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Game Industry Labor Laws: Should Governments get involved?
LibrarianThorne
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So, to kick things off, an article from Kotaku: http://kotaku.com/5444150/alleged-unfair-work-conditions-at-rockstar-san-diego
As a member of the game industry, and a lifelong liberal, I cannot process the abuse that companies willingly give out to employees who seem to ask for more. Several AAA games have been published without 70-80 hour weeks, and there's been countless statements by profitable, if smaller, companies that show that working employees sixty hours and over leads to higher stress, worse health, and (worst of all for most companies) decreased productivity and quality.
There's a distinct unwillingness on the part of game developers and the associations that represent them (IGDA) to address the issue of overwork in the game industry. Especially in an economy where getting laid off means upwards of 8 months without new employment, longtime veterans (men and women with families, in large part) of the industry continue to work completely unreasonable schedules. There will be no organized labor resistance on the part of employees, and it seems that expecting larger employers (Tecmo, Activision, Rockstar) to obey sane labor standards is doomed to failure.
So, I come to the conclusion that it seems like governmental involvement is necessary to enforce a labor schedule that isn't harmful to employees. I feel that the game industry is in a unique position in this regard, as it's the "dream job" of so many people that those already in the industry continue to subject themselves to substandard treatment in order to hold, desperately, onto their jobs. Competition is fierce, brutal, and vicious for game industry jobs, even Testing positions, and employers (rightfully or wrongfully) value the labor of their employees extremely low.
There is some hope, though. Electronic Arts, after enduring EA_Spouse (Erin Hoffman), was able to turn things around and, by all accounts, maintain extremely high employee happiness standards. Smaller studios, like Blurst Interactive (makers of Raptor Safari and other independent PC titles) have successfully experimented with thirty hour work weeks. The question is whether or not these standards of happiness and work will spread throughout the industry as a whole or not.
Given Tecmo, Activision, and Rockstar's behavior I'm inclined to think that it won't.
As a member of the game industry, and a lifelong liberal, I cannot process the abuse that companies willingly give out to employees who seem to ask for more. Several AAA games have been published without 70-80 hour weeks, and there's been countless statements by profitable, if smaller, companies that show that working employees sixty hours and over leads to higher stress, worse health, and (worst of all for most companies) decreased productivity and quality.
There's a distinct unwillingness on the part of game developers and the associations that represent them (IGDA) to address the issue of overwork in the game industry. Especially in an economy where getting laid off means upwards of 8 months without new employment, longtime veterans (men and women with families, in large part) of the industry continue to work completely unreasonable schedules. There will be no organized labor resistance on the part of employees, and it seems that expecting larger employers (Tecmo, Activision, Rockstar) to obey sane labor standards is doomed to failure.
So, I come to the conclusion that it seems like governmental involvement is necessary to enforce a labor schedule that isn't harmful to employees. I feel that the game industry is in a unique position in this regard, as it's the "dream job" of so many people that those already in the industry continue to subject themselves to substandard treatment in order to hold, desperately, onto their jobs. Competition is fierce, brutal, and vicious for game industry jobs, even Testing positions, and employers (rightfully or wrongfully) value the labor of their employees extremely low.
There is some hope, though. Electronic Arts, after enduring EA_Spouse (Erin Hoffman), was able to turn things around and, by all accounts, maintain extremely high employee happiness standards. Smaller studios, like Blurst Interactive (makers of Raptor Safari and other independent PC titles) have successfully experimented with thirty hour work weeks. The question is whether or not these standards of happiness and work will spread throughout the industry as a whole or not.
Given Tecmo, Activision, and Rockstar's behavior I'm inclined to think that it won't.
LibrarianThorne on
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These guys aren't exactly digging ditches for 70 to 80 hours a week straight.
Read the article. Staring at computer screens for eighty hours a week is terribly unhealthy (not a lot of movement, extra pressure on wrists, fingers, neck, eyestrain, easily leads to othe health issues like obesity).
Or, how about this, sitting in your chair do nothing but stare at your monitor for twelve hours a day. Get back to me in a month about how non-stressful it is.
