Creative Life in Game Dev: It’s Not Personal with Emily Grace Buck | GduX.me

[Music] all right hi everyone my name is Emily grace buck and today I'm gonna be talking about an issue that's very near and dear to my heart and I've titled this talk creative life in gamedev it's not personal and yeah I guess I am bringing some of the FEM energy to this thing cuz I decided on a hot-pink first slide I like the color it's all good um so a little bit about me before I get into things I am a narrative designer and writer in videogames my main project that I'm currently working on is called the whale Anders for gato studio it's a Dragon Age Origins inspired tactical RPG with time travel and romance and all kinds of fun stuff before that I was at telltale games for quite a while I worked on 17 episodes while I was a telltale and was the leap designer for five episodes the

games that I worked on there include Walking Dead Michonne Walking Dead the final season both seasons of Batman the telltale series and also Marvel's guardians of the galaxy and unfortunately I was working on wolf among season two when the company closed so that's gonna be the one that got away for a long time you're gonna hear me talk a lot about telltale in this talk partially because I've talked a lot about telltale in the past bunch of months especially since the closure I was still working there when it closed down and though before that happened I already had a lot of strong feelings about workers rights advocacy in games that kind of solidified for me that we need to be doing a lot more that things really need to shift in our industry before I worked at telltale I was an instructional designer at a serious games company called kognito worked on seven different games there and prior to that I was actually an

elementary school teacher and a musical theater actor and that's going to become relevant later in the talk I promise so here's a confession just things out I've made every single mistake in this talk I'm going to be talking about some of the potential pitfalls of gamedev company culture and I'm not coming this from a theoretical place I'm coming at this from a very personal place I'm gonna be talking about some things I've done that worked for me some things that blew up in my face um some examples of things I know friends have done because that's kind of what this talk is about at its core that game devs become friends with one another all of the time it's just kind of rampant and that's not necessarily a bad thing which I'm going to talk about

but it can have some unexpected side effects that are both positive and negative so why are we talking about this first of all game deaf culture is very insular we tend to not see very many people who work outside of game dev and it can be really brutal a lot of us work crazy hours a lot of us are doing extremely taxing tasks every single day and then going home and working more or trying to play the latest games to keep up on what's going on so we can talk about things we work around the clock and that takes a toll on us at the same time game deaf culture is kind of amazing I love it the fact that what we do is so much fun and bring so much joy to so many people is fascinating the fact that we have shared interests with everyone we work with with just about everybody we meet at industry events that's incredible

and the fact that it's incredible and wonderful and the fact that it's brutal are pretty strongly related to be honest so let's just get this out of the way at the beginning of this talk crunch most of us who work in game dev have done it if you've never had to do it in game dev I am so so happy for you you are working the right places congratulate them hug them do what you can to keep that culture and spread it to other places because most of us have done it and a lot of us have crunched not just for a few weeks at a time when we're trying to get a project out but sometimes consistently four months or eight years straight I know that in some of my previous gamedev jobs I have worked ninety and hundred hour work weeks on end for over a month multiple times and that wasn't just a telltale eye that's been almost every place I've worked now I'm a contractor

and I get hay mostly our lease that doesn't happen as much anymore but that has its own list of different potential work issues that I'm not going to be going into today but crunch is for those of you who aren't aware of it when pretty much an entire team is asked to work extensive overtime to finish a game project and by extensive I mean like twice as many hours as they don't work in a normal week a lot of the time although it can just be 60 or 70 but in game dev since most people aren't hourly if that isn't compensated you might get free pizza but you're not going to get money usually for that time and for the roles that are compensated for crunch they're often the lower paying roles like QA which shouldn't be as low paid as it is but unfortunately we hurt so why does this kind of thing happen so when were in games it's not just our job

it's kind of a lifestyle games are our job they're our passion and our hobby a lot of us spend all day making games and then we go home and play games to relax most of us are doing this because we love it a lot of people in the game industry either grew up playing video games or some like me found them a little bit later in life like in college I got extremely hooked and why would we do this if we didn't love it right we want to be around video games all the time that's why we're here and that's not how most jobs work obviously I mean there are plenty of other industries like theater film music where it is someone's passion and hobby as well but they don't tend to have the same kind of corporate culture a game dev has and all of those professions that I just named have

