CRUNCH

LevelUp has finally been and gone, and here we are, a few days later. The title of my post is most certainly related-- it's been an exhausting several weeks. While it certainly could have gone more smoothly, and I didn't come home with a medal draped around my neck, I don't regret the blood, sweat and tears I poured into making v0.3 ready for the show floor. It's got a few tweaks left to make before I can release it here, but I promise it will have been worth the wait. More on that in a later post (I'm making THREE today to make up for lost time!).

(Okay, this one's a little bit over 500 words, bear with me here. Look, I've even given you a picture to break it up!)

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I'm sure many of you are intimately familiar with the term 'crunch culture' by now-- it is a philosophy that permeates every part of our industry and is intrinsically tied to the economic systems under which we live and strive to surpass. The 'free market', to the extent that it actually is one, is a blessing and a curse upon creatives one and all. It is theoretically a platform on which those with the purest dedication and strongest talents will persevere... but it is also a system of supply and demand. Demand is not infinite: even with the money to afford luxuries such as games and art, we as mortal beings do not have the time to appreciate all of them (in fact, it is said that game developers are excellent cheerleaders, but terrible consumers). This means that without a Universal Basic Income, many creatives will not be able to both pursue their passions and afford to feed themselves or their families... unless they have some sort of edge. This can mean finding a stable job at an established studio (which, as of late, seems to be an impossibility) or it can mean trying to take the market by storm through the 'indie' route.

Consider the dilemma of the 'triple constraint':

The optimal 'Quality' of any given end product (such as a video game) would fill the entire area within the triangle, but Quality in this diagram must also remain equilateral-- the triangle's points (Scope, Cost and Time) must expand proportionally to allow this, which in practice is close to impossible. In order to produce a product of the highest Quality, one often needs to choose a point to compromise on:

• Reducing Scope results in cut content, and can only be done to some extent due to modern trends conflating Scope with Quality (consider how many open world games have released in the past few years!).
• Increasing Cost eventually stops being an option. While large studios may have more capital, that is in no small part due to their frequent refusal to compromise in that category. However, cost-cutting means very little if your product is never released...
• As discussed earlier, increasing Time is often not an option. When it happens, it results in delays (obviously), which means a significant hit to profit (and sustainability).

So that leaves us trying to squeeze blood from a stone, lest someone else do it first... and unfortunately, any blood that comes out is our own.

Even living in a 'perfect' world with proper rights and protections, where there are agreed upon standards to prevent crunch at the non-Indie level, it would only be a matter of time before an unscrupulous opportunist grasped that stone anew. You see it often with anti-union hiring practices-- if the union refuses work, someone else will be hungry enough to take it on until either the union compromises their standards or is run into the ground. 

I will not say that there is no solution, even if reality seems bleak-- I will always push for a world in which mutual empathy, respect and patience persevere and lead to the creation of ethical job opportunities, but I am just one person of over 8 billion. The journey towards truly sustainable human prosperity may never end, but it does continue to this very day-- I highly encourage all of you to contribute, each in your own way!

'Til next time,

~Jack