I wish people would stop glorifying how many hours they work and how little sleep they get, "You need to live without sleep (4 hours a night every day for years baby!)." Sounds juvenile to me.
It's likely bravado from college days. I remember overhearing many conversations at school where students would brag about pulling their second all-nighter in a particular week. I could only think that they were doing something wrong. If your work load is requiring you to stay up for more than 16-18 hours a day, then you're either doing too much or you're really inefficient.
A metric of success, to me, is being able to make money while you're asleep. You'll never escape the chains of the cubicle if you don't work smart.
It's the lead position. My lead at work (MS) works more hours than me, too; and, so far as I know, knows what all of us are working on at a pretty considerable level. He does testing for some of the things that we can't, or that need to be done immediately if we're doing higher priority things, and so on.
I'd like to think he still gets at least 6 hours of sleep a night, but I wouldn't know. The synopsis of the lead, I read, was reasonable, especially remembering what sort of lives the people that worked for EA had.
In short, I don't think this was trying to glorify the hours worked, and instead alerting would-be leads to understand what they're committing to.
Read the last sentence before taking quotes out of context - "being a lead is all about responsibility".
If you're the lead and things start going south on your project then you'd better be prepared to start leading and taking on whatever is needed to get your game shipped.
I know it's cool to preach about working smarter instead of harder, but getting a game out of the door and into a box usually requires large doses of both.
The game industry puts this type of workload on more than just leads and managers - the rank and file toil for long hours with miserable pay (compared to the rest of the industry). There are a few exceptions to the rule - studios where life resembles something like normal, and crunch time is an anomaly, not year-round.
They are few and far between though. I grew up in Vancouver where EA has its largest studio presence, and the number of burned out game devs I've met is a little scary.
Video games is like Hollywood - it's glamorous, and has the tendency to suck in some great talent, chew them up, and spit them by the curb 2-4 years down the road. And this will not change so long as there's a lineup of talented artists and developers out the door and around the block waiting for their crack at what may just be the worst working environment known to software-dom in this country.
I agree somewhat. Yes, a lead has more responsibility, and will work as hard as the other team members. Sometimes they may have to push to get the product shipped.
That is a completely different thing than four hours of sleep a night for years.
It's all of the above. As lead you have to fill in, to do what no one else wants to do, to keep try of all the things that need to be done in the say 48 hours to the next deadline and sort them by priority. But you often have to work just as long as the longest worker on the team if only out of solidarity. It's important that no one can ever say to you: "You took it easy, while I did the work."
This principle is why Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon were all beloved by their men. They dug in there with everyone else. Slept on the ground. Rode first into battle. All that. It seems silly, but don't underrate it. I can't tell you how many times someone would come to me at 4 in the morning before a deadline and say how much they appreciated that I was there. No one wants to feel used.
I think foregoing producers definitely makes this very difficult. We had some wonderful producers at Blizzard (web team) that came on and turned the team around from hours of OT every night to projects being done on time without OT except in rare cases. Leads don't have (quite) as much on their plate, devs don't get burnt out, and things just run so much better.
Video games are an interesting phenomenon. They manage to pack many of the most interesting problems of computer science into one of the most superficial, yet profitable, applications. They're kind of like the warping of space time, an anomaly of extremes that manages to relentlessly suck brilliant minds away due to its siren call.
And yes, I love video games, and considered working in the field. But, stepping back you realize there are more important things to work on, and more useful ways to spend your time. That doesn't mean the temptation on both fronts (playing and creating) ever goes away.
You could say the exact same thing about books, TV, movies, paintings, etc.
Games are just like any other form media. Yes, many of them are superficial, but a lot of them tell incredible stories, teach life lessons, and evoke powerful emotions. To top it all off they can also be incredible teaching tools.
Just because you think something's a waste of time doesn't mean other people aren't deriving real meaning from it.
While i found your comment very insightful, i have to say that, even if you're not the one working on the "art" side of things, it can be extremely rewarding to make the existence of the final creation possible with your programming skills.
This is the inevitable response that I get when I dare suggest that those of us with the gift of being able to program computers in such a interesting time choose wisely where we place our efforts.
