The Crunch Culture Conundrum

you know the more i learn about video games the more i'm amazed they even exist it is really hard to visualize how a game goes from idea to product but the more i learn about what goes on in the average studio the more i'm beginning to realize that creating a commercially successful video game the indie or aaa is a stressful expensive time-consuming exhausting undertaking shit comes at a high price not not just financially hello i am funny cartoon man and today we will be discussing mental health self-care workplace abuse and other fun topics quick thing before we get ourselves knee-deep in bullshit i gotta make a thing clear for those who aren't already aware crunch and crunch culture are two very different things crunch is the act of pushing yourself usually by working very long hours to meet a deadline it's what immediately follows the oh god oh fuck moment when you realize an assignment is due in two days and you haven't started yet it's a feeling of running on five hours of sleep in the last two days going on your third g fuel desperately chipping away at an assignment due that morning that you still don't know whether you're going to finish on time got that okay cool now i want you to hold on to that feeling but your boss just told you that that's what you and all of your co sorry your family's life is gonna be like for the next two months okay have fun see you on launch day crunch culture is where most of the problems come from it's the idea that regularly staying late slaving away on a project among your peers is a good thing actually and should be expected from those in the field those who buy into it would argue consciously or subconsciously that it's a rite of passage that getting stuff done and doing it well isn't just important it's the most important all that lame ass work-life balance mental health shit can go to hell if it means we're delaying frogger ancient shadow well-adjusted people don't usually wake up one day and decide to abandon their social life and also 80 of their sleep crunch is a result of deadlines a lack of time needed to comfortably reach them and a general sentiment that it's okay to burn the candle at both ends some would say that this is a bad thing what what's wrong oh nothing okay okay well since you asked i just have all this pubic hair and i don't know how to get rid of it yeah i really don't like that i know that introducing manscaped today's sponsor and the number one reason i can afford food this month they have sent me another holiday ear box the all-in-one performance package kit wouldn't you know it that you buy a product and they send you the product look at all this holiday product let's check it out over here and thanks to manscape for sponsoring um this this is a bit personal but my friend ed who you may know better as punk duck was recently hit by a car he suffered some pretty gnarly spleen damage and was stuck in the hospital bed for a long while at one point they had to use a catheter since he wasn't able to leave his bed and since it was taped to the side of his leg once they finally removed it most of his pubic hair came with it and if you just used manscaped that wouldn't have happened for a limited time when you get the performance kit you also get some stocking stuffers a travel bag is similar boxer briefs look at that photoshop a horizontal transform over to manscape.com and slap on code noodle for 20 off and free shipping and presence manscaped your jingle balls will thank you that that's on this that is on the script so uh i prepared a list of words that describe me you'll notice game developer and smart are not on this list so in addition to binging every article and video on crunch i could find i've spoken to a few people who work or worked in the industry that way it seems like i know what i'm talking about i know some people have always said the well we're not holding a gun to your head excuse but yeah you are my employment is in your hands and if you don't like that i don't want to crunch you're going to let me go and i'll be out of a job this is chris of the dead or you know that's his username anyway i was brought on as the only animator for a season of a show oh my god he's chosen to share his experience under the condition that certain details such as where he worked remain undisclosed this is not only because the job market could blacklist him for telling the truth but because the company he worked for can also sue him if he directly says bad things about them in most industries this is standard practice when crunch is discussed in relation to a company people actually like pay attention and you'll notice the white knight neckbeards rushing to the defense of the multi-million dollar company yeah that's it paid overtime paid overtime under polish work laws which are much better than the united states wow you're telling me these developers are getting paid to work the same hours as an 18th century coal miner ah yes queen give us the bare minimum one of the most popular arguments used by both morons and pr departments is that nobody's got a gun to their head they chose to work 80 hours a week they chose to abandon their social life this is important because it clearly defines more than a year as a time span of overtime but as we will underline soon this happens independent from any requirement sometimes there are employees who just stay late at the office or put in those extra hours with artists and people passionate about their craft it happens i distinctly remember somebody telling me early on you are not expected to crunch it is not required i'm like cool and then crunch hit 12 to 16 hour days seven days a week for a month straight that averages out to a hundred hours a week which is like a cartoon number i can hardly wrap my head around that but that's like sweatshop hours you might be thinking to yourself well if chris wasn't forced to crunch why'd he do it anyway simple coercion