unions to stop them from being exploited games are kind of in this weird niche unique space where we function a lot more like tech companies but have some of these kind of passion issues that things like the Performing Arts tend to experience and once again that's kind of unique can you imagine I'm assuming most people watching this have probably seen at least a couple episodes of The Office nobody on the office like loves paper right they like paper they kind of they think it's fine but they're selling paper but none of them are obsessed with paper I guess the closest person would be Dwight but can you imagine working in an office full of Dwight's and even Dwight has a bunch of extra hobbies that have nothing to do with paper they're weird hobbies but he has them and they're things that he can focus on in games this is kind of it for many of the

people that we work with of course there are some people who work in video games who aren't quite as passionate about it and that's fine but they're certainly a rarity at least in my experience so when you're seeing people for 90 hours a week when you're working on things that you mutually love when you're excited about creating things you get to know them really really well they start becoming some of your best friends because you have so much in common you're going through a difficult experience together to make something tangible that you're excited about of course you're going to become close that's normal I've made lifelong friends at every game job I've had I've formed romantic relationships with people that I met through game dev and that's extremely common in this industry there are a lot of people who

are very close friends with each other I know so many game devs who are married to other game devs and once again it makes sense when you're around people that much and you're making things together you bond that's how human nature works and then those close relationships start becoming a company culture when you care about other people you start holding them accountable you want their work to be the best it can possibly be you want to make sure that they're not out sick for too long because you want them to be okay if they're going through something you offer to help them I've shared this story and a few other talks but I got divorced while I was working at telltale and twelve of my co-workers showed up to help me move after the divorce that kind of thing doesn't happen at most jobs people in games become really tight they're there for each other and when you have a whole building of sometimes multiple hundred people who feel that

way about one another that's your company culture that's who's talking to each other at the watercooler every day but also who's going out with each other for drinks or dinner just about every night who's inviting one another over to their houses for barbecues on weekends this becomes your core social circle your company is your social life and when your company is your social life there's potential for things to start going wrong I mentioned holding one another accountable as a positive on my last slide but when you start becoming so close and so devoted to one another and devoted to the project holding one another accountable can be used as a tool against you if everyone else decides they're gonna crunch and they're gonna stay if you're the one person who tries to leave the office at 7 p.m. suddenly you look like

a massive even if you've already worked a 10-hour day because everybody else is still there and they're gonna talk to you about it that's people messaging you if you don't show up in the office on a weekend wondering where you are that's people agreeing to really ridiculous deadlines for you because they know you can do it because you've done it before instead of asking you if that's possible or trying to give you a schedule that will allow for a normal length of workweek and some breathing room this is also when you start to see cliques forming when you have an in-group where people are that devoted to one another when there are people whose personalities don't fit with that in-group even if they're the best people in the world they're going to start getting left out of those types of events they're gonna get left out of happy hour they're gonna get left out of the barbecue to celebrate somebody's kid's birthday and when those events

tends to have mostly people from the same company inevitably work talk is going to happen people are going to start deciding on things that should be happening at work at those events and if you're not invited if you're not in that room you're out your work life has suddenly been affected by the fact that you're not super close friends with everybody else I saw this at one of the companies I worked with when it came to smoke breaks most of the in-group or cigarette smokers and a number of employees actually picked up or picked back up smoking so that they could take smoke breaks with the in-group and get to hear what they were talking about and make certain that they would get the kinds of roles they wanted on future projects that's not great the other thing you start seeing is no other social life I mean especially if you're dating or living with as in a roommate situation or a romantic situation people

that you work with there are not going to be that many people in your life necessarily who you talk to every day who aren't involved in your project which means your brain is thinking about work 24/7 and once again those kinds of work decisions can end up being made outside of work which excludes they're people but keeps you kind of on that one note and that's not particularly healthy this is also when we start to see people being critical of the person that they're working with instead of critical of their work especially if someone is on the out from a clique or if they're starting to get burnt out it can be easy to see that a person has lost their touch or just isn't does it doesn't have it doesn't have what it takes when really they just need more feedback they need mentoring they need extra support and when people are just written off like that that's a