I'm not saying it's immoral, unrewarding, or not plain fun to play and build video games. I'm saying that in life you get to choose how you spend your time, and in my view building the next killing simulator when you have the talent and means to do so much more is probably something worthy of self-reflection.
Speaking of self-reflection: a quick look at your profile revealed that you're working at an e-commence company and previously worked at an advertising solutions company. Do you consider those things less superficial than video games? Honest question.
Sure, and a fair one! I think there are a number of tradeoffs you can make when taking on a new project:
- Will this make me happy?
- Are the people involved good people I can enjoy working with?
- Will this develop my skills in the way I want for my future?
- Will this enable me to open doors later that are shut now?
- Does this have a positive impact on the world?
- Will this have a long-lasting impact?
- Is this ethical, will it be used for good or evil?
- Is it something that I can be proud of? That I'll tell my grandkids about?
I've been lucky enough to work on a variety of things all of which stretched these constraints in wildly different directions. In each case I've tried to push things towards a happy medium when it was clear things were tilted too far in one direction. I'm quite happy with what I am working on now, as it is with a great team, provides good technical challenges, and has a positive, real impact on thousands of people's lives in an ethical, positive way, while potentially having a long term impact on building sustainable, local economies as a whole.
The point of my post is not to 'judge' people doing things they enjoy. It's to point out that it's important to keep in mind these tradeoffs and be honest with yourself. At any point in my career I like to think if you asked me where what I was working on fell on these lines, I could give you an honest answer. I think there are many engineers who blindly follow technical problems wherever they lead, without thinking of the larger picture.
My original post was pointing out video games certainly, for the most part, fit into these tradeoffs in a common way. (Again, I am talking about applied software engineering in video games, not all facets of video games.) If you're working on fascinating computational geometry algorithms for the next game that lets people run around shooting each other in the head, I think you know where what you're doing falls on these dimensions, and I think it's important to know if you're comfortable there. (Yes, I play and love Quake 3.)
It's hard to phrase these things without people taking it personally, but I've known many engineers that wake up 10 years into their career and realize they've been working on incredibly interesting technical problems which are being applied to things they aren't really too stoked about.
"My original post was pointing out video games certainly, for the most
part, fit into these tradeoffs in a common way. (Again, I am talking about
applied software engineering in video games, not all facets of video
games.) If you're working on fascinating computational geometry algorithms
for the next game that lets people run around shooting each other in the
head, I think you know where what you're doing falls on these dimensions,
and I think it's important to know if you're comfortable there. (Yes, I
play and love Quake 3.)"
Ok, you're saying, that you don't judge, but are doing it the whole time.
Your definition of meaningful is very simplistic. It's like
saying, that exertion could be without catharsis. No, they can't
be without each other. If they can't be without each other, than
both are meaningful in the same way.
The term 'judging' is a loaded term. It implies that the person doing the judging thinks less of people that are being judged. That isn't the case here. How could I? I've written video games and play them all the time.
If I had said something along the lines "working on your college degree is a better use of your time than gambling your money away in a casino" I'd not be 'judging' gamblers who do so. I'd be judging the acts themselves and how I see their relative merit and the rewards they'll bring the person doing them. I'd also be stirring up less controversy.
It's disappointing that people in this thread have tried to attack me personally or twist my words to be interpreted as 'judgements.' I don't think it's controversial to say that playing video games excessively is, in the long run, not the most rewarding endeavor. The question is, does this extrapolate to making a career of the construction of games themselves (exclusively on the software engineering side, the topic of this thread.) I happen to think that it does, particularly when I look at all the energy and talent that goes into creating them and the draw they have due to the fact that our generation was raised on gaming and that it offers enticing technical challenges.
I would rather tell my grand kids that I made a cool game that a lot of people had a lot of fun with, than try to explain how I helped an insurance company limp along without succumbing under the weight of their legacy IT architecture. Or contributed to make the world a better place for advertising. Etc. That kind of thing is how most programmers pass their lives.
And what is the "so much more" that these talented programmers could (and, in your opinion, should) be doing instead? I'm genuinely curious, since most programming jobs that I can think of aren't exactly world-changing.