Wait...this really isn't the 'it's not hard/unhealthy/stupidly wrong unless you're absolutely physically dying work' argument is it? Because even if the job itself resulted in direct health implications for working 80 hours as opposed the 40, it would still be an incredibly shitty (and should be illegal) practice if only for the fact that there will still be indirect health effects of having nearly no time at home. Not to mention if you have a family.
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I think that the argument isn't just for the game industry, but basically all of computer science. Programmers seem to work long hours in environments that lead to them wrecking their bodies in tons of ways which prevent them from doing more work. I assume artists are also equally hosed?
I can't imagine how the pros do it with their bosses breathing down their necks, with real money on the line, and families waiting at home that never get to see them.
It's physically unhealthy because you're not moving and it's mentally unhealthy because you're stressed, wracking your brain trying to solve some problems, and you barely get any time to relax and spend time with your family.
So yeah, I do think something should be done to make working conditions reasonable, and fuck anyone who thinks a high-stress tech job is easy because you're 'just sitting at a computer'.
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Forget it...
If an employer is violating those laws, state or federal officials should involved in stopping the abuse and holding those responsible accountable. Nothing more.
If the thread is asking if the various levels of government should take over in place of the employers, hell-fucking-no dude.
When it came in there were a few companies that tried to make waiving that protection a condition of employment, but that was ruled illegal, including practices that created a culture of expectation that people would waive it.
The problem is, that despite this, it still requires someone to complain, and in an industry like video games, people are generally loath to rock the boat.
That.
I'll never take another cubicle desk job again, ever. I mean, at first, the average schmuck like myself intuitively thinks (especially in a climate that is extremely cold in the winter), "Hey, awesome - indoors %100 of the time, always at a computer w/internet, always sitting down... what the heck more could I ask for?"
What you don't realize before you actually try doing that (and, unlike those poor bastards in the article, I was only doing it for 40-ish hours a week) is how quickly your station chair starts to look like a set of chains and that cubicle starts to feel like a prison. I mean, you don't realize that when you're at home because you can take a needed break from the screen whenever you want - you go take a walk to think things over, you can go refill a beverage or get some snacks, you can go watch some TV, whatever.
Those breaks are non-existent at a desk job. You just sit there, and sit there, and sit there... and, slowly, your brain goes to mush and your desire to accomplish anything is flattened.
I wouldn't pretend that the plight of desk jockeys in the gaming industry is equivalent to that of, say, factory workers in China - but why the Hell would anyone want to use the absolute bottom of the barrel as a standard to measure against?
Well no, that would be easier. I'm perfectly happy doing 10-hour fieldwork days, even in tropical heat, but if I were stuck doing intense brainwork in an office for that long I'd be wanting do die by the end of the week.
I find it fairly bizarre that there's even a question about whether work conditions in any industry should be regulated. Unregulated labor markets are always bad times.
It also doesn't help that many programmers are salaried, which makes it easier to overwork them. And the "dream job" aspect doesn't help, as it basically means that there will always be a replacement.
Edit - The giveaway is the bit about Rockstar's need of "power."
Yeah, this is a huge problem in Canada. There are provincial standards - but if your employer 'bends the rules' a bit, and you call them on it, you get labelled as someone who 'isn't a team player', and essentially the management will turn the whole workplace against you. Then they can lay you off with little to no hassle.
/facepalm
Well, to be fair to Mr. Wardell, he ran Stardock for a long time as basically an out-of-his-garage project. No doubt that he got used to pulling those type of hours as a one man show with his earlier brain children.
No excuse for abusing employees as he became successful, but I can see where he'd have developed his mindset from.
It's not an issue just in Canada.
I can't name names, but a close friend of mine works at a major game developer. She works under a contracting house that this company does business with. She, and other folks under similar contract, are currently working 70-80 hours a week for 40 hours worth of pay (they are heavily encouraged not to log more than eight hours a day, regardless of how long they're at the office). This is actually illegal, even in our right to work state, but she won't do anything about it because she doesn't want to lose her job and, at the same thrust, gain an inability to work at other places in the industry she loves.
I've got lots of stories like hers, unfortunately. It's really impacted the way I'm running my own studio.
