Recently, I had a chance to chat with Jason Della Rocca, Executive Director of the IGDA about quality of life, their new crediting white paper, and the evolution of the industry.

Sam Sollars: Can you illuminate some milestones of how the industry has evolved or how workers’ quality of life has improved since the IGDA’s inception?

Jason Della Rocca: One example would be Chris Taylor from Gas Powered Games, recently both at GDC and at Dice, coming out and saying extreme working conditions and long crunches is just the wrong way to make games. And that as he’s matured in the industry (he’s been around for about 20 years), and has gotten married and had a family, and sort of seen project over project sail and go over budget and past schedule. He’s taken a complete 180 and now he has a very strong “no crazy crunches” policy, and that was the approach that they took on with “Supreme Commander,” which was, they seem to think, a much better product and was a much easier production process.

On the whole, the IGDA has done a lot to bring awareness to the quality of life issue, try to put some numbers and metrics behind it, and try to turn it away from, “Well I’m a worker and I don’t like to work hard” type of issue, and turn it into something where having a good quality of life and having sane production schedules actually is a good business decision. Happy workers are more productive and results are better. So the emphasis has really been on generating awareness around those issues and sort of advocating for it, shining a light on the good examples and point out the bad examples.

SS: Do you think that there is anything you can point to as a reason why it’s so hard to create a game in a standard 40-hour work week?

JDR: There are so many contributing factors. One of them I already sort of alluded to is the lack of formal production methodology. Games are really just big projects – lots of staff, lots of assets, very complex; and it’s hard to manage a project of that scale. And as an industry, because we’re so young, we don’t really have lots of experience to properly schedule or properly manage resources. And added to that, most producers and project managers in the game industry have absolutely no clue what they’re doing in that they’ve had no formal education, they’ve had no training, they don’t have a background or previous experience in management – in managing projects, people, or budgets. Generally, they were really good programmers, or really good designers, or really good artists, being promoted into the lead position or the producer position. It’s very rare that someone in a producer role is actually a trained project manager. And the answer is not, “Let’s go get some Vanilla project managers from out of school or other industries”, because you do need an understanding of the craft and the complexities of games not just about managing spread sheets.

Added to that, there are pressures from the top, in terms of the economic and business complexities or challenges in the game industry. There is the emphasis on the Christmas release window, pressure from the publishers who have their quarterly earnings and shareholders to satisfy, and sort of meeting the short retail window. There’s a lot of pressure from the executives to get games done, to get them out, to hit the same week the movie comes out, and that causes a lot of date pressure.

Two more things we can add to that. One is related to the complexity of projects, in that fun is elusive. You can’t just sit there and say, “On my spreadsheet I’ve put in next month, that’s when we build the fun and it’ll be done and we’ll just sort of move on and do testing”. Maybe you say that, but then after the month, it’s like “Crap, it still sucks; it’s not fun, what do we do?” You had budgeted to go to test, but you still need another month to make it fun. And it’s just kind of that elusiveness of “we’re building entertainment; we’re building something that’s supposed to be fun.” And you can’t really plan for that. I mean, you plan it, but it may not arrive, and then you need more time to get it. And that, in large part, is where you get slippage and so on. But there are ways to get around that. You do a lot more prototyping to find the fun before you go off and build 20 levels and 20 cut scenes and whatnot. You find the fun, and then you go into full production. So the industry has matured in some senses of frontloading the pre-production and prototyping more intelligently, as opposed to planning things out for 2 years and then the last month, everything comes together and you get your hands on the game and you’re like, “This isn’t any fun”.

And then the last one is that every game industry worker is so passionate that in many ways, they submit themselves willingly, to the intensity of the career in the game industry. They’re so driven by their love for games, by their passion to create, that they don’t even realize what they’re doing is hurting them; that working for 16 hours straight means that they’re putting in more bugs then they’re fixing, and the art that they’re creating is not as creative as it could or should be. And as a designer, you don’t have outside influences, because you have no time for a life and to absorb other parts of life and pop culture. So, I guess in a nutshell, that’s what we’re looking at: Pressures from the top, inexperienced management and producers, the elusiveness of fun, and the passion and willingness to submit ourselves to the challenge and the rigors of the career.

SS: That brings up another great point. It seems that over the last 5 or 10 years, the numbers of degree programs and schools, where you can go and get your programming degree or game designing degree, have kind of exploded. Now we have an unprecedented number of people trying to get into the game industry and they’re going to be willing to do whatever they can to get a job. Do you think that’s going to be further detriment to the quality of life issue? How involved is the IGDA at an education level? And how aware do you think students are to these issues?

JDR: The game industry is one of those desirable careers, like going to Hollywood and being an actor. So whether or not there were all of these game degrees and game schools, we would still have a massive line-up of students that want to get in. Game schools and game degrees are just more of a direct path. The IGDA is actually very involved in the education side of things. We have an education special interest group that works on stuff like curriculum standards and teaching resources, and they actually just hosted a 2-day workshop on the first two days of GDC. They had 150-200 people in the academic industry talking about raising the standards for teaching game development and teaching practices. They’re very active in insuring that the students who do go the path of the more dedicated game education, that what they’re getting is meaningful and relevant and usable and will in fact help them get a career in the industry and let them learn the skills that they need to learn. So, we’re actually quite involved in that.