really bad sign about what's going on with your company culture and the other way we tend to see this is with big personalities getting preference over good work if someone's really fun to be around and then they're at all of these social gatherings and they're talking themselves up it's very easy to start selecting them for things over people who have been turning in consistently good work but are quiet and maybe not as involved in the culture and that's not necessarily beneficial for the company long term so you're probably starting to see how all of these things put together encourage over work they encourage continuing to obsess about what's going on in the company and on the project and they start excluding people who don't participate in that type of culture and then that's when things start to get really bad you start to hear things like you're lucky to be here a lot of people would want your job I could hire one of the hundreds of dudes on reddit who think they could do this

any day you start feeling replaceable because sometimes people are literally saying that you're replaceable but even if they're not gamedev culture if you spend any amount of time online you know how many people want your job like everybody wants to do this you start feeling imposter syndrome like did you do enough to deserve to be here do you know as much as your co-workers who seem to be happy and on top of it and not minding working this much all the time you might burn out where you just don't even have the energy to get out of bed in the morning where you open up a spreadsheet you just stare at it for hours I'm Nicki bolts of parse things because you're executive functioning is just shot you might start to lose passion you don't want to play games in your off time you don't want to talk about the project anymore you don't have a drive from within to get things done you're only getting them done to meet deadlines this is when people start quitting or in some cases and I've seen this people get fired because of those kinds of assumptions

that they've lost their touch over just a bad culture fit in the first place and that's once again really really dangerous um sorry about that I had folks got a plug really fast they should be back now and this is part of why we see that many game devs leave the industry after three to six years I the state of development survey last year found that 32 percent of the people working in the industry had been in for less than six years and only 13 percent had been in for 11 to 15 that's an enormous drop off and that drop off gets even worse when we're talking about women when we're talking about people of color when we're talking about people on the LGBTQ ai+ spectrum when we're talking about game devs who are disabled and especially when you start looking at game devs who are an intersection of multiple of those identities they're dropping like flies left and right and it doesn't matter how many diversity

initiatives we run how many camps we do to try and get more young people into the industry if they're not going to be able to stay because our culture's aren't supporting them and are in some cases actively kicking them out we're not going to change anything in the long run so here's the thing this isn't just games I mentioned earlier there are other professions where we see this kind of thing so I wrote undergrad example because this is my undergrad experience I went to New York University and got a BFA in drama for my undergrad and I was in a program that was extremely rigorous we had class from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. five days a week my entire course of study which is not how most undergrad programs work not only that we were in classes where the average class size was 10 to 12 people and you had all of your classes for the semester with

that same group of 10 to 12 so you just saw them day in and day out for often more than 40 hours a week in classes and then had to go do your homework with them after class so this group of people and most of us you know were between like 17 and 24 where young people were in each other's lives constantly it was just a dramatic mess if you showed up five minutes late to class people would give you silent treatment for the rest of the day if you weren't really ready and prepared to perform a scene people would text or call you and berate you for like letting the class down it was really bad and at the time when I was in it I thought it was normal I thought it was exciting you know I was young I didn't know any better and in some ways I kind of prepped me to work in games because I that became acceptable to me um I just understood that if I was working on an artistic pursuit with

other people this was the way the culture was going to be people were gonna be personally offended if I wasn't completely invested at all times often to my own detriment and that's really scary and what's scarier about this is now a lot of games college programs are promoting this type of culture when I was in undergrad games college programs basically didn't exist yet I think USC's program had already been around for a few years and why you did not have one yet but in many games college programs the students are being forced to crunch and being held up to unrealistic deadlines these toxic work practices are being normalized for young people even before they come into the industry and they're being encouraged to adopt these practices when they form indie Studios because many of these games programs tend to push students towards working in India