Yes, a programmer in the video game industry might spend their days debugging the mammary physics of "the next killing simulator". But they might also create the next Braid or Minecraft, helping a lot of people connect and have fun in the process. Similarly, a programmer outside the games industry is much more likely to be tweaking some bespoke piece of accounting software than they are making the next Facebook.
I think you bring up a good point. The person making the mammary physics simulation or Braid are probably two different types of people.
I think the reason for this is because the person working on Braid chose to balance technical challenges with other things important to them. A 2d platformer is certainly less interesting to build from an engineering standpoint than building a navier-stokes based milk dynamics solver in CUDA :) But, the Braid engineer knows they are working on an ambitious, novel piece of art. It's this tradeoff that I don't think most people are making, and I think most video game engineers do not see themselves as agents to push the boundary of contributing in an artistic sense to a greater whole as those on games like Braid do, particularly.
The post in this thread sparked my comment because it mentioned the most drawing position in gaming is the coveted engine programmer position. To me, this sounds like people want to work on bleeding-edge technical problems without regards to the fact their engines are probably being applied towards shoveling out violent, dry crap from the mainstream gaming studios. I once had one-dimensional goals like this too ("I want to work on global illumination algorithms!") but this has changed for me dramatically over time.
I think the problem is you appear to be judging others by the stick you are measuring yourself with. Everybody gets to decide what they feel is important, but HN'ers don't like others telling them what should be important to them.
On the other hand, sometimes being slapped in the face to think about what your working on and it's larger purpose can be like getting dunked into a pool of ice water for the first time.
Insult after insult. I think a vast majority of those on HN are self aware enough that they don't need your comments to make them stop and think about their lives. Seriously.
"I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Actually, 3D games are a GREAT test-bed for AI research. Some of the best AI algorithm competitions in academia are possible solely because of the game industry's awesome killing simulators.
This response is inevitable because you are sharing this opinion with people who can see through your biases. I'm happy enough that someone programming games isn't hacking my bank account. Does that register on your personal Richter scale for a valuable use of one's time?
I'm not really a fan of moral relativism. I don't think it's unfair to claim that certain applications of engineering are objectively more valuable to society as a whole than others, or more rewarding to the person doing them. It's fair to disagree with me on the particulars, of course, and argue the point, but it's not fair to say such judgements are impossible to make in the first place.
While a lot of people inevitably dislike these kinds of high-and-mighty accusations of superficiality, as an aspiring video game programmer whose sole goal in life is to have the maximum positive impact on humanity possible, I have given this much thought. I have a rather interesting combination of analytic and artistic talents that can only be fully taken advantage of in the context of a game and its engine. I have looked at other industries, but in all of them they only utilize a subset of my abilities. In my attempt to optimize my impact to the absolute maximum, I have come to the conclusion that making games is what I am best at doing, and I must use this to push forward society in any way possible, even if it is only to give people a spark of hope when the world seems to be eating itself alive.
Sometimes, games are the most useful thing one could ever work on.
This is an admirable post and I appreciate you making it! I think if more people thought through their actions as you do, the world would indeed be a better place (and we'd have better games to play as well :))
More important things like making webapps that find restaurants in your area?
Get over yourself. Your web/mobile apps, as cool as they are, aren't more important or any better for anyone than video games unless you're feeding starving children or freeing people from tyrannical government.
Oh, come on now. There's a bit of a difference here.
We can all agree that getting regular exercise and eating well is a good idea, and stuffing your face with junk food every day a bad one, without thinking either should be something enforced by society upon people.
"stepping back you realize there are more important things to work on, and more useful ways to spend your time. "
Video games can be artistic, inspirational, stress relievers (In my opinion one of the greatest invention for men ever), they stimulate imagination, and have been proven to help
real professionals like surgeons be more precise at work.
How is your e-commerce vocation more useful for humanity exactly?, its still consumerism no?
It is a game totally worth consuming your life. It have too much depth and there's so much to learn. Designing your own defense system, figuring out how to satisfy and juggle the requirement of your fortress, and so on. It's mind expanding. Other than that, I like killing and skewing globins.
Someday, I'll be able to handle trapping globins and use them to automate my fortress.
