The Big Dipper

There is a well-documented problem with longevity amongst game industry careerists. Part of it is the frivolous nature of our products. When you’re meeting with friends who are lawyers, doctors, cancer curers or crime-fighting superheroes it always feels a bit sad when you tell them you’re still making kids’ toys, especially when you’re getting older. It’s also partly due to the punishing work “ethics” and generally lower wages. This is why most companies advertising for staff stipulate the applicant must be “passionate about games”, because, let’s be honest, the only real rewards you are going to receive are self-made.

In Japan it works a little bit differently. It’s often just seen as a desk job, as I suppose it is, and any real chance of promotion comes with longevity at the company. If you’re in your thirties and have been employed at the same place for, say, a decade, you’ll be promoted, whether you’re suitable or not. This partly stems from Japan’s history of life-time employment which, as I made clear at the start of the sentence, is history. Any person who still claims this as a fact of Japanese life needs to move out of the 80s. That said, job hopping is still very much a developing skill. Employers expect the employees to expect life-time employment, but that’s where it ends.

Eventually a lot of people end up leaving the industry, globally speaking, as employers are keen to hire enthusiastic graduates rather than keep their senior, and therefore more expensive, staff. Only those few who are extremely lucky enough to find a place of employment ideally suited to them find a new lease of life and stay the course. This is pretty much what it comes down to, life in the game industry: job-hopping from one place to another, or being made routinely redundant, until you find a place where there is an ideal marriage of wages, quality of life, projects and people. Ideal for you, that is. Alternatively you could be blissfully aware of your own incompetence and stick it out at a place where your employment is safe, possibly due to longevity or having incriminating photos of your boss at hand.

In the meantime most of us just ride the rollercoaster of highs and lows until we are sick of it and get a real job. Personally, and I think this may be endemic, I find my lows getting lower and my highs less and less high as time progresses. Soon enough the highs can’t counter the lows anymore and then I’ll have some difficult decisions to make.

The reason so many people get burned out, apart from the obvious crunch time mentality, is, as I see it, twofold. Firstly the job requires a creative mind, yet one hardly gets any opportunities to let that creativity run riot. This is the “prissy artist syndrome” where the increasingly technical tasks start to eat away at your Muse. You want to go mad and create insane characters and fantastical worlds, yet most of the time you have to polish, fix, adjust, change, bug-check, implement. These are necessary tasks and all part of the job, but when you’re feeling low these activities can really get on your goat.

The second reason is one the employers need to take the blame for. The aforementioned passion that is, apparently, a job requirement, is mostly advertised to get young, keen people to work for little money and do unpaid overtime willingly. It’s hard to make employees work extra time for no extra pay or reward other than, maybe, a few days holiday at the end of a project of a duration that usually doesn’t reflect the countless hours you’ve worked for free, but if you convince them it’s “for the good of the game” you usually can get people excited enough to comply. However, this is a double-edged sword. Aside, of course, from overworking your staff and decreasing their effectiveness, you are also chipping away at their morale. “Wow,” a keen applicant may think, “I am passionate about games! They want passionate people! I can give them all my ideas, I can really help make this a better game!” But no, there is usually little room for employees to contribute to the extent they believe they will be able to, so this false expectation of being deeply involved turns into bitter resentment when leads and bosses dictate what needs to be done with little regard to the ideas of the “passionate employee”.

In the end you have turned from passionate artist to competent but tired craftsman until you become a journeyman, doing your hours for the pay with very little enthusiasm. At that point you think to yourself “hey, I can work my hours with little enthusiasm elsewhere, for much better pay!” and you get a job in banking.

Of course, the many people that do stay in the industry before their use-by date are lucky. They end up somewhere where they feel valued, where they feel adequately compensated and can work on things they like. They are also an immense asset, having acquired more knowledge than the five graduates their wages would easily pay for. But these days finding such a place is a little like winning the lottery.

With increasingly expensive development cycles and a staffing problem the traditional decline in morale of seniors is something that should be addressed. However useful keen and cheap graduates are, they are no substitute for a weathered veteran. At the very least you need a few of them aboard. It’s a shame to lose all these people to the better paid, better scheduled and better rewarded jobs. I wonder what could be done about that.

On the other hand…maybe it’s our industry’s self-regulating culling process. Get rid of the chaff, out with the old. I mean, if Portal has taught us anything, not desert related, it’s that it’s the new guard, the young turks, who will bend new life into game design while the old fogeys keep harping on about nicer-looking guns and better ragdoll physics. It takes a team of seniors to come up with Halo 3, but it was a pack of students that came up with Portal. Bah humbug. What do I know? Maybe it’s time to be put out to pasture.