or creating their own projects instead of going into triple-a so you have people actually forming businesses with this as the backbone or even if they do go into triple-a earlier I was talking about the fear of being replaced imagine if you are a game dev who has been working for six seven eight years you're at a leader a senior level now you've been doing your best for a long time but you're starting to feel burnt out because you've been crunching for too long and then suddenly a bright fresh-faced twenty four year olds who is straight out of a college program comes in and is willing to work 90-hour weeks and do whatever they can to prove that they deserve to be there suddenly we have another culture problem because guess who's going to start looking really bad it's that burnt-out dev who has already been put through the wringer there are just so many problems about the fact

that game dev college programs are promoting this and once again it's not every game dev college program it's just far too many and unfortunately so I talked to a lot of college students in games especially at events like GDC impacts I try to take as many meetings with them as possible and I just hear about this all the time and it makes me so sad for them and so scared for everyone else working in the industry ah and then the kicker what happens when you lose your job if you've been spending just about every waking hour of your life either working at your job or hanging out with people from your job when it is suddenly taken away from you either through a layoff or a studio closure or a sudden firing it has the potential to really mess you up that's when you start to see people dealing with loss of sense of self loss of their

social circle when a studio closes all your friends are gonna move away when you lose your job you need to go where the new job is where are all of the people that you knew they're gone and keep up with them on social media online maybe go visit each other but it's not the same as being around one another firm you know a hundred hours every week and for some people and I've unfortunately seen this with some of my former telltale colleagues a loss of desire to make new friends or rebuild when this has happened to you there's a fear that it's going to happen again you know job loss is really traumatic and people in games tend to go through it multiple times in their career and when that keeps happening it can start feeling like it's ridiculous to put down roots like it's ridiculous to make friends like it's ridiculous to form romantic relationships never mind like buying a house or getting married or

having kids just the basic kind of stuff and that's not sustainable so how can we avoid this first of all once again making friends is good please make friends friends are important friends are wonderful I cherish the friends I have made through gamedev and I would not trade them for the world but understand the difference between a co-worker and a friend those lines get really blurred at game dev companies and at the end of the day if the person is working with you their most important relationship with you might be that of your coworker as opposed to your friend or confidant more practically avoid places that list passionate is a job requirement that is a really good red flag and a job listing that you are going to be asked to devote

a lot more time to that company than 40 hours a week or at least a lot more mental space than 40 hours of mental space would generally be places that value passion have learned to exploit this for the most part they've learned to take advantage of the benefits they can have when their company culture turn into that kind of pressuring one another to work set up pushback against French culture however you can I recognize that this is difficult like I was saying earlier if you refuse to work more than a certain number of hours a week it's probably going to damage your social status at the company beyond just your job and that's really really scary so kind of spend capital where you can to not have to work as much do what you think you need to do to be safe one of those things you can do is to consider joining game workers unite or another

local union proto Union or support group reach out see what you can do have another space where you can vent about this and learn tactics of how to better support yourself and support your co-workers go to therapy so I I'm a huge fan of therapy I truly believe that just about everyone can benefit from having a therapist but the main reason I'm recommending this here is if you have a therapist who is an absolutely unpardonable issues at work instead of informing your friends at work and further contributing to that cycle of blurring the lines between personal life and professional life so yes having a therapist is really good nurture relationships outside of work try to make friends who have nothing to do with your company or nothing to do with video games that's really healthy to have varied interests and people who you know

encourage you in different walks of life and also that way if you do lose your job you won't be completely out of luck when it comes to people to hang out with and related to that last one try to have hobbies unrelated to gaming and a lot of people in games do I know a lot of people who are musicians artists but especially if you can do something that's possibly not artistic that isn't flexing that same muscle or not technical if that's the part of game day if you're working in um you know play sport pick up yoga join a chess club that's a game but it's a different kind of game whatever sounds good to you but having a hobby that nothing to do with your work tends to be very very healthy and always remember at the end of the day it's just a job what we do is amazing um and I love it but making gamedev our whole life is dangerous and it's not just dangerous for us it's dangerous for our co-workers