A game like dwarf-fortress is a 6+ year labour of love from its creators (and its players!), and screw anyone who says dedication like that is wasting your life.
And more broadly, a game is as artistic & life-changing as the developer is able or willing to make it.
As cool as Dwarf Fortress is, I really don't think we should go along with judging games by the metric that is suggested by the GP ("killing simulators"). It is like forcing kids to only play with Lego, because 'cops and robbers' is a 'crime simulation'.
I have played less than 4 video games in the last decade, all of them either flash or shipped with my mobile phone. I'll give this one a try (helps that it has a Linux port :-)
I'm a fan of this subject and I think that it's a relatively easy to associate the video game industry as something meaningless. (that doesn't mean that it's correct)
It's worth reading this even if you're not interested in games or the industry that makes them. The game industry is one of the most mature industries in software and it offers a possible future for YOUR corner of the software world.
Besides being one of the longest running industries in software, it iterates teams and products rapidly.
Because of this it has performed a gradient decent more than any other software industry, and I would argue it is is sitting at a local minimum.
From that perspective it's very interesting to study.
Unless your definition of mature is old, I'm not sure what you are talking about. At the large publishers stuff like unpaid overtime is built into the budget from day 1, game developers are typically paid quite a bit less than their counterparts in the business sector, and agile development practices are rare.
They build very expensive, monolithic pieces of software. It is pretty much the exact opposite of where software development has been going for the past 10 years.
Earlier in the history of the industry games were ligher weight, more iterative and more exploratory. Over time that changed. Sure thats changing back again with indie games, but that's still a small part of the market.
I'm just wondering out loud, could your corner of the world be moving in that direction?
Most games are trainwrecks inside. They are /just good enough to ship/ and often no better. They are fragile, fickle things that for the most part have a market lifetime much shorter than the time it took to develop the title. You get your money back -- if you do -- in the first few months of sales.
Games are pragmatic and hard, cheap bastards that chew up teams and spit them out.
Every game I've shipped has been far more stable than the majority of applications I use on a daily basis today. Most of those codebases where then used in other titles, aside from the very game-specific parts.
Sony/Nintendo etc require that your game runs for 1-3 days without a crash, on a platform without virtual memory, before they'll put it on a disc that cannot be patched (well, until this-gen of consoles. Now it's just expensive to patch).
Quite a bit different from platforms such as iOS where developers get upset that Apple take five days to approve updates for for free (fail a Sony submission and you'll be paying $$$$$)
> They are /just good enough to ship/ and often no better.
From one point of view, this is viciously optimized. I'm reminded of a quote along the lines of "the ideal racing car would cross the finish line intact and immediately disintegrate." The point being, find the minimum weight necessary to accomplish your goal, and spend as close to that minimum as possible. In games, the "weight" you're minimizing is the effort and focus spent on production quality, in order to be able to spend more on game design and performance, and ship faster.
This is what I've been suspecting after reading dozens of tutorials and examples on all manner of game-related APIs and libraries. It seems like game programmers as a whole care less about code organization, style, and all the other values that are exalted in other fields.
You're probably being unfair there. The programmers who work on games are often very smart, very capable people who genuinely want to make a good product. A lot of so-called professional programmers could learn a thing or two from games developers about everything from writing high performance code to co-ordinating large development teams via the value of developing in-house tools to make development work more efficient.
But the games programmers are screwed by the simple fact that the market will accept games that are buggy/require insane hardware/etc. and pay for them, will usually not attempt to return them if they simply don't work but will rip them apart in on-line commentary if the game sucks, and will rip them off at the first opportunity if the game is cracked.
That means the business guys who are, quite rightly, calling the shots, are interested in basically the first few days after launch and nothing else. That in turn means there is no need to bother with things like code quality and long-term maintenance. Better to spend the money on a cinematic trailer and DRM that takes one more day to crack.
This will continue as long as people continue to accept buggy games, dubious policies like shipping incomplete games and then filling in the blanks with paid-for DLC, and so on. And right now, while there are clearly plenty of people like me who would spend a lot on good games that worked properly and didn't come with pseudo-malware attached, it seems there are plenty more people who just don't care.