SS: Speaking of the sessions you held at GDC, you presented a first look at your new crediting white sheet. Can you give us a quick breakdown on what the crediting standards cover and how you propose to standardize this in the industry?

JDR: Well, the white paper itself is a bit long and needs to be edited down, and sort of tweaked and polished. The motivation really comes from the fact that we don’t have, as an industry, a standard or accepted way of assigning credit. Most projects, when they’re nearing completion, someone goes around with a piece of paper and says, “Okay. Sam, you did the writing. Jason, you did the coding”. And if say ‘Bob’ was out that day, or out to lunch, and someone forgot to put his name on the piece of paper, and all of a sudden, the game goes to retail without Bob’s name in it, just simple human error. And now, Bob’s looking for a new job or trying to get promoted, and there’s no “official record” of his involvement on that project. And it’s sort of like Hollywood or music; you’re only as good as your last credit, only as good as your last project.

As the game industry workforce becomes more fluid, the ability to have a verifiable or official track record of the projects you’ve worked on and what you did is very important. In fact, looking at credits is one of the most influential factors in when a manager is looking at you as a potential new hire. So, if somehow you got passed over or weren’t credited appropriately, it’s all that matters. And likewise, sort of the reverse. Because the studios put so much emphasis on that, if for some reason you were my buddy and I put you down as top ninja, or something silly at the top of the credits as a personal favor, and then you go into the company, and the studio says, “Well he was at the top of the list, he must have been someone important”, and really you didn’t do anything, and we hire you, we just got fooled and tricked, and you don’t turn out to be so hot. So having standardized credits helps both the studio and helps the developer. And just in general as an art form or a craft, an industry that is focused on talent should be focused on talent, giving appropriate credit and recognition for the efforts and contributions that you made is the sign of a mature industry.

SS: Do you think there are any areas of the industry that are significantly more affected by this than others, like coders or musicians for example?

JDR: It’s hard to say. Certainly those that today are more on a freelancer mode or are more apt to jump from project to project, or studio to studio, would benefit more immediately from those kinds of standards. If I’m a freelance musician, or a freelance writer, I really want to make sure that I get proper credit for all of the projects that I contribute to, because that basically becomes my sell sheet for getting the next gig. But if I’m a programmer that generally stays at the same company for 5 or 6 years at a time, and does 2 or 3 projects, it’s less relevant from a job currency point of view. But it still is extremely important from “I put in my sweat, blood and tears, and I want to make sure that I am properly recognized for my contributions”.

SS: Has there ever been a moment that you’ve seen, in a finished game that you’ve been playing that’s illuminated or shone light on an issue that you guys need to address? Is there anything that you actually can see in a game that you wouldn’t see otherwise?

JDR: The whole social commentary thing is kind of interesting. There are certainly some games out there that are created for that very purpose, and these are potentially non-mainstream games. So, something like “Super Columbine Massacre” or “September 12” or the JFK simulation, or a lot of the games posted at Water Cooler Games or Persuasive Games, they’re sort of made with that very purpose, to be political and have invented social commentary. The other thing is that every game kind of has some kind of message or expression in there, and sometimes, it’s unintentional, sometimes it’s purposeful. I mean, the “Grand Theft Auto” series is just loaded with all kinds of parody and moral commentary. People often don’t really pay attention to it, because they’re busy shooting up the gangs or doing whatever.

I just started playing “Crackdown”, and there is something in there. I’ve only just started, and I haven’t quite connected all of the dots. Using cloning and genetic modifications to build a super powerful police force to cleanse out the crime in the city, but in the process of cleansing the crime, essentially you can just sort of level the whole city to clean out the bad guys. So, it’s like, who’s really the bad guy? I haven’t really gotten too far into it, so I don’t know how far they’re going to take that. Even “Gears of War” writes a kind of good vs. evil. And you can kind of see that sort of commentary. Sometimes it’s intentional, sometimes it’s not. Also, with “Dead Rising”, the consumerism and being alive, the value of life and government conspiracy, and all this kind of stuff. I don’t think they made “Dead Rising” specifically to make a statement, but in making a meaningful game, they’ve kind of embedded it with a lot of that kind of social, political commentary.

SS: Do you think that your position as Executive Director of the IGDA has changed your perspective of how you view games at all?

JDR: Well, I’ve been a gamer since I can remember, and I’ve been very passionate about the art form. In my early days in the industry, I was much more focused on the technology and I wasn’t really thinking about the bigger picture. Questions about art form, media expression, design aesthetics, and the rights and freedoms of game creators just wasn’t something on my radar, and it wasn’t something that I worried about day to day, because it wasn’t part of my role. Getting involved with the IGDA, you start to deal with those issues and wrestle with those challenges. And it’s not that I changed my position, it’s more like I uncovered them. They were kind of always there, you just never really realize, and I guess that’s just part of maturing along with the industry.