because it's just as bad to be the person who's burnt out and being told that they've lost their touch as it is to be the one working 90-hour weeks and criticizing them even if you're working 90-hour weeks and not criticizing anyone else the fact that your butt is in that seat that often is going to affect the culture of everyone else around you so if you can go home if you can diversify your interests diversify your friend group don't put everything in the egg basket of your gaming world that was not an eloquent way to say that but just try to find other places to focus because games are wonderful but this is a job this is what you get paid for and this is not how most other industries work so yeah that is the end of my talk thank

you so much for tuning in I'd love to have take questions for the next 15 minutes or so if we have some I'm glad you're watching this up everyone is like supporting you're like oh my god this yeah this is so yeah I'm gonna say you screenshots of what we've been seeing but you probably lit up which jet I think more than any other talk so I'm so glad that you were anchoring - odana great today because that's the way that we started right we want to talk about this yeah shoes and it's very true we we go and clock in clock out and it's so much more than the actual hands-on game development part it's everything about it because every company that I've met has been this little pocket of family in in in some respect that I see more than my own family because ya spent eight hours plus every day consistently and you only well I only see my kid like once in the morning once at night before they took him to

sleep and it's a it's a it's a is a dangerous and at the same time great line to have right to have that that group of people to actually go to that feels like as you mentioned friends but not really co-workers right but it's it's a weird yeah I don't even think there's a wheel yeah there's both but I don't yeah I think there's a single word that describes it best right but the things that are being discussed it's very true like every place that I worked at I would have to create some type of separation and it's very true that whatever problems I go through at work I'd bring it home it's very hard to separate it and vice versa if home life isn't good I bring it to work and it's those type of situation that gets really sticky at least for me because you're constantly stressing and if anything

that that that spills out in every part of your life right oh definitely it's hard for it not to know yeah um just technically can I turn off my screen chair at this point where I usually turn it up you can turn it off Larry's gonna pull it up it's um well cuz there's some gold in here as people were so we've actually got people like typing out that they want to clap great talk thanks for the talk Emily intense and OnPoint fantastic talk so I'm gonna try to parse through this to see if they were because a lot of this was just like Revelation is what you seriously thanks okay yeah well I mean there's some discussions here that are happening frozen machine a complimenting on the talk but also like these are issues that are often kind of shall I wait hot under the road yeah put it put on a drug because a lot of the employers employees Larry and I like to

avoid the p-word around here which is passion which is a used to be something that we strive for but lately you know in the industry that we're in that word is being exploited a lot and you do get those weird looks when you do leave on a on a on a reasonable time yeah like when has that's it's very interesting I didn't even think right I didn't put any time into thinking like oh man passion is actually a red flag buzzword yeah more than it is I like collective is more of an identifier yeah you know ii mean like i think that the employer is like oh we found someone who's passionate what does that mean for us as a business we're probably gonna get a lot more out of them than they're gonna get out of us I want to find an employer who's passionate about me being there yeah you know what I mean like Larry Haman you've been here like 10 hours so they look just go home get to this tomorrow we'll make sure that this works hey Larry man hey we got this thing it's beneficial for you it's called sleep yeah you know get somebody you look

tired you know to be like it works both ways so like I want to start seeing some passionate employers start popping up and I would gladly you know trade my time for money at least make sure that it's mutually beneficial but damn when you said that like I was sitting there thinking I was like she's got day right that's a tough one for me to swallow because I know early on in my career I went to every job like so hungry and like so tenacious to like over perform as best as I can and if I failed and I have to do double like I was broccoli if I fail at this then I'm gonna do double the push-ups on a double the last 10,000 yeah ever he used to say and I just was not making it easy for myself to have a good work-life balance because I wanted to put something on my resume finally yeah and you know that was totally me too and I mean that's part of why I started off to talk with that I overworked myself so much especially in my first game job

at Cognito it was really unhealthy how many extra hours I was spending at the studio getting things done but I felt like I had to prove myself because working in games was so awesome and so exciting and who was I like I was this former elementary school teacher and I had gotten my first gamedev gig and that was amazing and I didn't think that I deserved to be in that room if I didn't spend that extra time and it was also because I enjoyed it but part of it was just proving to myself that I could do it and I didn't realize until much later that that attitude from me was kind of making my co-workers lives help sooner sorry there's a bit of lag there sorry I thought you I was gonna jump in with a question and I believe the name is hawk c3d so I'm assuming this might be one of my former students I'm hoping wishful thinking but anyway there's a question in this a good question do you plan on writing a book in the near future because I feel like what you talked