You want them to write games for people like me. (Thanks! :-)) Unfortunately, most of the big games shops are going to follow the money.
I'd have to content that my own games (Crash + Jak) are far far less buggy than the typical web or desktop application. We had a VERY low tolerance for bugs. I NEVER EVER shipped with a known crash bug (there were some I didn't know about of course). As entertainment we always felt that the consumer had zero tolerance for bugs. Something like MS Word is riddled with serious bugs that don't get fixed major release after major release. We had a huge staff of in house QA and even more external.
Well, FWIW, I'm glad someone is still making games with some eye on quality.
Personally I basically gave up AAA games around four years ago, after three big disappointments.
Crysis should have been great but had all kinds of problems even on high-end hardware.
Supreme Commander should have been great, except that a major selling point was its world-scale maps but if you actually played a full on game on such a map you went over 2GB RAM and crashed it on 32-bit XP.
Oblivion should have been great, with a lot of power in the game engine and some interesting ideas, but they forgot to bring the fun part.
Those were probably the three most eagerly anticipated PC titles of their generation, and while I did complete Crysis and have spent plenty of time on Forged Alliance, the enjoyment was severely damaged by the frustration with all the problems.
Since then, it seems like all I hear about is ever more intrusive DRM screwing things up and ever more profiteering via DLC and exclusive content deals. I've given up on contemporary AAA titles entirely until this sort of silliness goes away, and I content myself with things like puzzle games and titles from GoG that are actually fun to play.
The sad thing is, I'm betting the programming teams behind Crysis and SupCom could have improved the trouble spots and given everyone a much more enjoyable gaming experience with a bit more time, but I bet the suits pushed them to ship when it was "good enough". As for the DRM and DLC in more recent titles, that's just management madness through and through.
I agree with most of your post, but I don't think the problem is bugginess.
The real problem is the short-term fix nature of games. As you say, they're (mostly) not designed to be one-shots, with the majority of players playing through the game for a couple of weeks each, within a period of a few months of each other. That is why bugginess is tolerated, not the other way around. It's not worth the time to fix non-critical edge-case problems in situations. By the time the bug can be fixed, and tested, it'll only be useful to, say, 10% of total players.
In multiplayer games (and other games where the player is expected to engage with the game for months at a time) then you find that there are frequent updates and bug fixes.
Such is the reason the only game I play is a Quake clone (Urban Terror). It is mostly bug free, runs on cheap hardware, and most importantly: it is very fun (due to the great gameplay.) It also has a great community (with a lot of hackers/nerd types.
I wonder if it's a different story with longer-running MMORPG's like WoW, FFXI, etc. Wouldn't the situation force the development process to be more stable and follow best practices?
I worked at Riot Games (makers of League of Legends) for a while. In some ways, it was much better: good, iterative practices, tracking technical debt, etc. In other ways, it was no different: long hours, little regard for anything but the release, etc.
Now that they've been released for a while, it would be interesting to see how things have changed.
Even following best practices, the top priority of the project should be to fulfill the players' expectations and realize the designers' vision. That's not as compatible with technical excellence at every stage of the project as you'd hope it would be.
On well-planned projects, best practices of development help achieve that priority throughout the project. However, the more problematic development becomes, the more things come into conflict with that top priority. And in practice, planning is almost never good enough to prevent that as the project wears on. Project management that can push back the day when that vicious cycle kicks in is invaluable.
Usually, in reality, the top priority is to ensure the short-term viability of the project or (worse) the studio or (much worse) the studio management. It's like Robocop's hidden directive, sadly. That diversion of focus, especially early in a project, is totally poisonous.
If anything, MMOs are more susceptible to these kinds of existential threats than most projects. They're incredibly challenging feats for even a massively skilled development team. The ability to produce an MMO is actually a fairly good way to measure how well-buffered a development environment is from this kind of insecurity.
I think what's sad when you compare the games industry to others like finance or telecommunications, (based on my experience) a typical (large) game company does way way more testing than say a big bank or telco.
