[game_edu] Qol, "crunch" and Education

[Bill Crosbie]

I love this thread and I'm going to try to make use of some of Philip's
techniques in my class.

I have a question for you, Jose, about the 40 hour work week and Ford. The
processes there were for efficiency of assembly line workers. Fewer errors
when workers aren't over tired. I can see the parallel between being more
efficient when you have a good nights sleep (GGJ aftermath still fresh in my
mind.).

But with relatives that work in film production, I know that there are
exceptionally long hours there and some 'crunch' to get things done on time.
The main distinction I see is that those fields are unionized and there is a
financial penalty in terms of overtime for poor management.

Sometimes creative work necessitates long hours. But the difference here is
that creative professionals in game development are not compensated at the
point where those hours are incurred in the development process.




>

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

assign them work such that they have no way of completing it without having
to put in crunch-style hours. As educators we have the moral obligation to
help our students become professionals that can (and should) make changes
for the better. Crunch (or overtime) is just wrong. 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... :-)
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