Games Journalism 2020 - Who gets the axe this time?

Wow, great article. Thanks for posting it. It’s pretty much an explanation for why Polygon (and virtually everyone else in game journalism) doesn’t produce interesting writing anymore.

Video game hatred has infected reality, or the other way around, it is hard to tell. Life and its digital counterpart has become the thrall of fandom, and yes, we journalists, Paxman apologists or not, have played our part in the ongoing limescaling of democracy. Even if all we do shake our heads at our peers in anti-solidarity because of a perceived disrespect directed at our favourite starlets. Even if all we do is encourage a fellow wage slave to buy this fun game about shooting more soldiers in the knees, and to think no more about it. Don’t get me wrong. I love to shoot a soldier in the knees. I’m from County Armagh. But even I must reconcile my place in the degenerative disease currently fingernailing its way through the gut of the body politic. Even I get tired of the endlessness of it all.

The quitting of my full-time job came from a long way off. The sentiment had bubbled away quietly within me. The burnout had a long tail. I long ago made the decision, on a terrible, sober summer evening during which I glimpsed at that endless ticker tape of internet and saw the phrase “Kingdom Hearts 3 will have 80+ hours of content” and knew that I wanted out.

I didn’t know what my goal was anymore. If I took that itinerent executive’s cloudlike advice to heart, the only admission I could make now was that I no longer wanted anything to do with this ultrastrange sideshow of an industry, that could produce both wonderful namazus and life-threatening DM rodents with the same colourful breath of code, crunch and community.

It was an interesting read, though for me one with no shortage of irony. Caldwell was probably the ultimate reason I stopped reading RPS. Not that I felt that he was that awful a writer or anything, just somewhat… symptomatic of a greater underlying issue. Perhaps merely the quill that broke the camel’s back.

To explain;

A few years ago I remember reading a rebuttal by John Walker against a comment made on one of his articles. The comment stated that his anti-consensus dismissal of the latest Call of Duty (or whatever, I forget) was just wilful clickbait, existing purely for the purpose of riling people up and driving in more traffic. Walker pointed out that it wasn’t clickbait, on the basis that there was actual content there, and even if one may not necessarily agree with him there was no claim to be made that what he had written was a deliberate deception.

I felt he was right about that, and that he had honoured the unspoken contract that you click on a link to an article… and have an article to read. That he had delivered something more than nothingness tucked away behind the smokescreen of a manipulative headline. Whether or not you agree with him, or even if you consider his writing to be worth your while at all, I still don’t think there’s a good faith argument to be made to the contrary.

Unfortunately, this is exactly how I felt a significant proportion of RPS output has ended up; content-free voids with manipulative headlines barely held together with smarmy in-jokes and desperate charm. Caldwell’s ‘listicles’ (mentioned, and linked, in the above article) being one of the prime offenders. No insight, reasoning or passion. Just ‘here are the 7 best guns in games with some half-arsed screenshots alongside’.

At least I finally get to find out a bit of the why, from his side. I’m not unsympathetic to him (and fair play to him being able to make his bread this way), but it speaks to itself as to the poor editorial direction of RPS that they’d run such poor output from someone self-admitted to being completely burnt out on the subject.

Best of luck to him in future, anyway.

USGamer shutting down.

ReedPop is laying off all four remaining staff at USgamer.

USgamer editor-in-chief Kat Bailey, news editor Eric Van Allen, staff writer Nadia Oxford, and reporter Mathew Olson all separately announced on Twitter today that they will no longer work for the site at the end of this year.
USgamer was launched on June 10, 2013.

ReedPop has not said what its plans for the USgamer site are once the staff are gone.

RIP :(

That’s a shame. I liked the site, but it never got the attention that other sites got. The Axe of the Blood God podcast was a good listen, Kat knows her shit.

Kotaku has a long-form feature examining the JRPG-maker Monolith Soft (not be confused with the Seattle-based Monolith known for their excellent FPS and the Mordor games). Haven’t had a chance to read it yet but it looks rather comprehensive.

