No, it’s not Hellfighting (fighting oil well fires), it’s the dreaded game development crunch.
David Sirlin has an interesting article up on his experience at the Unity engine conference:
It’s an interesting peek at some workflow issues that game development is still sorting out. It’s well worth a read, and he has some interesting links that are worth chasing, too.
What stuck out to me is the notion of shorter work days being more productive. The willful compression of the workday into the most productive “flow” hours makes sense to me, and is far more healthy than the death march grind that most dev studios use. It’s almost a daily crunch to combat the overall crunch, except it’s coming at the term from a completely different angle. It’s working smarter, not harder or longer, as Mike Darga might say, and it’s perhaps the notion of “good crunch” as Brian “Psychochild” Green might say. (Please correct me on that as necessary, either of you… I’m interpreting a bit.)
I know that for me, when I’m productive, I can blow through production and problems in a snap… but when I’m feeling sick, tired, annoyed, depressed or just plain bored with mundane production, things take longer than they really need to. I’ve taken occasion to focus myself to get things done, and it really is nice when I hit my stride. I’m not so sure it can be institutionalized, these practices run against the “40 hour week” (80+ hour in some evil crunch modes) mindset, and creative types are notoriously inconsistent… but it’s at least an alternative to the crunch mode that has caused far too much trouble for the industry.
I know that for me, when I have a list of Things To Do by Some Certain Time, I manage myself to get them done in time. (At least if it’s possible.) When I’m micromanaged, well… things don’t go as well.
My concept if “good crunch” was more about willingly putting in extra hours on a project. An example is when you start you own game project, you don’t necessarily stick to the “must only work a maximum of 40 hours per week” ideal. I know when we relaunched M59 I put in an insane amount of hours. I was building my own company, not working as a cog in a large company. I think that even though I was willing and even enthusiastic about long hours, it did contribute to a form of burnout when things didn’t go as well as I had hoped.
I think the industry went from “good crunch” (“I want to make this game awesome so I’m going to stay late a few nights, perhaps come in on a Saturday.”) to “bad crunch” (where the boss comes around and tells you, “I’ve scheduled you to work 12 hours days, 7 days per week, for the next six months, mmkay? That’d be great.”) Crunch sucks when it’s built into the schedule.
The idea of working less hours (which is more of a form of anti-crunch than “good crunch”) is interesting. It seems to be working out for that company. Always tough to make a decision based on a single (incomplete) data point, though. Could you really build something as complex as an MMO on a very reduced schedule like Sirlin describes from the talk? Perhaps I’m too used to the old way of doing things, but I’m not sure that’d work too well.
Yeah, it’s hard to say if a long term huge project would work with such a daily schedule. I can’t help but think that it’s possible, though, if the daily task list is reasonable.
I say this is like a “good crunch” because it sounds to me like willingly working more intensely for a shorter amount of time. That, to me, is crunchy in spirit, if not exactly the “long hours” crunch that we’ve come to use as shorthand. If anything, it’s more like the real definition of “crunch”, in that it’s compressed, rather than extended. Nomenclature can be wonky sometimes. *shrug*
Thanks for stopping by to clarify!
Yes, this definitely falls under “aim for efficiency, not productivity,” which is something I think is very important.
I found this post really intriguing. It reminded me a lot of the concepts in the 4 hour work week, where you’re not trying to get more done, but you’re trying to get the same amount done in less time.
I think in order to make sure this worked though, you’d need to be more strict than normal.
I was talking to a few friends about this, and whether we’d willingly work under much stricter conditions (clock in, clock out, nearly all internet sites and external chat software blocked) if it meant we could work for 3 hours a day and get the same amount done. We all THINK we’d go for it, but who can say until you’ve tried it.
Tesh wrote:
If anything, it’s more like the real definition of “crunch”, in that it’s compressed, rather than extended. Nomenclature can be wonky sometimes.
Heh, I like that.