about needs to be written down and published for all to read oh gosh that's not something I have seriously considered but maybe I should thank you we're gonna start with the first chapter and dictate the stock this is and this is not to like discredit anyone who has come on to gene X day one I'm just saying I've noticed an overwhelming amount of support for your talk it's so like there's a lot of people like really excited about what you had to say but like it's two things for me one you did a great job but - it's an identifier for me like holy man this is like yeah it's very well you you uh every slide that I was listening to felt like you were walking through every year of my kingdom career you know the three to six year mark is very real by that time any game developer that is experienced have gone through some stinkers just some things that happens around the office starts to

get very political especially if you're starting from the bottom up right you start seeing at that point in time what it takes to take go to the next level and it's not always pretty it isn't always about the hardest work it's the appearance of the hardest work and most likely in a lot of my experience it's whoever's the loudest whoever can show that that they can push and not be pushed back that gets what they want right and game developers I think in their hearts of hearts they generally want to just be creative they don't want to play that game they're very trusting yes on the way in super trusting mm-hmm and so they just listen they watch their colleagues and and unfortunately we do have a problem within the industry where we kind of turn on each other first before we turn on others I think a few years back you know the voice actor yield you know went on strike and they

got unionized within a month and the game developers instead of looking at them sound soft yes actually they do get pissed off at the voice actors I'm talking about if you guys are getting bonuses before us what does that even mean it's like you're pointing at the wrong people and even talking about unionizing not accepting the status quo there's a lot of confusion I feel especially in United States about what it means and we started this conference day one with Emma and Emma from game works good night to kind of help with that understanding of you know it can be as small as one to two people within the studio talking to each other just Larry and I myself with Emily just talking about what's going on at the studio what we can do the fix it and like coming up with a list of demands - for fee our treatment so it's for me like if I look at that like that and whenever I talk to

Emma it's like yeah it's as clear as day these are issues that we should talk about and work towards a solution but when I talk to other people who maybe did not look into it as much but just have automatic anti unionization sentiment they just completely deny that saying this is terrible you don't want to do this say what story are you holding back like what do you mean like what is your experience which is my curiosity like maybe you could something that makes you feel this way oh yeah the funny thing for me is like ice I started looking at it like well what do I lose right yeah will I sign a contract getting less than I feel like I deserve No Yeah right union or non-union like that's something that I wouldn't do yeah but you're telling me like now I have a more leverage in negotiating because I'm just ranked in numbers like that actually sounds like an advantage yeah I mean if I'm still getting paid what I'm worth if I'm not necessarily as worried about like oh all ten of us have to have the same salary

I think that's usually where a lot of people start breaking down that I've talked to was like there's just this notion of he's not working as hard as me or she's not doing as much as I am or they them are not doing what I'm doing but they're getting paid the same and it's not fair to me so that's why I don't want this it's like you're also introducing opportunities for like employers to like really screw you guys on the page just in the first place because you didn't collectively bargain so I think that there is strength in numbers I've seen it work yeah Screen Actors Guild like came in argued get their left and they're like back to business right yeah none of them get fired no what stop using them like all the fear of like oh if we unionize XY and Z is gonna happen to us the talent they're still the talent yes still get the jobs yeah I see the same screen act like reading dialogue lines and doing mocap like nothing changed for them except for they get what they wanted yeah so I do to look into it a lot more but I'm still gonna be an echo chamber for what's right for developers because I'm fighting for the small guy yeah I'm so Emily like with your last six months of

course obviously you know with the explosion that it was telltale and a lot of things that has happened since like NetherRealm games you know they're finally coming out with all the maltreatment of employees a riot of water NetherRealm okay did you after that years and years of mistreatment they're known for that and then Mortal Kombat people hoarder comment those fatalities are from representative those aren't creative it's just new it's yeah but I think everything from since telltale happened the last six months I've seen so much progress at least in conversation Elise and journalists openly talking about it at least employees not being afraid and actually doing a walkout like it riot like these are De La Soul it's just the last six months a progress that has beaten I feel