technically yeah chris didn't have to crunch in the same way i don't technically have to obey my house arrest it was like yeah you're not technically by contract required to crunch but they're not going to hire you back if you don't they're going to let your contract expire and then that'll be it most studios don't technically mandate crunch periods they don't have to over 50 percent of game devs consider crunch expected by their employers last year epic games developers described a culture of fear where overtime wasn't mandated but it was expected an anonymous employee told polygon that they averaged 70 hours a week and that somewhere between 50 to 100 people were in the same boat the company gives us unlimited time off but it's almost impossible to take the time if i take time off the workload falls onto other people and nobody wants to be that guy another anecdote reads i hardly sleep i'm grumpy at home i have no energy to go out getting a weekend away from work is a major achievement if i take saturday off i feel guilty i'm not being forced to work this way but if i don't the job won't get done hey don't worry it gets worse at epic games and most of the industry it's standard practice to hire a core group of employees as well as a larger body of cheaper less experienced contract workers to do the lower level grunt work but here's the thing about contract work in addition to the benefits they probably aren't getting contractors don't get paid overtime they're on a salary meaning that no matter how many hours they worked their paycheck is going to look the same at the end of the month either way best case scenario when the game finally ships it gets a 93 on metacritic and they get a little bonus hell maybe they even get offered a permanent position that way the next time they're abused do they actually get paid for it worst case the contract runs out around the same time this article came out jason schreier booked the story of anthem's troubled development on kotaku and you know it's bad enough that we developed a shorthand nickname for workplace abuse but holy shit does bioware take the cake because during that game's seven year long development cycle another term surfaced stress casualty in bioware the term refers to somebody who's quote had such a mental breakdown from the stress they're just gone for a few months as jim sterling once pointed out stress casualty isn't actually a new phrase it's probably been around for over a hundred years just not usually in reference to game developers the term actually comes from military documentation describing soldiers with early onset fucking ptsd they had lost count of how many times this happened in bioware some come back some don't this is why i fucking hate when people make the gun to head argument it's not just wrong it's actively harmful and it enables the kind of people who use other's passion against them it ties into this idea that if you manage to get a job doing what you love you never work a day in your life and that the art you create should be reward enough which is a detached childish mindset that only makes sense in a fantasy world where passionate people don't also require work-life balance or money to pay rent and eat food i gotta assume that the people up top cracking the whip must either not realize or not care that burning the candle at both ends completely drains you of any passion you might have had a tired stressed underpaid unhappy employee working the same hours as a fucking sweatshop worker is not likely to put out their best work somehow i doubt that someone undergoing a stress casualty feels super motivated it feels weird like obviously the people at bioware want you to play their game but the cranking 90s feels a little different knowing that the devs are cranking 90 hours a week i don't know hey check this out this is marty o'donnell's pet goose i've stolen him for the video he's mine now hey hey in there i think that's my goose can you give it back please hey uh marty i've been looking for the goose you have yeah i'm just holding on to him for a little it's not your goose i don't know no it's okay don't that's for the video so i'll give it back marty for those who aren't aware is the audio director at high wire games and previously bungie i want my goose back he wrote the flintstones vitamins jingle julian he's been in the industry for more than two decades i'm talking to you i want my goose and he's a big fan of weird convoluted metaphors example in 2014 martin o'donnell gave a talk at the annual nordic game conference he had much to say but what we're interested in today is his goose metaphor marty it's uh be nice to the goose what why do you want we all know how the fairy tale ends people get greedy and the goose dies the goose is the people and the eggs is the games obviously higher ups don't carve open geese as a hobby but that doesn't mean that they're treated fairly people don't want to actually kill the goose but they don't seem to have a problem kicking it in the stomach and a goose that's been kicked in the stomach is not probably going to want to lay any more eggs doesn't even want to get out of bed i think i think that like in the actual games industry you're going to see pretty cohesive sentiments on it all but i think that that is very contrary to what the community of gamers uh how they feel that's alex he's a co-founder and creative director at stress level zero an indie game studio responsible for vr games hover junkers duck season and boneworks he's also a workaholic we talked about a lot of stuff over the course of the four hour long interview but something we kept coming back to is the unpredictability of making a game you can't really account for everything that could go wrong even having the perfect blueprint to follow there's still so many little gotchas that you don't realize until you're like neck deep in development and the deadlines coming up that turbulence game development fucking sucks