[game_edu] Qol, "crunch" and Education

[Walter Lucman]

This is a really great conversation thread!

Allow me to fill in the discussion with my personal perspective as an alumni
of The Guildhall at Southern Methodist University (C7), and participant of
the recent Global Game Jam.

The Guildhall at SMU was recently featured in The Escapist (
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_291/8607-Secrets-of-the-Guild)
and was depicted as a school that teaches crunching in order to prepare
students for the industry. During my guildhall years, I easily work (study)
12+ hours per day during the school term. Most of students does spent that
much time. Hearing that one might think that the curriculum was designed to
enforce crunching. I would say that it's not.

The Guildhall curriculum teaches project management technique early on. We
studied software development cycle, making Gantt chart, SCRUM methodology,
etc. and have assignments on that. On a large scale project there will be
one student who takes the role of a producer, working closely with a faculty
supervisor. Long term crunch time is acknowledged to be destructive, and
should be avoided. The school building closes at night, and everyone is
forced to go home and rest. So why does crunch time still happened
consistently? Simply because we (the students) love making games! Some of
the previous posts have already mentioned the trade off between
adding/polishing features and feature cut to avoid crunching. Most of us, if
not all, choose crunch and make our games better (same thing happens in
GGJ). These crunch decision does not comes from school curriculum.

After couple terms going full steam of course the engine broke. Long term
crunching is indeed destructive. It took me a lot of self discipline and
moral support from friends and family to be able to finish my education
(other grad students should be able to relate this =) ). I was taught that
crunching is bad, I still do it, I feel the repercussion, and now I've
learned. Imho that is an experience that cannot be taught through
traditional ways (proven by students who add last minute features all the
time). Forcing students to cut some features might save them from being
burnt out, but it does not really teach them the long term crunch
implications. I guess this leads back to the OP question.

Mike Sellers post a really good point about teaching time estimation. I
totally agree with his thoughts. Unfortunately that skill takes years to
acquired. Even professionals still missed their estimate, hence the crunch
time in the industry. Mike's definition of the three crunch type is
definitely worth to be incorporated in the discussion.

Regarding sleep and GGJ:

Corvus mentioned that in his venue the teams that got proper sleep had the
most complete and polished games. That's something I learned during my 1st
term at The Guildhall. Sleep is the best debugging tool =) I see GGJ as a
short term crunch though, and as Jose said short term crunch does increase
productivity. It's a matter of experience of knowing when you need to take a
break and when you can push yourself further. After all, isn't part of GGJ
is about pushing yourself and grow from the experience? =) I myself took a
total of ~6 hours of sleep during GGJ. Some people might need more to
maintain their productivity during the sprint. And some people don't have
the experience yet to know when they need to take a break.

Shameless self promotion, here is the game I made:
http://globalgamejam.org/2011/screwed.


Walter Lucman
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