[game_edu] Qol, "crunch" and Education

[Mike Sellers]

Dan Rosenthal wrote:


> What about in fields where the vast majority of your students come in

> already on the "heroic crunch" workload because simply feel they have to in

> order to get hired? It's a problem we struggled with in law school -- you

> have hundreds of people who already are type A hard-charger personalities,

> taking on more and more work not because they were ordered to, but because

> they were simply trying to rise above their peers.  Problem is, over time

> this accretes until students start getting dangerously overloaded, and it

> stratifies the pool of graduates. Basically, what happens when everyone

> signs up for those incredibly long hard hours, because they feel like they

> have to to compete?

>


I think we all know what happens individually.  How to address this
structurally, I don't know.  The problem is that it's a sort of
survival-of-the-fittest scenario.  Unfortunately the fitness function
changes post-school and into life, and the "fittest" often turn out to be
burnouts with ulcers and divorces rather than high-performing professionals.



>

> I've been kicking around ideas for a while now about ways to prevent

> students from being overworked and overstressed due to occupational

> expectations. Most stress-relief programs schools offer that I've followed

> generally say things like "take breaks, manage your time, have me-time,

> etc." but never talk much about how you learn to draw the line.

>


The problem I see is, drawing the line really means "drawing the line where
you get excluded."  If someone says, "no, sorry, I won't put myself through
that," the consequences are, "I see, so you don't really want this as badly
as others" or even, "I see I can't count on you when things get hard."  So
drawing the line means you've just put a limit on your occupational
aspirations.  This often turns out not to be the case in the long term, but
there's no way to know that on the day you declare your limits.



>

> Again, the above refers mainly to fields outside of games; I'm trying to

> figure out to what extent this sort of thing affects game education, but

> it's more of a curiosity than anything else.

>


I think it applies to any high-achieving field where there are more entrants
than space for professionals, where there's a weeding-out process, and where
people are assessed competitively.  It's a tough problem, and one that I'm
not sure has a solution.

Mike Sellers
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