man say you're making a shooting game and you want to add a cool feature where the reload is different if you emptied a whole clip there's a good chance you'll be spending more time fixing all the bugs that feature created than you would actually putting the feature in the game it's impossible to accurately predict which is a problem whenever you have shareholders and consumers breathing down your neck counting the minutes till launch day nx developer at cd project recently described how when asking management last year what their plan was if they couldn't hit the april 2020 deadline their response was that they just had to there was no plan b chances are if you're already neck deep in crunch like some of cdpr was the suits don't care how hard it is or how long it'll take you keep working till it's done one night i was having dinner with an activision executive and he said hey i've heard about this goose thing can you tell me the story about that and so you know i had a couple glasses of wine i started waxing poetically about the goose and the golden egg and then he said well wow marty that's a really good story but you know sometimes there's nothing like a good foie gras it's it's really easy to hear about all of this awful shit and point the fingers solely at corporate executives but i'd be remiss if i didn't also take a moment to focus on everything else that contributes to crunch in the studio starting with the gamers the the gaming community puts more pressure on developers than anyone realizes there's there's so much pressure to like meet a deadline not from like executives but from the masses like i saw i saw the like one developer posting death threats that he received on twitter about yeah i saw that too it's fucking scary you know and like we're nobodies and had like very few people in comparison wanting our game but i had people that were like live it that i wouldn't give them the time that the game would release i i don't know what time on that date that we're targeting that the game will go live and people got violently upset to the point where they're like how could you possibly call yourself a game developer if you don't know the exact second that this game is going to be available imagine working at city project working these insane hours and on top of all that stress also then getting sent death threats from randos on twitter who think you aren't working hard enough there were people out here complaining about how apex doesn't have as much free content as fortnite literally a day after an article came out exposing the human cost of that dopamine drip feed respawn would later state that the whole reason they were updating the game slower was to avoid the crunch that epic had embraced there were real humans out here arguing that crunch makes video games realistic and therefore better and you know i want to believe that this is a vocal minority but this head ass take kind of popped off i think it's some kind of cursed blend of entitlement and the lack of knowledge that leads gamers to say so much stupid shit all the time like jesus christ but this insane internet noise can have a real effect on how games are marketed how they're made and the people behind them now as per the contra hey hey get out of there per the contract i am legally required to discuss halo in every video i make so i feel like now is a good time to talk about halo 2 possibly one of the most mismanaged games that's ever shipped its development has been described as intense brutal like they were going to die and more when reflecting on what it was like luke timmons of veteran bungie dev said that it almost killed the entire company the experience was so overwhelming so damaging that it forced bungie staff to think differently about crunch from then on as luke put it there's a crunch you wanna do and there's a crunch you have to do in my experience in work life some degree of crunch is inevitable uh whether that is passion driven or mandatory is the real crux of the problem when alex first told me this a year ago it really bothered me so much so that a year later i felt the need to get marty's take on it and i will agree with that so let me just say no game on earth should ever shift with the halo 2 crunch okay but if you're on a roll like you're doing something it's like yeah i need to get this out by five i told everybody it's gonna be live five o'clock tomorrow and you're still working on it the day before you go oh my gosh it'd be so much more fun if i did this other thing well all of a sudden it's 10 11 12 o'clock at night and you're still working on it well that's crunch that's what that is it's individual creative people saying i can make this better i still have a little time i want to get this in under the wire this is a big mood anybody who makes stuff with deadlines will know exactly what marty's talking about but even though self-mandated crunch usually comes from a positive place that doesn't always mean it's okay i feel i feel like i've probably removed some years off the end of my life with how hard i've worked at times um and it's not like nobody else did that to me you know like i made the decision to do that because i felt like i had to for myself do you know what i mean i do but i don't think that's a good thing ah i think that's kind of an invariably bad thing i don't want to at all compare myself to like an athlete because we're fucking not but i mean like you you you have instances like with runners you know who will hit this brick wall where they just cannot go anymore and they just have to stop or break through this wall and i think it's kind of similar and it's like that's probably unhealthy physically and mentally um i i i feel you but there's a there's a gigantic difference between like a day-long marathon and a two-month-long death march um at the end of the day uh video games are not more important than your health man nothing should take priority above that i mean at least