Is anyone else tired of hearing all this complaining about working? I work in the legal field and let me tell you about crunch. When there is an upcoming case there is crunch like no other. We spend at least 100 hour work weeks to prepare for a case. And while a video game gets delays if they aren't finished or a day one patch we dont get to patch our work. We need to meet the court deadlines no matter what. So you wont get any tears from me for having to work for a living.

hahahahhahahh my dude in your job, someone goes to fucking prison if you fuck up or miss a deadline. this is a

VIDEO GAME

also hey: you wouldnt believe it but what you describe is ALSO fucked up!

In discussing crunch, we came to the point where it became necessary to see if there's a moral difference between risk of harm vs consciously inflicting harm (see post 211 where this whole matter was brought up), which is where this scenario comes in. It'll tell us whether one is worse than the other or not. Two equal situations, but one consciously inflicts harm, and the other has a risk of harm. Are they equally bad, or is one worse than the other. Intuition says it's obviously worse to have a 100% chance of harm instead of a 5% chance (killing someone = harming them of course), but your argument is that because the 5% chance makes it likely that someone will eventually get hurt, the two are equally bad. Is that correct?

This is the end result of decades upon decades of a smear campaign against unionization and labor; you are supposed to be just be a good little cog and do whatever you are told no matter how much you are being exploited so some rich jagoff can make a shitton of money for a bunch of stockholders who do no labor whatsoever.

I hope more and more game devs can sow the seeds for unionization, I hope that people can salt this industry and get rid of that individualistic scab mentality that infests the game dev/tech industry

Pardon me but i honestly don't care how you try to rationalize working a 100 hours a week. If it has the potential to be at the cost of someones mental health, there is no way of putting a positive spin on it. Working in a field where i have seen people with a sleep deficit enter delirium i can tell you it's not a pretty sight.

@theht: It doesn't make it likely, it makes it inevitable. That's the key thing to understand about high risk jobs. Like I said earlier, have you ever heard of a sports star that went their entire career without injury ? The risk is so high in the profession that it is inevitable it will happen. Even if it's not so high to make it guaranteed that every single employee will get hurt, sending people off to do a job where you know every year 10+% of your workforce will end up with an injury and somewhere between 1-2% will be hospitalized is still as morally dubious as sending people to do a job you know has harmful side effects.

In either case you're asking people to do something you know will hurt them. The differentiator isn't how or why it happens, it's how much damage is caused.

@transit4080: My partner works for a firm that provides EAP and counselling services to large corporates. Almost half of their clients come from big law firms and they ALL are suffering from overwork, sleep deprivation, collapsing relationships, and in some cases actual PTSD.

No job has to be exploitative or destructive in this way. It's pernicious fiction spun by the power brokers in these professions that; because the work is Important and Complicated and the compensation significant relative to other fields, it justifies their industry's exploitative working conditions. "Can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" doesn't hold up when the head chef and the owner are making multiple what you make doing the same amount of work or less.

If it's not the passion argument then it's the "nature of the job" argument. Different excuses for the same exploitative practices.

@ares42: Wait, doesn't that completely dismiss the athlete example then? And remember, we're talking about two levers. There isn't a workforce of levers. So in the case of the 5% lever, why is it guaranteed to kill someone? Isn't each pull 5%?

It's always cool how often people like to trot out their variation of "in my day we walked to school uphill both ways IN THE SNOW" as if it is EVER a good point to make. News flash duder: your firm probably sucks and suffers from poor/unfair management just as much as Rockstar. I'm a mail carrier for the US Postal Service, and it'd be easy for me to say "You think your job sucks? We have one of the most powerful unions in the United States and I STILL work 80 hours a week, sometimes nearing 100 around Christmas, and that's with walking 12-15 miles a day!" but I don't. Why? Just because my job is terrible and unfair and borderline criminal in how it treats its workers, doesn't mean others aren't as well. If anything, my poorly managed occupation drives me to hope other places can be better.

It's basically like when one of the old dudes in the USPS are bitter and angry at the young guys because the old dudes were bitter and angry when he was young, because everyone is shit on and thus thinks everyone else should be shit on, when in reality, being shit on should be your motivation to ensure others aren't.

As for the game? I just bought it. I hope that the outcry leads to some change, but I also have a previously mentioned terrible job that I like to spend my free time away from relaxing and playing well made video games.

Apologies if I already posted this, but here in Japan this kind of situation is normal for most jobs.

@theht: How many circles do you want this conversation to go in ?

Genuine question - how self reflective are gaming websites and magazines?

Don't get me wrong I am all for better working conditions and if the highest profile companies in the gaming industry fail to offer them the industry by and large does have an issue here.

But at the same time after listening to some podcasts the pasts weeks where writer pointed out they do crazy hours for weeks around E3 and during the high profile October/November release window and knowing how much they utilize freelance writers to varying but general significant degrees I think it's a bit short sited to narrow the discussion down to game development only.

How effective could a union be if labor is trying to get the consumers to fight the battle for them? The whole point of a union is that it is the workers standing up for themselves. Nobody else can do it for them. So I really dislike the increasingly blatant effort to weaponize public opinion rather than actually try to fix anything. I found the "revelation" that salaried employees didn't get paid overtime particularly lame; that's *why* they're called "exempt"! IOW I really question the idea that the stories that are circulating of late are actually doing anything to "sow the seeds for unionization".

Let's hear more stories about workers trying to effect change (e.g. the voice actors thing from a while back) and/or what are the real obstacles those efforts are facing. And let's also take a realistic look at how many workers in the industry went in with both eyes open and felt their salary / wage is actually fair compensation for the work expected of them. I'm not in the gaming industry but I feel that is the main reason there's hardly any unionization in my industry.