In general, the punishments for companies which violate labor laws--up to an including the outright firing of union organizers--are a light slap on the wrist. Which leaves the employees with no power.
Ultimately the issue is that disputes about working conditions, especially if you're the whistleblower, have a distinct tendency to end up as constructive dismissals.
I'm not really certain that this is possible to legislate away, however.
Yeah I was gonna say. 70-80 hour work weeks when doing manual labour would probably be easier on you than the same amount of time in front of a computer. At least you're being active.
Personally I've done both kinds of jobs and I usually want to put a bullet in my brain much more when working in an office. That might just be a personal preference thing though.
So we seem to have identified the problem, here. I remember someone defending the EFCA legislation because it included steeper penalties for violation of existing labor laws. I wonder if they could get that legislation through if it didn't have the albatross of card-check attached to it.
Well, I guessed it wasn't just an issue up here, but I didn't want to speak for other places.
Heh. I, on the other hand, am happy to name names:
Ubisoft.
Fucking terrible company to work for, and their end products usually aren't too great either.
This isn't quite accurate, but it depends where you live.
I worked for EA and Vivendi in Vancouver, BC. I had a lot of trouble with the hours and the stress while I was working there. In fact, those two factors are the reason I stopped working in the industry. From what I understand, they have a variances under Section 72 of the BC Employment Standards Act that exempts them from things like the mandatory 32 consecutive hours off per week and such.
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It doesn't help that, even in a city with a lot of studios (like Vancouver, though I expect Montreal is similar), the community is VERY small so it's easy to get stuck with a label that will never go away even if you change jobs. It also doesn't help that there's a significant number of Landmark Forum/EST cultists in there too. This effect doesn't just apply to complaining about work conditions, either, it also can apply to some one who has a nervous breakdown during the development cycle.
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Crunch is a part of life in the game industry, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. Nobody gets into this expecting to work 9 to 5. The occasional (once or twice per year) crunch cycle of 55-60 hour weeks for 6-8 weeks is considered normal, and that's a-ok with me. Crunch is a time when the team goes shoulder to shoulder and pushes hard to improve the quality of a game. It can actually be fun, a sort of camaraderie in the face of hardship can develop and a lot of good work gets done. However I have never once, in my years here, been pressured into working a weekend I didn't want to work, or for leaving early for whatever reason (or no reason at all).
There's a big difference between crunch and death march, and the folks at Rockstar SD seem to be in a death march- cancelled vacation days, mandatory Saturdays, little or no compensation for the extra hours, and no end in sight. Unfortunately studios are closing left and right and most of us in midlevel to senior positions in the industry, contrary to the popular stereotype, are in our late 20s / early 30s and have families. We don't have the luxury of quitting in an environment like this (you can't collect unemployment if you leave a job voluntarily except under extreme circumstances such as sexual harassment or a hostile work environment), and it's sad that project leaders take advantage of that.
But here's the dirty little secret. Death marches work. Maybe not all the time, but often. Some of the best games you've played over the past 10 years have come at a high cost to the developers; it's why attrition is so high. People get into a studio that they think is the greatest place in the world because they make amazing games and are shattered by what the production process takes from them.
"But zilo, what about studio X? They make games that I love so much and they are media darlings, surely they don't engage in this abhorrent practice!"
Yes, even them. Especially them.
Unfortunately there's nothing that you, as consumers, can really do about it. If you vote with your dollars and boycott a game it'll simply result in lost jobs for those who ran the gauntlet and stuck around. I'm not really sure there is a perfect solution; as long as there are exempt employees, there will be death marches.
This would be one of those overtly cynical claims that sounds an awful lot like bullshit to me.
Can you substantiate this in some way? How does working your employees under the lash like this result in great games? Moreover, how does it result in good games that couldn't have been produced by normal working hours?
It doesn't even make intuitive sense, much less logical sense. If I'm feeling defeated and unhappy, I'm probably not producing the best work I could. If there's high attrition rate, that means work has exchanged hands several times; that's a pretty good way to fuck up the creative process (particularly when dealing with things like plot and artistic style).
Do you have evidence to substantiate the vague & spurious assertion that 'most companies' go into death march mode for big titles? I've heard pretty good things about companies like Valve; is the Half-Life series the product of a death march? Portal? Team Fortress 2?