not in our industry of entertainment like unless we're talking about you're in a fucking war then you're it it should not literally be your well-being on the line alex was careful to make clear that he would never force anybody not even his worst enemy to endure the kind of crunch that he's put himself through which is a huge relief seeing as how he's a creative lead he knows what he's doing is bad for his health but he still feels compelled to do it he's able to put himself through hell largely in part because he's passionate about what he does that's why it's called crunch culture it's literally a culture of workaholism this is why i think luke and marty both make the distinction that even crunch that's entirely voluntary has got to be kept in check the way luke put it it can be awesome because you have passionate people who are excited and have cool stuff to work on but you gotta be careful people can get so excited that before you know it they're working a ton and getting burned out that distinction he makes that passionate people are excited is a really important note to hit on because us creatives tend to be really bad at the whole self-control thing it's so easy to just throw everything you have into a project you're jazzed about before you know it you're burnt out you feel like shit and you hate everything you worked on some would argue that for management to explicitly seek out super enthusiastic workers is inherently predatory because young passion is easy to exploit the pr bullshit i hear a lot is like we're looking for somebody who's extremely passionate about this work and that's like okay you you want to just exploit them here's the thing about that though in a passion fueled industry who doesn't want passionate people it's a double-edged sword you need people who really care about the work they do because the more they care the better their work will be but unless that drive is kept in check it quickly becomes self-destructive you actually start seeing this you start seeing them they're staying later and later and they're like eating at their desk they're sleeping under their desk and they're doing these crazy things and then when if you're in a position of management you say look you got to go home i want you to go home i want you to spend the weekend with your kids like this isn't good you're not what you're doing is not good for you which means it's not going to be good for us so you're not allowed to come in sometimes you actually have to say no you can't volunteer to crunch anymore you have to take a break i feel like luke and marty are the kind of people you really want to work for they're more inclined to pet the goose every so often than they are obviously this isn't to say that all management that doesn't think exactly like these two are cartoon villains but when you embrace that culture of crunch rather than keeping it at bay that's when you get the horror stories jason schreier put it really well when covering naughty dog the studio is open about crunch culture and interviews and its managers deliberately seek out perfectionists in art engineering and all the other disciplines that make games happen at naughty dog nobody asks the devs to crunch nobody has to ask they'll be there anyway obviously there are things we could be doing better maybe it's better planning maybe it's unionization maybe it's a complete overhaul of existing labor laws but honestly i don't know if it's my place to draw those conclusions i'm not a game developer i'm funny cartoon man i'm not even saying that crunch in and of itself is always bad i mean it is most of the time studies show that it doesn't really work but i mean like if we're going off marty's definition there's nothing inherently wrong with it it's just really easy to take too far the only thing i know for certain is that crunch culture is definitely for sure a bad thing that no one should be okay with you know it fucks me up to think about how many people out here are okay with working themselves into the ground forcing others to do it or cheerleading for the companies responsible as long as entertainment is fueled by deadlines and profit crunch is probably never going to go away entirely but you know hearing about how companies like respawn and nintendo are out here actively avoiding it kind of makes me think that maybe you know and bear with me here but maybe everyone should be doing that yeah there are three things important to making a game not dying shipping and making money in that order and there's a reason why staying alive is first on that list you know it might seem obvious you can't be creative if you're dead right but i've seen relationships break up i've seen people literally go insane because of the pressures it's just ridiculous so stay alive stay healthy i'm going to keep the goose not yours it's okay [Music] you

Channel: Noodle

Views: 2,502,548

Keywords: crunch, cyberpunk, 2077, cyberpunk 2077, crunch culture, culture, naughty dog, last of us, the last of us part 2, part 2, the last of us, halo, halo 2, noodle, animations, animated, animation, cdpr, cdproject, cd project, cdpreojectred, cd project red, cdproject red, cdp, witcher, witcher 3, the witcher 3

Id: aS3-iSEwNhs

Length: 23min 47sec (1427 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/tenems]

Noodle is pretty cool, good video. Has Marty O'Donnell in it with is cool too.

[u/FearDasZombie]

I know I've seen this video before and it's really good. The Goose Metaphor is super fitting

But to hear the line, "Y'know, sometimes there's nothing like a good foie gras." in response to it...

I mean jesus christ. That's so... cold. So.. cruel and heartless. I can't tell if It's corporate missing-of-the-point or it was fully intentioned, but it's a nightmare either way..!

[u/Polygonalfish]

I also liked his vid on the bad trend of treating higher FPS in things that aren't games as objectively better

[u/BlackJimmy88]

Cool video. Thanks for sharing.