Home
The game industry regards crunch time as a sacred institution, not unlike marriage. If you’re in love, you do it, and either your bond grows stronger, or it ends in a messy divorce. Not that into your significant other? Time for somebody to hand out walking papers.
Now, thanks to the Internet, some of the more abusive relationships have come to light. Most recently, IGN published a story about the year-long "perpetual crunch" at Team Bondi during the development of L.A. Noire. Then, just to throw a little gasoline on the fire, someone asked Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter on his weekly Pack Attack series if programmers and artists should organize to prevent future abuses.
We lose more employees that way....
"I just don't think people who make a $100,000 bucks a year need a whole lot of protection because they have to work overtime," said Pachter. "Once you get to a certain wage level, you're charged with being able to protect yourself."
Turning the question into a class issue might be interesting, but it misses the real point. Whether or not game industry workers should create a union is a bit moot, because they won't. Ever.
Let's start with practicalities. A game developers' union wouldn't look anything like the unions you probably think about...the Teamsters or Service Employees International Union (SEIU). A closer example would be the Screen Actor's Guild (SAG) or the Writer's Guild of America (WGA), two unions that essentially represent independent contractors who frequently move between jobs without accruing seniority...and whose members often make far more than Pachter's six-figure salary estimate.
The thing is, while the studio system did its best to snuff those organizations out, they both had the advantage of being centrally located. Everybody they wanted to join lived in Los Angeles. The game industry, on the other hand, lives everywhere, spread all throughout the country and the world.
I demand a fluffy pillow to sleep on under my desk! And nice curtains!
I talked to "Mary," a former member of SEIU's hierarchy, and asked why they don't just step in and start signing people up. "They should totally organize," she told me, "but they have to invite us in." It's not that SEIU or any other union can't take the first step, but ask yourself: Who would they talk to?
"I crunched very hard on my most recent project," said "Peter," one of several developers who spoke to me on condition of anonymity. "But this was completely voluntary. I even enjoyed most of it." That wasn't an uncommon sentiment. Others admitted they didn't know anything about unions, but they didn't like the idea of some organization telling them what they could or couldn't do while working on a project they cared about.
Another individual, "Paul," worried a union shop could potentially stifle creativity. "It seems to me that unions don't really encourage people to break new ground and stand out from the crowd, which is exactly what you want from people in a creative position."
True or not, out of the half-dozen people I contacted, nobody felt any enthusiasm for unionizing. They understand crunch, and they dislike, but accept, that they won't be paid extra for it. They don't understand unions...and unions don't understand them. Programmers and artists tend to like their autonomy, and they often take pride in their work. An SEIU member might not carry the same sense of purpose. Overtime without overtime pay would be unthinkable to them. The developers I spoke to, on the other hand, seemed to agree there's a difference between crunch and abuse. Crunch is necessary. Abuse isn't.
C'mon, Roy! Work through another weekend! You hate your family, anyway!
The resurgence of the union issue may not have anything to do with whether or not workers in the game industry actually need one, because my impression is they're ambivalent at best about the prospect. It might just come down to the reportedly dismal management style and filthy temper of one man: Brendan McNamara, founder and head of Team Bondi. What those employees suffered happened on his watch and likely at his direction. But they should've had avenues and recourse to assert their rights as employees, and for whatever reason, that did not happen.
Pachter's quite correct -- unions came into existence to protect people who couldn't protect themselves. That said, a six-figure salary doesn't automatically shield you from someone with a nine-figure salary. Most people don't even know what their workplace rights are, much less how to assert them. More than a union, the industry needs a dedicated resource to correct that. Not a message board, not a blog, but a real hub for getting solid facts and helpful advice -- something that could even offer mediation when a crunch starts edging past a certain level of reasonable excess.
In the meantime, if you're interviewing for your dream job at the developer you've always idolized, don't forget to come down out of the clouds and nail down the details in writing. Find out what the company's crunch-time policy, length, and terms are before signing the agreement that locks you into them. And if you don't want to commit to them, don't. Because just like marriage, this is something you want to get right...even if it does get a little bumpy at times.