Even your defense of 'crunch time' as being an 'industry standard' is a logical fallacy (appeal to tradition). So what if some guys enjoyed it? It's not ethical to chain people to desks for that many hours a week under threat of financial ruin. Your place of work isn't supposed to be a prison.
Dunno.
I do know that in the gaming industry, it's often just a handful of bad eggs setting bad trends. Like in any industry, nobody's a saint, but Capcom, Valve, pre-EA Maxis and BlackIsle (to get really old school) are/were, according to just about anyone you spoke with, great places to work.
Rockstar, Vivendi, Ubisoft and Activision are just terrible employers, and I've heard on more than one occasion that Blizzard and Relic Entertainment are/were basically fascist techno-cults.
EA seems to fluctuate from one end of the spectrum to the other.
But, a friend of hers from school works for Rockstar SD and the horror stories that she's passed on to me about what he has to go through on a weekly basis makes me want to fly down there and punch his manager in the mouth.
That's really interesting. Back when Starcraft was being developed, I'd heard some real damning stories about what working for Blizzard was like (if you weren't really enthusiastic about a particular component of the design, you were given degrading punitive consequences of some sort; if you had creative ideas, you were to keep them to yourself; hours were whatever would get things done to marketing's satisfaction; etc).
Of course, they've changed hands plenty of times since then, so all those old anecdotes are probably outdated.
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Shitty employment laws.
I have first and secondhand knowledge of several of last year's GotY candidates coming at the end of a brutal 6 month crunch, and I could give you a list of places as long as my arm going back to the 90s that created some of the classics in the field that were awful grindhouses. I won't, because it's bad form and you may not believe me anyway.
I could try to make you understand that crunch can be a normal and even beneficial part of the development process but until you've been there and done it I suppose it's a lost cause. It's not an appeal to tradition, it's a recognition of the practices inherent to a deadline-focused industry. I don't participate because it's always been done that way, I work the extra hours because the extra effort goes a long way towards making a better game when applied in measured, reasonable doses.
Really, 6 60 hour weeks every other year is not a big deal. It's hardly being "chained to your desk under threat of financial ruin". You could call it a necessary evil, but it's not even that evil. And it's worth mentioning that, at least in the US, it's common practice to reward employees with 2 weeks of comp time after shipping a game. It's when it turns into an unending slog that it becomes untenable. I am in no way defending the alleged goings-on at Rockstar SD.
Note that I never said "most companies", or even "most games" end in a death march. Just a lot, and from places you wouldn't expect.
That said, it's disheartening to hear that this is STILL damn prevalent. At least there's light at the end of the tunnel with EA cleaning up its act. I just wish more companies followed suit. I really don't see much good coming out of this if this just keeps up long enough.
The IGDA's stance on obtaining a sensible work schedule industry-wide is a joke, though. And a bad one, at that.
I think the only non-legal option left to the industry is to hope guys like Blurst become the mainstream. It takes one game to prove that crunch isn't necessary, I think. Hell, the Battlefield: Vietnam guys did it on no crunch time at all.
EDIT: Having been through crunch in the game industry (several indie titles, cell phone QA) and outside of it (establishing a program that fed belower poverty level senior citizens, architectural software), I can say with some authority that crunch is, 99% of the time, completely unnecessary and a result of bad scheduling and management.
Right; so your argument is no different than any number of other tin foil hatter claims I've heard over the years.
"Oh, I know - I've been there, dude! I have connections. I could provide evidence, but I can't, because it's such a hush hush matter."
Come back to me when you've actually got something to support your claims with, then we'll talk.
And yes, six consecutive 60 hour weeks is a very big deal. People kill themselves from overstress, or weren't you aware of that?
Making deadlines or 'improving' a video game is not worth someone's mental health or life.
EDIT:
...Like, do you see how in this post, the guy actually cited an example to support himself? So now it's easy to verify or falsify his statement - we can literally just ask anyone who was part of that project, "Hey, dude - did you guys complete Battlefield: Vietnam without being forced into a crunch time period?"
When you don't do that, it's a pretty good sign that you're just bullshitting.