Mike Darga wrote:
I was talking to a few friends about this, and whether we’d willingly work under much stricter conditions (clock in, clock out, nearly all internet sites and external chat software blocked) if it meant we could work for 3 hours a day and get the same amount done. We all THINK we’d go for it, but who can say until you’ve tried it.
My concern would be, especially in highly creative work, it can be hard to schedule accurately. Sometimes inspiration strikes at odd times. Of course, when you’re on the critical path to launch you need to buckle down and focus, and that’s when this philosophy would probably work best, in my estimation.
I’m not too keen on Sirlin since he tried the old ‘Well, your wrong but although science can explain many things in one paragraph, what I’m talking about is sooo complex you have to read this multipage document to understand how your wrong. Oh, and my fanboys will use my post rating system to downrate you to hell’ on me. Well, I guess the latter part isn’t old, but the first part is.
What the focus of the article? I mean, if you compare the mind to muscles, you can only do X amount with your muscles per day before they are too fatigued. However, they can be developed to do more. Same goes for the mind. Is it looking at that vector?
Side note: I wrote something on one of my blogs about ‘zero work games’ http://gamejolt.com/profile/callan-s/blog/news/zero-work-games/1705/
You ought to read it, Callan. Sirlin himself might be a bit abrasive, but don’t confuse the writer for the message. As it happens, he’s citing another article wherein a studio recounts their efforts with shorter but more intense work days.
Avoiding fatigue plays into it, but it’s just as much about optimizing the hours when people are functional and interested in the project, rather than slacking off.
Brian, I agree with you that most of the inspiration might not occur during that 3 hours, but that’s actually one of the reasons I like it.
We spend a lot of time just thinking and solving problems in the background of our brains, and I find that most of the time I have a great idea it’s while I’m brushing my teeth or falling asleep or driving. I already do most of my ideation away from work and implement on those ideas when I get there, so this would just be an even more extreme form.
However, I do think that maybe not every discipline would be equally suited to this kind of thing. I remember when I was an artist I could regularly work 12 and 16 hour sessions without feeling like I was killing myself, and I definitely can’t do that with balancing combat or writing design docs.
IMO right-brained tasks tend to work well as marathons and left-brained tasks tend to work well as sprints, but I haven’t done any art in years now, and Tesh may disagree with me.
It depends.
When I’m just doing art to spec and filling someone else’s vision (complete with iterative feedback), art asset generation is a pretty brainless activity. It works fine as a marathon since I’m not really straining anything but my patience and sense of self worth.
If I’m allowed to be creative, what I’d call “right brained”, I do tend to find sprints more effective. Inspiration striking and all that.
If I’m doing what I’d call “left brained”, problem solving and bug hunting, it works well enough either way, but generally does work better in sprints for the sake of focus. After a while (say, at the end of the day), focus is all but gone, and I’ll miss bugs or obvious solutions that I’d have caught in a more attentive moment.
Is it telling that most of my work is indeed pretty brainless? Perhaps I should address bugs first thing in the morning, and plod through asset generation the rest of the day, rather than mixing it up.
It’s the same way for me. I can implement pretty brainlessly, although there may start to be errors after awhile.
The interesting thing about this is that if you have all the ideas worked out before you start working, then all work becomes easy implementation work. All the hard stuff is figured out in the back of your mind while you’re not at work. lt’s a nice idea in theory at least.
Tesh, well, if you advocate having a look…
Hmmm, I’d think about it holistically – really, if you have a look the reward loops are pretty flimsy in terms of what their describing.
By reward loops, I mean if someone does a great hours work and their reward is…to get up, walk about a bit, then sit down and work again, how much is that a here and now reward for that great work?
You might want to talk about long term rewards, but that isn’t how the human brain is wired. The human brain listens hardest for rewards in the here and now. Even if the guy got some candy after doing a great hour, consistantly, it’d probably lead to even more than a great hours work in future.