Game Developer Unions

Sorry for the derail.

How do you know that you exist at all? How do you know that any of your scientific observations are real? How do you know what you should do with your life?

Serious question here, do you have any actual experience with philosophy?

Can science tell you what it means to be a good person? There are questions about human existence which transcend mere observational facts.

Science is different from philosophy. While science essentially grew out of western philosophy, it did not replace it for everything. Philosophy continued beyond the enlightenment period. And yes, there are similarities between philosophy and religion.

To be clear, philosophy does not offer easy answers to any of these questions, just like science doesn’t really offer any answers to more concrete questions. It’s a process for the exploration.

They’re in philosophy programs at universities, generally.

Science in many ways did supplant philosophy when it came to understanding mundane aspects of our every day existence, so modern philosophers don’t really hold as central a role in human society as they did in days gone by. But philosophers do still exist, and they do still think about interesting things, especially in the fields of ethics, because as Goldblume said in Jurrasic Park, “You were so worried about whether you COULD, you never stopped to ask whether you SHOULD!”

For instance, you may know who Peter Singer is. He’s written a number of interesting pieces dealing with the ethics of dealing with animals. Steven Wise also has made interesting ethical arguments for giving legal rights to animals.

Science can tell you a lot about how the universe operates. But science cannot tell you what your role in that universe should be.

Basically, philosophy is religion.

That seems to be the counter point to all this. Which is fine, if you want to limit that it that way.

Complete derail. P & R, please.

I feel like you’re overlooking the very real role that philosophy plays in people’s everyday lives. E.g. say that someone is trying to decide whether to stay in game development or to instead move to a more lucrative but less interesting field. When they’re making that decision, they aren’t doing it with an MRI machine and the scientific method. They’re more likely to think about Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, or on judgements that they’ve made about the nature of the world, or on the personal values that they’ve developed. And that’s all I’m saying, that there is still a large role for this sort of thinking. You can call it philosophy, or CBT, or Cognitive Psychology, or a complete set of Jane Austen books, but we’d generally agree that it plays a huge role in the paths that people’s lives follow.

Oh come on. It’s not like anyone brought up Ayn Rand yet.
Ha, that’s a 21st century Philosopher for you!

It’s certainly at least similar. The humanities school in my college where I studied philosophy was called “Philosophy and Religion”. Hell, once you get into eastern philosophy, you encounter schools of thought which effectively became established religions.

For western philosophy, I’d generally describe it as tackling many of the same issues as religion, but with less of the mysticism.

And again, even in modern society, it serves an essential role in considering the ethical implications of our actions and behaviors.

This is a thread about unionizing the Tech/Game development industry. Not the Noam “I never met a left-wing genocidal murderer I couldn’t defend with my sophistry” Chomsky Che-Guevara T-Shirt debate club thread. Nor the “Teachings about Philosophy 101 to the unwashed” Thread.

Seriously, I highly recommend you guys all have it out. Its a healthy topic. In another thread.

Making decisions is hard, especially when you are uncertain of the outcome. Risk and reward, novelty and fun seeking.

Funny enough, people over value the chances of something going wrong, as opposed to the the amount of loss it will bring. People will avoid multiple losses, even if the singular loss is worse.

Actually the body of my research is on that subject.

Anyway, whatever you do, do it with great gusto!

It seems like a lot of people even today seem unable to separate the epistemological or metaphysical parts of philosophy with the moral or ethical parts. To be fair, some philosophers do as well.

You say potato, I say, look at his body of work. The man was insightful when it came to language development and acquisition. Because of him, learned that there are particular sections of the brain that are specifically set up to learn languages, and that its most sensitive to learning before the age of 2! After that, it can atrophy if not stimulated, which is sad.

Also, a lot of the downfall of behaviorism was due to him.

Anyway, we didn’t study his politics much in Psychology, just how his research impacted our understand of childhood development.

Man, this is better than rereading old notes! I really appreciate the discussion and being pushed. I’ll definitely need to take some time to consider all that is being said. Certainly, I may have a lot of prejudice to work through when it comes to philosophy (not my fault, I was bullied by biologists in college, who in turn were bullied by chemists, who were bullied by physicist. And everyone was bullied by mathematician).

I always say, “He is a fantastic and pioneering Psychologist and Linguist” before scoffing at and damning every other part of his legacy.

And I mean it. Start a “Learn Me About Philosophy” thread somewhere. I’d participate. P & R is the best place because it will get broadly political.

Fair enough!

Anyway, Unions can be beneficial for companies as well. It might help during a down turn, when negotiating salary reductions. People in Unions are more likely to see it as cost sharing as opposed to being screwed.

It can also make people more comfortable making complaints or suggesting improvements, since they’ll have more protection from petty managers that might be on an tyranic streak.

The Dutch Polder model is cited as the main reason the 1980s recession ended sooner in the Netherlands. It is the idea that Unions and management work together to better the company.

As a shit communicator to another (maybe?), don’t be, it was related. I think I disagree with your views, but mostly I have a hard time getting your points.

Probably a Portuguese / Spanish translation issue. :D

I doubt anyone in this forum is a bad communicator. We read more text than a english student, and write more text than a journalist. The people that post and read in this forum must be people that love text and can give words any shape.

Sometimes you are positively lyrical.

My opinion is than more than “Game Developers need Unions”, that game companies seems to need competent senior people.

Even a bad software developer like me can look at long hours and think “heres a redflag this company is poorly managed”.

Reasons for this are many, too long to list here, so I will just provide a link to wikipedia of a book that seems fun to read.

Only the employees can really make that happen though or at least make it tolerable with a union. If they couldn’t force people into 100 hour weeks to “finish-up” and then turn around and lay them off that easily, they’d have to change the way they make games or just go the way of the DoDo. Simply asking for better management or ownership isn’t going to work, not unless employees are ready to jump ship, and they don’t seem ready to do that.

Well, you are not wrong.