34. Personal Care and Development

One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he is a genius.

—IAIN M. BANKS, MATTER

Many books and articles have been dedicated to informing people how to pursue a career in games. Often these takes are idealized, relying on wishful thinking and anecdotes of the successful to supply enthusiasm rather than painting an accurate picture of the realities and the trade-offs involved. Making a career in games is simply not for everyone.

Life in AAA

A modern middle-class life is possible through working for a video-game studio, in many roles: art, animation, programming, design, testing, and project management. Generally, game studios provide a competitive salary (although lower than comparable fields), health insurance, and often, good fringe benefits.

However, “AAA” video-game development is often quite unlike a “normal” job. One of the grim words that come up quickly when you start talking about the game development lifestyle is crunch. The “crunch” is a period of extended work hours that may include 12- or 16-hour days up to seven days a week. Crunch is excruciatingly tiring and leads to high developer burnout. Crunch happens for a number of reasons: inefficiencies caused by turnover, lack of direction from management, disrespect between management and workers, and/or the lack of a clear and accurate schedule.

One of the few defenses for crunch claims is that creating extraordinary entertainment titles requires an extraordinary amount of effort. If Company X spends 40 hours a week to make Game X, and Company Y spends 50 hours to make Game Y, then all else being equal, Game Y should be better than Game X.

The research team behind the Game Outcomes Project used a wide database of project information and metrics to distill principles of game development that would lead to exceptional outcomes. They put this theory to the test.¹ The data was clear. Crunch leads to poorer outcomes with a high degree of certainty. Projects made without crunch had higher scores on both subjective outcomes (the team was satisfied with the game) and objective outcomes (such as critical reception measured by a Metacritic score, or financial returns based on initial investment). The Game Outcomes Project’s analysis of the topic is fascinating, but it is beyond the scope of this discussion.

¹ Tozour, P. (2015, January 20). Gamasutra: Paul Tozour’s Blog—“The Game Outcomes Project, Part 4: Crunch Makes Games Worse.” Retrieved June 26, 2019, from http://gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20150120/234443/The_Game_Outcomes_Project_Part_4_Crunch_Makes_Games_Worse.php.

Many studies confirm that crunch gives a small boost early, but that early gain is eaten up by lower productivity later. A greater-than-40-hour week does not increase overall productivity.² Henry Ford understood this 100 years ago, but we seem to have forgotten it in the meantime.³ Nonetheless, the game industry tends to expect it. There is a reason that the common profile of game industry professionals is largely childless 20-somethings. In fact, 70 percent of game developers are under the age of 34.⁴ Older professionals find that the long hours and lack of creative freedom are not beneficial to having a family and a fulfilling career.

² Thomas, H. R. (1992). “Effects of Scheduled Overtime on Labor Productivity.” Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 118(1), 60–76.

³ A great reminder from a games industry perspective can be found in Cook, D. (2008, September 28). “Rules of Productivity Presentation.” Retrieved June 26, 2019, from www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presentation.html?m=1.

⁴ Remo, C. (2010, May 21). Study: “Game Developers Increasingly Newcomers to Business.” Retrieved June 26, 2019, from www.gamasutra.com/view/news/118984/Study_Game_Developers_Increasingly_Newcomers_To_Business.php.

Simultaneously, we are growing less productive at work given all the tools we have to encourage productivity. A common misconception is that “digital natives” are adept multitaskers, juggling work, email, and Slack and taking moments here and there to interact with social media like Instagram. Unfortunately, research has shown this not to be the case⁵. What we do when we multitask is instead task switch. And every time we switch tasks, our brains must spend some resources gearing up for the new task. Additionally, we have a period of “residue” from our old task that drags on the amount of attention we can provide for the new task. For tasks that are relatively rote and routine and do not require much cognitive input, the impact of this task-switching is minimal. But for difficult and creative work, interruptions can be extremely disruptive. If we are working 60-hour weeks distracted, can we work a normal, healthy amount of time if we choose to work effectively?

⁵ Kirschner, P. A., & De Bruyckere, P. (2017). The myths of the digital native and the multitasker. Teaching and Teacher Education, 67, 135-142.

This is why many forward-thinking businesses are adopting “distraction-free time,” when email and messaging clients are shut down and no meetings can be scheduled. In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport advocates for a set of practices that would help us succeed in a world that requires us to thinking deeply while being bombarded with task-switching opportunities. It is full of anecdotes and evidence about techniques for work that eschew the status quo.

If you are looking for a job in this industry, the Game Outcomes Project has some guidelines on what successful game industry teams do.⁶ By finding teams that do these things well, a potential employee can hopefully avoid spending their energy on a dysfunctional team. Some of the highlights of their analysis are as follows:

⁶ Tozour, P. (2015, January 26). Gamasutra: Paul Tozour’s Blog—“The Game Outcomes Project, Part 5: What Great Teams Do.” Retrieved June 26, 2019, from www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20150126/235024/The_Game_Outcomes_Project_Part_5_What_Great_Teams_Do.php.