@belegorm: I thought things were at least TRYING to get better there? That's such a bummer.

We're not going in circles, we're narrowing down on specifics so we can move forward on the larger questions. Why can we say that a 5% lever is guaranteed to kill someone, when each pull has a 5% chance? It's like a 6-sided dice. Just because you have a 1/6 chance of rolling a 6, doesn't mean in 6 rolls you're guaranteed to get a 6. Are there mathematics that suggest you will eventually get a 6, such that we'd be right to say it's a guarantee, rather than a chance?

But if you don't want to talk about that, would you take a look at a question I asked in post 235: if we imagine instead that the person who would be killed is the puller of either lever, which one would we advise a single worker to pull (if they had to pull one)? I'm trying to put to the test this idea that the 5% lever and the 100% lever are equally bad, in order to see if that's really the case, because that notion strikes me as incredibly counter-intuitive.

@sethmode: Can I ask why you feel it was getting better? Advocates for healthy workplaces are few in a country where hamachi rooms and "black companies" exist. This is where Konami(s) flourish, where Nintendo Japan side steps discussion, where we'll known devs like Sakurai talk about how each game he makes ruins his health and personal life. Well know companies like From Software to smaller scale companies like Spikechunsoft all have terrible crunch. This is all on top of the fact that many high skilled workers get paid nearly the equivalent of US minimum wage. To put it simply it's isn't crunch over there. It's just called work.

@theht: No, you're repeating the same questions over and over and never accepting any answers while providing no relevant reason. You can already find the answers to both questions you just asked if you read back. If you can't accept any of the answers I've already given you I can't really offer anything new at this point. I could keep repeating my answers and you keep finding new ways to ask the same questions, but this isn't going anywhere.

@merxworx01: I definitely didn't get it from any kind of vigorous research or anything! haha

I don't have a source or anything, it was more just a passing comment on my part. I was down some variation of a wikihole while researching places to move, and felt like I read that they were making progress in comparison to before, but maybe that's just because there isn't solid enough data, or maybe it's just idealistic wishful thinking. Either way, it's all a real bummer.

@quantris: it's absolutely true that "gamers" have proved themselves time and again to be allies of corporations, first and foremost. For every consumer revolt against exploitative practices like Battlefront 2 (note, exploitative to consumers, the audience has routinely proven itself incapable of empathy for other groups in the industry) there are five where "exercising their rights as consumers" meant trying to get someone fired for not giving them what they wanted. Trying to weaponise their opinions for good is a cul-de-sac.

There is a burgeoning push for unionisation in the games industry, and honestly I think articles like these benefit people who both work in games and are part of the audience. They encourage empathy and solidarity with the workers being quoted, and what's illuminating for readers who are primarily consumers could be galvanising for workers who don't think of themselves as such. You can't have an effective unionisation movement without spreading class consciousness, and while these kind of articles and this style of reporting at most engenders a "gee, that's messed up" from most consumers, I think it gives oxygen to the movement.

@sethmode: To put in perspective, my daughter was just born and I managed three days off, two days working, then scheduled vacation. Overtime pay, vacation, paternity leave, etc. aren't really a thing here (and if you take your vacation people judge you for increasing their workload while you're off).

But I digress. I wasn't going to play the game either way and I hope Rockstar gets less shitty.

@ares42: But they're not the same! You corrected me by saying "it doesn't make it likely, it makes it inevitable," and I'm questioning if that's actually the case. I don't know much about probability, but I thought that for the lever in the example it would never actually be guaranteed (i.e. have a 100% chance) no matter how many times you pull the lever. So in that case we have to say likely, not inevitable, nor guaranteed. And if it's not guaranteed, wouldn't that make it the better option over the one that is?

@impartialgecko: I guess I'm just pessimistic about their chances if support from outside the industry is seen as essential (oxygen). So I hope any efforts to improve game industry working conditions (unionization or otherwise) can find their footing without that. Perhaps I am just naive about the extent to which current employees feel isolated / powerless to effect change (as you mentioned the potential for "galvanising").

That said I certainly do support transparency & shining a light on bad practices. I think a lot of those bad practices are not unique to the games industry and part of what we're seeing is the result of laws not adequately protecting the vulnerable (meaning people who need to work to survive); obviously I'm of the opinion that better laws could help (which is certainly up for debate). And of course I feel that practices that break or skirt breaking current labour laws should be very loudly called out (vs. covered up; not sure about Rockstar but I'm sure it happens in gaming, as it certainly happens in broader tech sphere).

So here's hoping that we do see real progress on such issues in the coming years. As implied by my previous post, I'm skeptical that the current furor would necessarily help with that. But I certainly wouldn't mind being proven wrong on that point.

Regarding the OT, I probably won't be picking up RDR2 any time soon, but this controversy is not the only reason or even the main one. If Rockstar workers came out and said that not buying this game would be a way to support them, I probably would be willing to skip it. Otherwise, I'll likely pick it up on sale some day, because I heard it's a pretty good game. While I understand the argument that buying the game rewards Rockstar for "bad behaviour", it also respects the decision of those workers who did work on it despite the potential abuse. And I feel that buying the game doesn't really undermine any efforts to improve the situation for those workers, because I also feel that said efforts need to be based on something more substantial than convincing Rockstar to avoid abusing workers due to bad publicity / sales---IMHO that road just sets up incentives for cover-ups and shady deals, and would make it even harder for a union to be effective.