I've worked for a couple of game studios over the years. Unfortunately, conditions were atrocious at both, something that seems to be fairly common in the industry. My hypothesis is so many coders spent their teen years playing video games, wanting to write them, that they are willing to work in sub-par conditions.
I won't work at another one, unless it's my own. Sadly, I'm not skilled enough to start my own.
All the studios that consistently turn out brilliant games: Naughty Dog, Valve, Epic, Blizzard and many many others are really well run. Working there might often be brutal because of how hard the job is and pressure, but they know the process of making great games and the quality of employees is very very high.
It's less so at the big corporate studios where marketing and big company policy has heavily infiltrated the system.
It could be the personalities of the people I make contacts with (I'm a researcher who works with research-interested game-industry people), but the burnout rate seems really high, even at the well-run places. More than half the people I've met in the last 5 years have quit their jobs within that timeframe! And a lot cited the working conditions: more or less that the pressure-cooker environment was cool in their 20s, but not a long-term career path. Some have gone the indie route, some to consulting, some back to grad school, others just left the game industry entirely for a job somewhere like Lockheed.
There are two quotes that I remember from my CS profs that have stuck with me over the years.
AI prof addressing statistical vs. rule-based learning: "All models are wrong. Some models are useful."
Systems level programming prof: "Now that you have a thorough understanding of programming all up and down the stack, if you want to minimize the amount of money you make and maximize the hours you work, then take a job as a video game programmer."
I know several coders who have worked in the gaming industry for 5+ years and they're all completely jaded at this point.
Thumbs up for telling people they need to know some math. Even if you're not planning to work in the specialized areas that are mentioned in the article, it wouldn't hurt to be more comfortable with math than most developers are, because you may need to step in and help somebody in one of those areas, and (for me, at least), learning stuff like that on short notice is really hard.
Physics, collision, animation, and certain types of compression also use a lot of math. I also found that just plain gameplay programming in 3D games required a pretty decent command of matrix math and analytic trig.
Sure, and there are a lot of other things you don't /need/, but that will make you more valuable to employers, or to your customers if you're a business owner.
Everybody has to choose things to learn and not learn, but my experience has been that putting math in the "not learn" category can make your life/career more difficult in some job markets. If most game devs decide they don't need to know math, that's just more opportunity for me, so I'm not too bent out of shape about it. :)
You don't need to know much mathematics, but a solid practical understanding of 3D geometry is a bread-and-butter skill in game programming, no matter your speciality.
Seems like many people here enjoy playing video games but they do not like that some very smart people chose to program them instead of "making the world a better place". Hmm.. makes me think why do you consider it like that. Its one thing to say that the gaming industry is bad because of bad working environment (a new info to me) and quite other to say that its bad to work for since it does not make the world a better place. A game is made because someone wants to play it. Why do they want to play it? Because life is a bitch and we get frustrated.(And I am fairly sure that people who are "making the world a better place" also experience that). So they try to escape the daily motions of life by shooting zombie faces or kicking someone's ass by making a avatar of them in a wrestling game. That brings us a sense of relief and allows us to fight another day or week or month (depending upon your gaming habits). So why not? My puny human brain cannot understand all this bad rap given to these poor game programmers who are maybe working in the worst environment possible (according to some comments here).
edit: Reading this again I realize that some people will argue that they are not against the therapeutic values of games but they get angry when people waste time on it. Hmm... interesting counter argument. Lets see, I can cut my hands with a kitchen knife so maybe I should throw it out right now. Dammit punyhuman you may fry your brains with this mobile crush it, right now. Punyhuman is surrounded by such things, they are all after me. Help HN people.
Why? I'm very NOT large studio oriented. I don't think anything stated in my post (which is just part of a larger series I'm writing) is even about studio size. In this particular post I'm just broadly breaking down some of the sub-specialities inherent in the process of programming video games. In a web app you need more network and database programmers, in a video game you need graphics and sound programmers. It's just practical sense. The same guys might do these tasks, but if you like advanced 3D graphics and get a kick out of it -- get a programming job that involves graphics!
Those technical specialties are specific to certain genres of games. You don't have to learn all of them to get started and make good games. You probably do have to shoehorn yourself into one (or a few) of them if you want to work on big budget games.