like the last five years within the game industry so I'm very uh I'm looking forward to to what the next six months for the rest of the year is and it is at that breaking point I think for a lot of game developers out there is like yeah everyone's echoing at the same thing so it's not just me feeling this way stop looking at me weird I'm leaving at 7:00 p.m. I did my work yeah exactly you saw my juris completed and so obviously many Emily you you've been going to schools you've been doing a lot of these talks about your experience and obviously conversating with all a lot of developers out there what is your general feeling out there with developers are they're just sick of it right now the percentage of it or is it still like half and half you know I think we're definitely at a turning point but it is still turning for a lot of people there has just been a lot of surprise that anyone seems to suddenly give a because this is how it's

been forever and in some ways it's actually a lot better than it was five or ten years ago there aren't as many layoffs as there had been there aren't as many full studio closures as there had been for a long time but what's different now is people are starting to realize that this is messed up and the press is starting to realize that this is messed up and not just traditional video game press but actually larger outlets too so people are trying to hear about this who don't even have anything to do with games which is always a little bit dicey because we know how reporting on games and sometimes be from people who know nothing about the games industry but what's most important I think is that the conversation is happening and that it is continuing to Center people who actually work in game development and lift up our voices because if we're controlling that message and putting specific things out

there then that's what's going to be heard people are going to understand what we want um so yes it's gonna take time for the game industry to come around because we do still value passion we do still value over work we do still make this our entire lives and shifting that is gonna be enormous for a lot of people especially for some of the old guard who have been doing this for you know 20 and 25 years it's it's a task to get people to think about this in a different light but I think we're starting to hit a critical mass of people who are really ready for change and are really excited that these things are being talked about and in some ways like the layoffs and closures over the past bunch of months have not been good there has not been a good thing about them they've been a travesty it's awful

that that has happened all of these lawsuits and accusations of mistreatment at studios that's bad I there's nothing good about any of that but what is good is how much they're being talked about and how many people know that these things are going on and the more we can continue to race these issues and make people aware that they are actually issues that this isn't normal that this isn't how things should be functioning um better off we're gonna be that was a really long answer but I think it's a very complicated thing I have like a little poetic way of kind of summarizing it all up you know how you get rid of shadows you add more light ah those are more talk more people pointing at it more people bringing it up more accountability the less likely you're gonna see these companies like I'll be able to I guess fight their bad deeds in the public space when it becomes like once like oh you guys did this oh no that didn't happen twice every times

four times five times now USA Today picks it up yeah CNN picks it up exactly stockholders everywhere like WTF yeah I mean exactly I think this is very caring something is gonna definitely shift I need to go make friends with stockholders that's the key so I want to ask a quick question from the twitch audience left-handed Heather she said it looked different cool hopefully it's not older fatter I'm pretty sure it's one of the two so the question here for you Emily is so I'm an incoming game arts student and you mentioned how crunch culture is encouraged from those early stages how do you recommend working against this in a situation where how much you crunch can directly affect your grades and subsequently affect your ability to find employment when you graduate oh that's though man ah first of all I am so sorry that you're going to a school where how

much you crunch affects your grade my gut want to tell you is to consider changing schools yeah but that's a huge thing to try and do all right so please don't do that unless you really truly feel that that's right for you um my biggest recommendation outside of that would be to project manage yourself as much as you can see what you can do to make your productivity be really really good within a reasonable number of hours put out the best product you can while still working a reasonable workday and if the issue is that your professors actually require your butt to be in your seat or a crunch length of time figure out creative ways to take breaks from the time that I was in acting I took with me the stage actors Union

