[game_edu] Qol, "crunch" and Education

[Philip Tan]

I touched a little bit on what we do at GAMBIT in the thread about Scrum...

"As an instructor, I find myself really having to hammer this point

> [sustainable development] home early and often. It's really difficult to

> eliminate all crunch, but in my experience, it's possible to teach

> students to recognize crunch as a process that has gone wrong and needs to

> be fixed, instead of simply accepting it as a regular part of the work. I

> prefer to have students guiltily admit that they crunched instead of wearing

> it as some sort of badge of honor, because they'll try to plan the next

> sprint better."



In my experience, students will pretty much "stack the deck" themselves.
They always want their games to be more complex and more polished, and the
only way most of them know how to get there is to throw more hours at the
problem at the last minute. So there is never a shortage of teachable
moments. :)

My intent is to try to let students see the benefits of a well-paced
project, then they can decide if they want to carry that into their
professional life. The classes and projects in our lab generally have the
following constraints:
- Limited time a student can work on a project (Value the time you actually
have)
- Nonnegotiable deadlines (Cut features or don't ship at all)
- Scheduled retrospectives (Fix your team's processes)
- Prioritized features and regular testing (Identify what's working and what
needs to be cut)
- Emphasizing design that produces emergent gameplay (Better bang for your
buck)
- Grading based on the process, not the quality of the product.

Whether crunch is looming because of demands outside of class, over-scoping,
or poor personal discipline -- all those things happen on professional
projects too -- our recommended solution is to cut, cut, cut scope. If you
believe that pain is a great teacher, I feel that feature cuts are more
painful to students than sleep deprivation. When you're 18-21 years old,
sacrificing nights of sleep aren't always a big deal, and you're not usually
in a state to reflect on your performance when you're exhausted. When you're
forced to cut your pet feature, though, there's a lot of soul-searching.

I typically have discussions about working conditions in the industry at the
end of production cycles, while everyone's decompressing. (Even projects
that don't crunch get pretty tense near ship.) I think they're generally
pretty well-informed... many have spoken with alums who are already in the
industry. Some of the students would have just finished working with
well-paced teams and some would have had a disastrous experience in their
last project. Having them talk about their experience side-by-side gives
them some perspective.
----
Philip Tan
Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab


On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Stephen Jacobs <itprofjacobs at gmail.com>wrote:


> At RIT we're on quarter system (10 weeks of instruction and an exam week)

> and many of the courses have large scale projects, so unfortunately they

> know about crunch :-)

> That said, I do discuss project management in my classes (I mostly teach

> graduate courses and a design course, I believe my colleagues do cover it at

> the undergrad level in other classes)

> In my current grad class in "Business and Legal Aspects of the Game

> Industry) this quarter we've got a special resource to help us.  Last

> quarter one of the students became a certified SCRUM master for games via

> Clinton Keith's workshop and has been lecturing to my guys (and some of the

> undergrad classes) about SCRUM.

>

>

> Stephen Jacobs

> Associate Professor, Interactive Games and Media <http://igm.rit.edu>

> DIrector, Lab for Technological Literacy <http://ltl.rit.edu>

> Visiting Scholar,International Center for the History of Electronic Games<http://www.icheg.org/>

> Rochester Institute of Technology

> 152 Lomb Memorial Drive

> Bldg 70

> Rochester, NY 14623

> sj at mail.rit.edu

> 585-475-7803

>

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