Oh, snap. The WaPo just published a piece on the whole “EA Spouse” scandal and what really happened.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/12/03/battle-middle-earth-crunch/

Released in December 2004, “Battle for Middle-earth” found critical success and sales high enough to warrant a sequel, but the lasting legacy of the game’s roughly two-year development by EA Los Angeles is found in the memories of desperation from former employees, lawsuits and internal culture change — as well as lifelong loyalties.

“Crunching for the indecision of people who are supposed to be smarter and more decisive than the people working for them is pretty heartbreaking,” said one former employee. “I remember one weekend when we suddenly had to phone everybody at home to get in the office. There’s big changes ahead. Then they sat there for hours, waiting to be assigned something to do while the execs holed up in a conference room and tried to figure out what they were doing. A young woman, really talented, who was on the art team, quit and she said to me, ‘You know, this isn’t the life I want. I want a normal life.’”

And this tidbit from the author:

https://twitter.com/Matt_Paprocki/status/1334565943360565249

It kind of amazes me that this story keeps on giving, this many years later.

What they describe, this crunch, other industries have it too but… it’s not permanent. That’s the part that makes so little sense here. Sure the weekend work, 12-14 hour days… I imagine anyone who has to meet big deadlines, maintain systems just something experience it once in awhile but this constant cycle of it… It’s not right. It wasn’t right then, and it’s not right now.

I’m still mind-boggled at who the fuck at EA management even thought this was a good idea.

I’ve had some shitty bosses in my time, but even they recognized that if you don’t give employees at least a day off you’re going to break them.

The article suggests they really didn’t care. You just burn through your existing employees, and step over their corpses to welcome fresh new employees into the fold. And that’s not the first time I’ve read something like that about them.

But, you know, they shipped the product, didn’t have too many people quit, and the core team remains together 20 years later. Hard to argue with that. I mean it sounds miserable, and I would’ve quit, but it seems to have gotten results. Maybe if more mistreated devs walked out?

This for sure. The people who make these choices are not dumb. They are fully aware that crunch burns people out and that some people are going to leave the company because of it.

It stings a little, but eventually you need to understand that when your boss or the head of your company says something like “our employees are our most important asset,” they are either lying or just saying it because it’s what you say. Very few companies, and certainly none I’ve ever worked at, actually make that phrase meaningful, other than stocking a fridge with soda and having a closet full of free snacks.

I’ve been at smaller companies where that’s been true. At least, the ones that were small enough for the owner to know everyone by name and have weekend cookouts and sincere get togethers. Once you start having dept heads and middle managers and multiple VPs that kind of family atmosphere is pretty tough to maintain.

Then again, I’ve worked in small businesses where the owner was a complete asshole and everyone was constantly cycling out for a better job.

I too have had both of these experiences.

It really sucks when you think you’re moving to the one thing, because you’ve been living with the other for so long it’s corroded your soul, but then it turns out to be the other thing after all.

I’ve worked some great companies, and some okay ones and a couple of bad. I try to… subtly tell others not to use HR as a means to address anything but the mundane crap. They are there to protect managers, executives and all those high up folks and will only ever take one down if it’s them or the company.

This industry though, even the freaking company that promised not to crunch did it again. Until the employees at large demand more, it’s just not going to change. And I know some will say well that’s never going to happen, could never happen, too much risk… hey, the other industries are not better because it was impossible. And I am not saying other industries don’t also have problems, even similar issues, but it’s not week after week of that kind of thing; it’s short-term.

I totally agree with you, and think it’s super shitty that a company went out of the way to use “no crunch here!” as a recruiting tool and then did it anyway.

But honestly I think it’d be OK too if the industry, or companies in it, were just honest about it. Be up front and say that crunch time is real, it happens, we try to avoid it, but it’s a thing that is going to come up.

