[game_edu] Qol, "crunch" and Education

[Anthony Hart-Jones]

> We should not encourage students to "crunch", or expect that they will, 


  My experience of students (and having been one myself) is that you
don't need to encourage them to crunch; after leaving the rigid
organisational structures of school, the relative freedom of
undergraduate study will tempt them to get complacent, to underestimate
time-scales required and to just put things off.
  There are exceptions, especially amongst mature students, but these
are the ones who do not need to have crunch and crunch-avoidance
strategy explained because they are already capable of effective
time-management.

  The real issue, I feel, is that many students repeat the pattern.
Time after time, they will continue to crunch and then take it easy.  I
know I did and I know the same mindset was alive and well in AAA too -
once you hit your deadline (or miss it by a few days), you are all too
exhausted and so productivity dies.
  The obvious answer is to take this experience (even if it is vicarious
in the case of the disciplined students) and teach them how to break a
single 'hard' deadline into a number of smaller weekly deadlines.  Play
the studio producer with a GANTT chart and a weekly check-list at first,
just to get them into the rhythm, and then teach them how to do it
themselves.


> As educators we have the moral obligation to help our students become

> professionals that can (and should) make changes for the better. 


  I agree, but with reservations.  As educators, a group with a
reputation for teaching information which can be anything up to 10 years
out of date, it is important to acknowledge current reality.  Too many
students, especially in the games industry, are coming out with
amazingly naive ideas about how stuff works.
  Manufacturing crunch is morally questionable, but denying its
existence of putting it down to simple 'bad management' is worse in many
ways.  It is currently a sad fact of life that must be opposed by first
acknowledging its role and impact.


> Crunch (or overtime) is just wrong. 


  Missing important deadlines and losing multi-million dollar contracts
is worse.  Crunch is a coping strategy, albeit a bad one, not a problem
in and of itself; you need to understand how to fix the underlying
issue, not just refuse to be part of the solution.

  Unpaid overtime and crunch are simply the result of trying to fit more
than 40 hours of work into a 40 hour week.  Often, this is nothing to do
with poor time management and everything to do with management taking
more work than there is time in an attempt to 'stay competitive'.
  This is not something that a student can do anything about, since it
is like assigning a 70,000 word dissertation an giving them a week to do
it.  It's something that the IGDA have been fighting for years, with
varying degrees of success.  Yes, training the managers of tomorrow will
help, but it could take 20-30 years for the changes to trickle down and
that is assuming that the students are not corrupted during this time.  

  I agree with what you want to achieve, but I think a statement like
'crunch is wrong' is naive and borderline counterproductive.  

  The best way to avoid crunch is not to sign a contract that includes
unpaid overtime.  If the entire office goes home at six, managers whose
strategy relies on crunch will soon lose their jobs.  Sadly, there will
always be people desperate enough to take that contract.
  In the UK, we even have a law that limits the working week to 48
hours, but every games-industry contract I have seen includes a clause
where you specifically waive your rights under that law.  Lobbying the
UK government to remove that get-out clause or lobbying the US to add a
law like that would be much more effective and something half the
students would get behind.  
  It is not specifically a 'games industry' thing, but political action
is certainly something that the industry is starting to recognise these
days, at least in the UK.


> And it doesn't work either (there's over one hundred years of research 

> from a wide variety of industries that supports this). The 40 hour work 

> week came out of research on improving productivity at Ford. It was the 

> optimal for increasing worked productivity and reducing costs. In other 

> words, it was in the best interest of the company... :-)


  I actually hear this about Germany a lot.  I am not sure how true it
is, but I am told that Germans don't do crunch or unpaid overtime (in
any industry) and are still just as productive as their English,
American and even Japanese rivals.