• Great teams have a clear, shared vision of the game design and a plan for how to get there. The Game Outcomes Project found this to be the most important factor in the success of the team. This singular vision and buy-in kindles enthusiasm. Every team member feels important. A lack of enthusiasm is almost always a warning sign.

• Great teams understand and manage their risks. Ignoring risks and putting them off in order to “cross that bridge when we get there” is dangerous. Design elements in a game often change. This is necessary for iteration. How that change is carefully managed and how negative effects to the team are mitigated is a measure of the future success of the team.

• Great teams avoid crunch and do not make it a part of their corporate culture. This is not to say that a great team never crunches, but a great team takes great care to avoid it. The Game Outcomes Project makes explicitly clear that crunch, even small amounts of it, leads to myriad negative outcomes and that it harms employee health, productivity, and decision-making.

• Great teams allow team members to feel safe in risk-taking. This encompasses the psychological safety related to expressing problems to bosses, along with the freedom to try novel and creative ideas without the possibility of punishment for failing, assuming that those ideas can fit within the team’s development plans. Failing is not taboo. It is something that is discussed and learned from rather than stigmatized.

• Great teams give the team members autonomy to determine how their tasks are completed under the team’s production methodology.

• Great teams work together. They resolve conflicts between members instead of letting them stew and simmer. Team members support each other, praise successes, and make sure that each member feels mutually respected.

• Great teams minimize turnover. This is something an interviewee can ask directly in an interview.

• Great teams give individuals timely and relevant feedback on their work. This includes code reviews, which help minimize software defects.

• Great teams are conscious of being great. Each individual holds herself and other members to high standards and is self-reflective to the degree that she can understand, in real time, when she is not living up to her own standards.

Independence

Life as an indie developer anecdotally meets the stereotypical features of the idealized artist. The indie developer has a great degree of creative freedom but often struggles to make ends meet. Even extraordinarily successful independent developers often need to supplement their income. Canabalt designer Adam Saltsman relies on contract work and his wife’s income to support his independent games work.⁷ There are more routes than ever before to fund independent development, but there are also more independent developers competing for those crowdfunding, grant, or patronage resources.

⁷ Francis, B. (2015, March 25). “Let’s Get Real about the Financial Expectations of ‘Going Indie.’” Retrieved June 26, 2019, from www.gamasutra.com/view/news/237046/Lets_get_real_about_the_financial_expectations_of_going_indie.php.

Anecdotes abound of small game successes. Early app store developer Steve Demeter made $250,000 in two months.⁸ Flappy Bird made $50,000 a day on ads alone.⁹ Vlambeer’s Ridiculous Fishing made over a million dollars.¹⁰ I would be remiss to leave out Markus “notch” Persson’s solo-project-turned-cultural-juggernaut Minecraft. Persson sold his company to Microsoft in 2014 and netted $1.4 billion.¹¹

⁸ Chen, B. (2008, September 19). “iPhone Developers Go From Rags to Riches.” Wired. Retrieved June 26, 2019, from www.wired.com/2008/09/indie-developer.

⁹ Hamburger, E. (2014, February 5). “Indie Smash Hit ‘Flappy Bird’ Racks Up $50K per Day in Ad Revenue.” Retrieved June 26, 2019, from www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5383708/flappy-bird-revenue-50-k-per-day-dong-nguyen-interview.

¹⁰ Parkin, S. (2014, April 3). “The Guilt of the Video Game Millionaires.” Retrieved June 26, 2019, from www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-guilt-of-the-video-game-millionaires.

¹¹ Associated Press. (2015, September 15). “Microsoft Buys ‘Minecraft’ Maker for $2.5B.” Retrieved June 26, 2019, from http://nypost.com/2014/09/15/microsoft-buys-minecraft-maker-for-2-5b.

However, these are examples of the top results in what is called a power law or Pareto distribution. Power law distributions are found in many natural and interpersonal examples, from wealth distribution, the population of the world’s cities, the distribution of letters in words, and the number of connections in a social network to the severity of earthquakes. Pareto distributions are characterized by the fact that most of the effects of a distribution fall under a small number of the causes.

For instance, in a sales force of 100 salespeople, a Pareto distribution is one in which the top 20 salespeople make 80 percent of the sales (Figure 34.1). If they sell 1,000,000 widgets as a group, these top 20 salespeople sell 800,000 of them, while the remaining 80 salespeople sell only 200,000. The Pareto distribution goes further, however. If you look at only these top 20, the top 20 percent of those (or the top four salespeople) make 80 percent of the sales of that group. So the top four salespeople made 640,000 sales. This means the top four contribute more than the remaining 96! Keep in mind that if you use the average to look at these salespeople, the average salesperson has 10,000 sales. However, only the top 24 of the 100 salespeople is above “average” because of the skew. The median salesperson has only 3000 sales.

