I'm not the most contemplative person in the world. I'm ethical, but neither religious nor spiritual. In the grand scheme of the Universe, I take comfort in relative meaninglessness. I make games, most of them obscure, and I write silly jokes that few people will ever hear and fewer still will remember the next day. That is the sum total of my contribution to humankind. My trade is evanescence, not legacy.

Thus, not very often do I begin a project wondering about its ultimate influence on the "greater good". Less often still do I keep on wondering once the project is over. But that is exactly how I feel about Quality of Life in the Game Industry: Challenges and Best Practices, the IGDA white paper which the committee I have the honor of chairing has unveiled at GDC and officially released in late April. The white paper is at

To be honest, I'm not quite sure what to tell you about it. I could quote the statistics, or list our most important findings, and I will. I could tell you about the staggering generosity of my team of writers, who spent untold hours working on the paper despite overflowing schedules and a subject matter unlikely to endear them to the Powers that Be. I could tell you about the comforting news I heard at a recent IGDA chapter meeting, with some major studios looking to our work as a guide to improve the situation for their employees.

But first, I will humbly ask that you read the paper and draw your own conclusions. If you think it is a worthwhile effort, use it. If you think it is flawed, join our group and contribute to our future efforts.

And if you think this "quality of life" stuff is worthless tripe that a Real Game Developer With A Hardcore Work Ethic shouldn't care about… Well, I hope you will change your mind someday. Preferably before you reach a management position and have time to cause too much damage.

The Situation
As we first discussed the contents of the white paper, we decided to put together a survey to complement and support our findings.

I would have been happy with 150 responses. We got 994.

Maybe we hit a nerve.

That being said, the survey's results hold few surprises:

[] Despite our 30+ years of history, we are still a very young industry, with only 18.4% of respondents saying they were 35 years old or older.
[] We're also woefully inexperienced: only one lead developer in ten has accumulated over 10 years of experience, and one company in thirty has employees who average that much. Unfortunately, the main reason why this is true is that we lose many of our best people to rival industries every year.
[] Game development is hard on families, with 61.5% of respondents saying that their spouses think the developers work too much and don't spend enough time with their families.

However, some of the statistics we have been able to extract from the responses are downright scary from an enlightened studio executive's perspective:

[] Game development is not a long-term career; 34.3% of respondents expect to leave the industry within five years, and 51.2% will be gone in 10 years.
[] Fewer than half of the people who expressed an opinion on the matter said that game development was their only career option. Since many companies still operate on the principle that all developers should be game-obsessed (just take a look at the job ads) and therefore amenable to lower salaries and working conditions for the privilege of working on games, this is a recipe for disaster. Our competition for talent is no longer just EA or THQ; it's Pixar, SAS and HP. Can we compete with them?

The Symptoms
We all have first-hand experience of the joys (and occasional horrors) of game development. Now, we know that our experiences are just about universal:

[] Game developers work long hours at the best of times, with three out of five of our respondents saying they put in over 46 hours in a normal, non-crunch week.
[] The Death March is a way of life in our studios, with nearly half of respondents saying that a crunch week demands over 65 hours of work – and 51.7% saying that their management sees crunches as a normal way of doing business, while only 2.3% actively pursue no-crunch policies.
[] Our pre-production staffing and scheduling estimates are often either woefully inadequate or ridiculously optimistic, because it is all but impossible to secure a contract while quoting realistic figures – there is always someone else who is just as desperate as you are and willing to undercut you by another percentage point or ten.
[] We push developers into leadership and management roles without giving them proper training, and even all too often against their wills.

The Solutions?
We don't pretend to have found silver bullets that will apply equally well in San Francisco, Nagoya, Prague, London or Johannesburg. But we have assembled a set of best practices that may help guide companies in tailoring a solution for their own needs. I can't go into much detail here (after all, I have to give you some incentive to read the paper!) but they include:

[] Scheduling and budgeting practices.
[] Project management and architecture techniques.
[] Family support.
[] Honesty in hiring.
[] Supporting different career paths.
[] Separating R&D from product development.
[] Leveraging remote developers.
[] Customizing individual work arrangements.

Here's a bonus idea from our GDC roundtables. A TV network never sends a series into full-scale production until they have written a sample script and a "series bible", shot a pilot episode or two, and reviewed the concept in detail more than once. Movies go through a similar process, with pre-production routinely lasting years. Why don't we sign prototyping contracts more often?

After all, a publisher can fund fifty $100,000 design-prototype-and-find-out-what-really-works-for-the-player deals for the price of a single AAA game that fails in the marketplace. One of the main reasons why projects slip and fail is that we go into production without having a clue what feature will make the game fun. By funding more experimentation early on, without tying it to a full-scale production budget, not only would we experience fewer late-cycle cancellations, we probably would get more (provably successful) gameplay innovation as a bonus.

Conclusion
The work of game development itself is stimulating, challenging, and certainly better than most alternatives. However, that is no reason not to try to improve the conditions in which it is performed.

That is what we tried to do, anyway. As I said, I don't value legacy much, but I'm sure that I can speak for the entire Quality of Life committee when I say this is a bit of legacy we'd be proud of.

Editor's Note: To read the white paper, click here for details.

BIO
If you aren't really tired of FDL by now, don't say so in public unless you are looking for a serious beating. He's been the bane of the game industry for over 10 years, during which he cajoled and threatened his way into over 20 credits as designer, producer, programmer and writer. For some reason, magazine and book editors seem to like him; his Game Design Perspectives and Secrets of the Game Business are available now from Charles River Media. With the dozens of articles he has contributed to other industry publications and the roundtables he hosts at GDC every year, it is getting really hard to avoid him these days. But there is hope; FDL has been freelancing for 5 years, so we expect him to starve to death any day now. Visit his mediocre web site, http://pages.infinit.net/idjy, at your own risk.

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