It has been over three years since I washed my hands of the gaming industry. Still, a few months into each completely unrelated programming job, word gets around that I have a sordid past as a game developer. Geeks with long-standing dreams start to tell me about their home-brew projects and cajole me in search of help and support. They ask, wide-eyed, how I got into gaming in the first place, what it’s really like, and why I could possibly have left. Lately, older co-workers are asking me on behalf of their collegiate offspring, each with childhood dreams of making a living making games. I always dread these conversations. I worry that my nostalgic reminiscence will build up someone’s dreams and then I’ll crush them.
I spent about a year as an intern and two as a full-time programmer for a small, independent developer — an increasingly rare entity as the industry consolidates under buyouts from big-name publishers. We had about fifty employees in two floors of the same building, and everyone knew everyone else. This included a few designers, very little management, fifteen or twenty artists of various stripes, and some of the most brilliant programmers I have ever known. In fact, fresh out of college and thrown in with these people, my confidence in my own programming abilities suddenly sank to a low I hadn’t known since I started coding at the age of ten. The learning curve was steep, and I think I am both a stronger person and a better programmer for sticking to it for even the first few months.
As every glamorous teaser article about the industry will imply, we had a ping-pong table, a pool table, a lobby with a comfortable futon and chairs facing a gargantuan television hooked up to every kind of console imaginable. We had catered lunch and bagels and donuts each once a week. We had a beer fridge stocked from a manager’s discretionary funds. No one cared that my hair was blue, that several people eschewed shoes, or that half the company didn’t show up until 10am, as long as we made our deadlines.
Our daily schedules depended highly on product schedules, which were in turn based on arbitrary commercial ship dates dictated by publishers and the holiday market. Think of any semester of a class with but one big final project and stretch that over twenty people and two years. Early in a project, everyone would have collaborative fun with a design, play with new technologies we wanted to incorporate, and build the basic structure at an unhurried pace. Far less than a standard eight hours after showing up, most of the team would kick back and begin playing hours’ worth of other games, competitively or collaboratively, until late into the night. There were ping-pong tournaments and Monkey Ball ones. Early in a project is the life in the gaming industry that fans get sold on. Slowly, over the course of a year or two, the work begins to catch up. There’s no point in being the one person with the nose to the grindstone, everyone thinks, because twenty-odd other people are going to make the crunch just as bad at the end. It might as well be enjoyed before it all falls down and eats your life again. Thus is the adolescent fallacy of an entire industry. And the more complicated games get, the more that is expected of the graphics, the physics, the sheer length of a story arc before a publisher will accept a game and a reviewer will praise it and a consumer will be swayed to plunk down their money, the more time and effort is required of the same people. Thus the looming “crunch” worsens. When I left the gaming industry, it was generally assumed that at small companies with good working conditions, “crunch” would take a month of one’s time before a beta release, another three or more before final shipment, and some time after that for those few adapting international editions and patching. By “take months of one’s time” I mean “require sixty, seventy, then eighty or more hours of high-stress work a week at jobs that are exempt from overtime pay in most of the United States”.
Speaking of the pay, it’s significantly less than the market value of average programmers for jobs that require exceptional ones. A first year game programmer’s hourly pay, if they start work to fill in during a crunch as typically happens, could be close to minimum wage. I still miss the beer fridge. I don’t miss the free breakfasts and lunches; for my first year, the pizza and barbecue leftovers stretched my food budget enough to keep me fed, if not healthy. It was, even during crunch, a good deal of fun. I felt a deep sense of camaraderie with my fellow developers and an overwhelming sense of personal and group accomplishment each time a title went out the door with our names scrolling in the credits. I am to this day very glad I followed my childhood dream and managed to get into gaming, and that I did it directly out of college, when I was still used to working all night on a project I loved for no pay. I still turn down the occasional solicitation for gaming work now; there’s too much I want out of life I can’t have working there, and for something that requires a resident doctor’s stress and hours, the end result is hollow.
I understand that the industry is improving in terms of crunch hours and pay, though the average burnout time is still about five years. This improvement is a direct result of many lawsuit settlements, the most famous of which have been against EA. It is happening very slowly, one company at a time, and I advise the undeterred prospective game developer to shop very carefully for a studio that will not take all of your enthusiasm and time and give nothing in return. I advise aspiring programmers to get a proper Computer Science degree, one which can be tailored to gaming-related skills (graphics most especially), but will still look good on paper if you ever tire of making games and want to fall back on a more stable career in computing. Look for jobs at developers you may never have heard of through the dodgily-named Gamasutra website. Hunt down an internship and get your foot in the door; find a roommate and live on leftovers. Be willing to travel across the country if there isn’t a studio near you, and prepare to get one or two titles under your belt at a small studio before the big names will pay your job applications any attention. Get involved with the International Game Developers’ Association and follow their advocacy group for Quality of Life. And if it ever stops being enough fun to feel worth it, walk away secure in the knowledge that a CS degree and the skillset of a game developer will get you attention anywhere you ever want a programming job again.
It can be a grand adventure. I regret nothing except starting out unaware of what I was in for. It doesn’t change my decision to never, ever go back.