Actors Equity associations break rules and I've tried to apply them to myself in game dev which is for every hour that you work take a five minute break and then if you really feel like you need to push through out an hour work to an hour and a half but then take a ten always make sure you take a at least a 30 minute lunch break where you're not at your desk working and then if you have to work like a full 12-hour day only work 10 out of those 12 take an actual 2 hour break around like mid afternoon early dinnertime and completely disconnect during those two hours and your dad can really help I agree 1,000% 1,000% yeah I'm not gonna do your best work once you're outside of your efficiency zone as far as you know your body your attention starts to break down your proficiency starts to break down and you might be able to work it like a functional level but I mean you're way below yeah by in a week it

done exactly where an hour you were again an hour's worth of work you're now spending an hour doing like 26 minutes worth of work right and that's taking time from your life as Jay I been waitin multiple studies done that I'm sorry there's no studies but I'll name it after you sure that after 55 hours there's no improvement to the amount of work done so like you know if you're gonna work more than 55 hours you might as well only work 55 and just make those 55 hours really really good hours and that's still longer than a normal 40-hour work week but it's not a completely bonkers number either like we can all get by on doing 55 hour weeks for a couple weeks in a row and not like lose our minds our destroyer specialized yeah a taking a day by day is very smart it's like you know sometimes you just hit your quota for the day I'm at that level where when I'm done I'm done I'm

out see I'm gonna take a break right the fact is it's like there's no deadline that can't wait till tomorrow that's my philosophy you you wrote these project management and if I looked at that and I'll get at the beginning if I'm lead or reassigned something and I didn't okay that fine then that's a personal responsibility where like I didn't throw up a red flag and there are dependencies if I reject it from the beginning to end it is not my responsibility it's because of your poor management that you know you did not listen or adhere to my issues and so I I totally get that and to the student questioning right the student is I do empathize on that part because I think as a student you're always had of these classes stacked against you you have like six classes at a single time and

you have multiple homework especially in art school if I'm going back to my college days I had like five classes and I'm juggling with each half like three hours a night with it so I think that question is like towards like that type of mentality I got to get all this homework done but I've seen how students were able to just cut back and do three classes per quarter or something like that to make it work because these about teachers exactly - is hard and it's traditionally known as the you're gonna be spending Saturdays and Sundays on my homework rest my homework ya know this is what I say I used to teach at a school in several schools and this is what I tell them was like you're not gonna be unless you're that good that you're gonna ace all five classes don't concentrate on the ones that you actually care about prioritizing so this is a part of what Emily was talking about do project management what is important what do you have to pass that

attributes to your career obviously I don't care about math or history I'm becoming a 3d artist sir so what is the C average and I'm fine with them because you know what no job has ever asked for my degree or GPA they just look at my portfolio right so that's how you see skip degrees yeah exactly do you guys so I echo that and mine will be quick before because I you know want to tie this all together at the Art Institute like I failed a drawing portfolio review and I was like I'm gonna be a game designer it's not fair last time holding a pencil that's like I drew a whole naked person and it actually look good but they I had never failed the class at that point yes I got you fails and I'm never gonna never gonna render yet let me go through yeah it's alright yeah I'm still salty about that obviously right right well Emily will hand over the mic to you we are

very thankful that we are ending it with you so any promotion anything that you want people to go to just let us know and let us know when your book comes out well I got to write at first and pitch it and do all that stuff yeah so my main thing I would like to promote would be the project I'm working on right now the way lenders with gato studio we're currently shooting for a 2020 release if you like dragon aims if you like Baldur's Gate if you like good fun crunchy RPGs that let you try a whole bunch of different tactics in their gameplay but also have good relationship and interpersonal content you're gonna dig it I'm really happy with how it's going and I can't wait to show you more it also does have a fun history component because it's based off of oak my cat is jumping on my lap so now you get to say hello to him this is Biggs thinks is very excited about the way Landers

yeah it's based off of the history and legends of Alex Payne so yeah it should be a fun project and seriously if you have any other questions comments thoughts email me or hit me up on Twitter we're gonna be in touch for sure obviously we have more stuff in the future that we would like to have you part of thanks for being on our podcast thanks for being on gee ducks thanks for anchoring day one you go down in history as being made for day one gamedev on chain Expo for however many we do before Brandon and I croak you're a part of the inaugural one so hopefully one day you will be like that was another and even if today felt like a sacrifice we appreciate like oh my gosh no this was wonderful thank you [Music] you

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