[TRENCHES] Thursday, June 21, 2012 - Parallel
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Parallel
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/parallel
WeeOOOweeOOO!
AnonymousI worked briefly as a concept artist for a game company that shall remain unnamed. (I fully admit, I had no previous experience within the industry, but a friend of mine who worked as a designer/developer thought highly of my drawings, and dragged me into said company) Names have been changed here to protect ... me.
Project Alien required me to do the initial concept drawings of the standard 3-4 angles and pass them off to my friend to be rendered into lovely 3D sprites. After several weeks of designing the world and critters in it, (and mucho hours worked) we were called in to a routine meeting.
The gentleman in charge decided that in the interest in time and money, and apparently fewer computers than needed, we would be working on a side-scroller instead of a 3D ‘verse. I admit, my friend had to take me aside and explain what that meant for me.
I can’t say I was happy about having to do old-fashioned frame by frame animations. It was suddenly a lot more work for me, and little for my friend - who is trying to build a rep in the biz - to do. We grumbled, but tried to make the best of it. He was the boss, so as long as we were getting paid to do it, right?
Yeah, right. That.
Two weeks later we were all called together to a large meeting in Toronto. For me to get there cost about $60 in parking and gas alone, not to mention unpaid time off my other job doing graphic design. Everyone was supposed to arrive by 9 AM so we could consolidate responsibility and get everyone on the same page. My friend would be joining us via Skype, being sick with the flu.
6 hours and no lunch later, the boss showed up at 3:30pm. His 2IC had convinced most of us to stick around, telling us the Head Cheese had been in a car accident, but would be there shortly. “Car accident” in Headese translates to “I was busy landing a contract for another game” in English.
He strolled in, admitted there had been no actual accident, but that he had taken up a new contract with developers already on staff, so he didn’t need us there anymore. Oh, and he had spent all the funds for the project I was on to buy new computers and software for the new project. Hence - WE weren’t getting paid. I thought the 2IC was going to kill him. Then I had to call my friend and tell him the news. He’d spent 5x the hours I had working on this project.
The kicker is, he called me 5 weeks later to ask how far I had gotten on the 2D animation cells, and whether I could overnight them to him.
I said they had been in a “car accident”.
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Unions have been very successfully demonized, so this is unfortunately unlikely. Basically watch The American Tail and imagine that the cats won.
This right here. It's a little shocking that there are people in my country trying to take us back to the start of the 1900's. Contract/salary based jobs are the goddamn devil.
Of course, it would be kind of odd if they talked to each other about the rollback and discovered the differing versions.
Edit: Hell, if you've been doing decent time tracking on yourself and have ANY sort of communication that shows the employer was obviously intending to pay you for work, you go to court and you get some money.
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It's a moot point regardless. I can't imagine how you could ever successfully unionize an industry that so many people want to be a part of.
They can't get away with it if you have a contract.
Get contracts before you start doing work.
Edit: Also, Cora sure is...affectionate.
Victim blaming for bad negotiating? Yeah. Not being an idiot is a job skill too.
Bullshit. Fuck You, Pay me.
Too many people are singing the "Unions!" song without ever going to bat for themselves and fighting for what they're legally entitled to. Look a the 38 Studios debacle and realize that these companies are not out for your best interests. The "I'll do anything to make games!" crowd only makes things worse by allowing this shit to continue to happen.
I quit a company that put me through a 3 months of 100+ hour weeks. I now make nearly twice as much money (4 years later) and have better working conditions. Companies like that always end up eventually failing as they hemorrhage talent that can work for better companies.
Awesome link.
PSN ID: fearsomepirate
Highly relevant to this discussion and the one for the previous comic.
Stop waiting for the government to come save you with an investigation or regulation. Government action is slow in coming, and a blunt instrument at best. Stop waiting for a union to save you. Many, if not most unions these days exist solely to channel money and political power to their leadership, and at best only look out for the most senior employees.
Government action, union action, these are things that maybe should happen, would be nice if they happened, but which you ultimately don't have the power to make happen. Prioritize what you can actually control first. Get a contract up front. If they try to screw you, fight it or tell them "Fuck you" and walk away.
(Especially in cases like the story with the previous comic, where the employees had been told directly they were not going to get paid and there was no issue of, "But I need the paycheck, I can't afford to be without a job no matter how awful it is, etc. etc.")