Then you attract people who are at worst ambivalent about it, and though it’s hard to imagine, also the people who like it. Yes, there are people who actually enjoy the pressure, as weird as that is.

It just seems like we need a different name for this. We have crunch time in my field, my industry… it’s not employees sleeping in offices and getting their laundry done at work with spouses writing angry letters to the industry at large. It’s not just… not normal, it should not be acceptable.

I mean I get that 20 somethings are willing to do that whole live for your job thing, 80 hour weeks disguised as “real passion.” That weirdo luggage company has the same problem. The gaming industry just keeps trying to address it without actually addressing the problem so we get around 20 years of articles talking about the same thing often all leading back to this one that keeps resurfacing every few years.

The problem is so multifaceted it will never be fixed. MBAs that simply don’t give a shit are the tip of the iceberg and in some ways probably the least of it. At the top levels (studio leads etc) we’re talking something of a personality cult with a lot of these people having ‘lived the crunch’ back in their 90s startups or whatever and carry a not-so-subtle expectation that their underlings should continue to do the same. They reaped the rewards of their hard work, justifiably so, but miss the fact that the rags-to-riches uplift will not repeat for the vast majority within the packed-out studios of today.

Outside of management there’s immense pressure below from an endless pool of graduates eager to get their foot in the door of a sexy industry, especially for high-profile studios and games which they may have pre-existing affinity with. Studios can, at any time they need, pick and choose from the most talented and desperate - and they know it.

Project management is legendarily bad across the entire IT industry but is at its worst here. From boom-bust cycles which see parts of some studios flip-flopping from crunch to layoffs (due to lack of stuff to do) to the very worst Waterfragile project ‘planning’ you’re likely to encounter (We’re agile! But it has to be finished by this specific date!). It’s just a broken mess through and through and the only glue that ever works - can ever work - is crunch.

But for all that, the rank and file are as much to blame as anything else. The studio cult ensures the victims are also the perpetrators. It’s a vicious cycle. The abuse gets internalised and normalised to the extent that those who crunch become the righteous and those who would not are unworthy. Of course, being seen to crunch is all that’s important. The rancidness (or even quantity) of the code generated after the umpteenth consecutive 16+ hour slog is of near total irrelevance. It simply does not matter - to anyone - that your health and productivity have tanked.

Yet all of this remains wrapped up in that special game dev omerta that ensures that only the most disgruntled burnouts - those prepared to turn their backs on the industry for good - will ever speak out about it. Thus the cycle continues ever more. You could argue for unions of course but I just don’t see it happening when it seems like practically everyone involved is a scab at heart.

I can’t speak from firsthand experience of every studio, of course; so if you, dear reader, have enjoyed a differing experience then in all honesty I’m happy for you. However I’d be wary of any honeyed tale to the contrary that doesn’t explicitly state they operated a strict ‘go home’ policy. The spectre of crunch can be subtle.

I worked in a company teaching the employees English.

Said company was founded by 2 people back in the 70’s, who worked their arses off.

Look it up, it’s a construction company here in Spain called Lopesan.

Very big company now.

But they expect employees to be there 0800 and leave 2000.

But most of that time is, according the employees I taught, spent hanging around because noone wants to be seen as slacking off.

And the same story got confirmed when I was teaching private classes to one of the heads of department, who used to show up to work at 0700 every day because that is just what had to happen.

Told me he spent most of his day in the local café…

Not quite crunch, but interesting how work cultures often don’t change.

Same head of department used to tell me how he wanted a flexible working day where people could come in for 5 hours a day…

A coworker used to do telemarketing for a small contract call center (they’d get deals to do sales for different companies, depending on the time of the year.) The owner told everyone who came in that he had figured out that he, and thus the employees, made the most money (most of pay was commission) if they worked 8am-2pm, Monday-Thursday, with a 15 minute break and constant work the rest of the time. He was dead serious about it and actually kicked everyone out at 2 and turned the lights off. Games needs that mindset.