As long as there are legions of clueless young people with negligible common sense willing to eat cat food and sacrifice their self-respect for a largely illusory chance to "tighten up the graphics on level 3" and enter the fabled Elysium of the games industry (or other creative fields), this shit will keep happening. And no union or regulation or anything else will entirely put an end to it.
Educate yourself. Stand up for yourself. Because you will never have certainty that that anybody else is going to stand up for you. Ever.
Yeah, I was just thinking about how useless unions are this past weekend, when I wasn't at work. I had a long discussion about it with my neighbor, whose kids don't work in factories. My upstairs neighbor wasn't there, though; he was at work, earning some overtime pay to save up for a vacation he's going on in a couple weeks.
Yeah, unions suck.
your = belonging to you
their = belonging to them
there = not here
they're = they are
Don't be naive. Even with a contract they can get away with it. They can refuse to pay you and then you have to sue them for breech of contract. If you win, then you still have to find a way to collect the judgement. Most employees cannot afford the time or money to fight this in court.
The gaming industry seems primed to capitalize on the naivety of inexperienced youths. It's reasonable to assume that, if you have no experience and if you ask for a contract up front, that you will be turned away in favor of someone who can be better manipulated.
Finally, the incredible demand for the opportunity to do work is what empowers an employer. The gaming industry is full of kids who have always dreamed of making video games, so employers can pretty much do whatever they want. Other industries are not like this.
If you actually know how to program you can get a great paying job from some huge software company at 45 hours a week. There is way more headcount than there are qualified developers (and especially QA), and they will pay you for sure, because they need you.
Wise words.
If you look at MMOs in the grand scheme of things , if there had been this massive gold rush in WoW 8 years laters no one would remember and it would have been irrelevant because items from 2004 are complete trash in todays game. If I was this company I might do some kind of tax on a service in the game like whatever the auto travel component is to suck some extra money out, but beyond that I'd just eat the shit sandwich and move on.
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So, to summarize again: The kids going into QA are pretty dumb.
My initial theory was that Q is actually the source of the leak or at least somehow gets blamed for it so that he gets busted back down to QA and can be a regular cast member again. But since he's made a number of appearances recently anyway, I now doubt that.
I'd be curious to see how well this pays dividends for companies. Company A doesn't exploit talent like that. Company B does. Who's more profitable, or arguably makes better games?
The summer after high school ('87), I took a job with an older friend who got a contract job for mowing the grass next to freeways. It was a pretty good government contract that paid really well. He promised me enough money to pay for my first year college tuition and then some. The problem was that he failed to mention that he was subcontracting for someone else. That guy defaulted on the government contract at the end of the summer. My friend had paid for tractors up front and he threatened to sue the guy. In the end, they settled, but all my friend could give me was a paltry $1000. And I had spent 10-12 hours a day on a hot smelly tractor for the entire summer. After that, I vowed never to work for a promise of payment ever again.
People all hatin' on unions, 'whargle-bargle they're the devil' or some other shit like that.
I'm just happy I have a standardised working week, minimum wage regulations, holidays, holiday pay, overtime rates, sick leave, occupational health and safety regulations, equal opportunity regulations...
Man, unions really do suck shit.
Nobody said unions are the devil. In fact, that exact rhetoric has only been used by people praising unions and bashing contract/salary-based work (Henroid's post above).
There are, however, people saying that unions are definitely not a panacea or even a particularly effective remedy to stories like the ones we see in the Trenches tales.
You ask me, saying "<x> has been rightly demonized" seems pretty close to "<x> is essentially demonic" seems pretty close to "<x> is the devil."
Conversely, nobody said unions are a panacea, or even a particularly effective remedy. The most to be said is that they're one of a very small number of possible remedies. Options like "refuse to work under shitty conditions" kind of implicitly assume there are other, non-shitty options available. Having unions around tends to improve the odds of that being the case.
your = belonging to you
their = belonging to them
there = not here
they're = they are
EA seems to be doing fine.
"Employees should stand up for their rights. If they don't, they're stupid."
"What about groups of employees standing up for their collective rights?"
"Don't be stupid."
This.
A union is only as good or as bad as the people running it -- which are your fellow employees. All unions are democratic, so if they're doing a poor job or if you just think you can do a better one you are free to run in the next election -- or (usually) force the process and start a recall drive.
A union is very similar a corporation -- a group of people coming together for collective financial interest to accomplish things they would be unable to accomplish alone.