Figure 34.1 Power law skew.

Pareto distributions are very common in situations with positive feedback (Chapter 17). The popular aphorism is that it takes money to make money. This is partially because money allows for greater reach, and that reach reveals more opportunities to make money. An app’s popularity, for instance, influences both how the app spreads by word of mouth (virality, see Chapter 33) and its likelihood of coming up in searches or featured apps. An app with a million downloads has a million potential advertisers, giving it a wide reach. An app that only 100 people know about has fewer avenues by which to spread.

In 2015, estimates were that the top 870 of the 1.2 million iOS App Store apps (or 0.07 percent of the apps in the store) made 40 percent of all the revenue.¹² Fewer than 3200 apps (0.26 percent) made enough revenue to make a developer the median 2014 US household income. It’s unclear whether this analysis includes the taxes and fees that the creator has to pay to be in business. In this survey, the bottom 47 percent of apps earn less than $100 a month. In another survey, the figure was that 35 percent of iOS apps and 49 percent of Android apps made less than $100 per app per month.¹³

¹² Perry, C. (2015, January 19). “The Shape of the App Store.” Retrieved June 26, 2019, from http://metakite.com/blog/2015/01/the-shape-of-the-app-store.

¹³ DeveloperEconomics.com. (2015, February 17). “Developer Economics Q1 2015: State of the Developer Nation” Developer Economics.

Tabletop

The vast majority of people producing games in the analog (tabletop) space are hobbyists and part-time workers. Some game designers have been able to make enough from royalties to make it a career.¹⁴ This model is similar to how book authors receive payment. However, the market for books is large, whereas the market for tabletop games remains quite niche. Probably only a few dozen tabletop game designers in the world make enough from their game design work to support themselves. Tom Vasel, designer and host of the popular tabletop video review and podcast series The Dice Tower, estimates that only 20 people worldwide make a living as full-time tabletop game designers.¹⁵ Nearly all of them started making games for nothing as a hobby. It’s not prudent at the time of this writing to pursue a career in tabletop game development without supplemental income from another source.

¹⁴ Tinsman, B. (2003). The Game Inventor’s Guidebook. Krause Publications. Kraus Publications, Iola, Wisconsin.

¹⁵ Vasel, T. (Host). (2015, April 22). The Dice Tower #402 [Podcast]. Retrieved from http://itunes.apple.com.

Personal Care

After knowing thousands of game design students in my career, I have found that there are some basics that we take for granted.

First is the essential nature of taking care of your body and hygiene. This goes without saying for most, but when you slowly increase your daily time budget for practicing your craft, you may find yourself making up time by cutting down on sleep, meals, or showers. A game conference I attend has a “6-2-1” rule: at least six hours of sleep every night, at least two meals every day, and at least one shower every day. This may seem a bit condescending and parental, but it is important to remember.

Sleep deprivation in some university and business cultures can be seen as a badge of honor. “I worked so hard I only got three hours of sleep last night and now I am back at it” is a boast I’ve heard at multiple studios. In my younger days, I may have been fooled by this. But sleep is necessary to process and relieve stress. It allows us to move the day’s events from short-term memory, freeing that up for new tasks. And it spurs subconscious creativity. You may look like you are productive after a lack of sleep, but you will be performing suboptimally.

Many are under the impression that they can work all night to meet a deadline and then catch up on sleep later. Unfortunately, research has shown that your performance deteriorates from lack of sleep and does not spring back to normal just because you get some “catch-up” sleep¹⁶.

¹⁶ Cohen, D. A., Wang, W., Wyatt, J. K., Kronauer, R. E., Dijk, D. J., Czeisler, C. A., & Klerman, E. B. (2010). Uncovering residual effects of chronic sleep loss on human performance. Science Translational Medicine, 2(14), 14ra3-14ra3.

Next is the body’s need for physical activity. Knowledge work is draining, and it can feel exhausting to suffer through trying to solve hard problems for an extended period of time. By the time you get home, you may feel you have nothing left in the tank for exercise. We have all been there.

It is important to make physical exercise a part of a routine. Many apps exist to help track and remind you of this. I’ve found that a simple calendar that you can mark off every day is the best motivator. When you see you are on a 17-day streak, breaking it at day 18 is psychologically difficult. And even if I have to break one day (rest is important after all), I can see that I had six days that week of activity. If you treat exercise as ad hoc, you will have difficulty forming the necessary habit. The beneficial effects of exercise begin to fade and reverse after just four weeks. Don’t let yourself get into bad habits.

Finally, when you are deeply focused on a goal it can be difficult to allow your focus to shift to something else. When I talk to students about their hobbies, I’m stunned by how difficult it is to get them to talk about something other than games. If being in games is important to your life goals, then you should certainly show interest in games. But true to “garbage in, garbage out,” you need to be able to draw from other life experiences. Give yourself the physical rest of sleep and the mental rest of hobbies that lie outside of games.

Market Luck

Luck is quite often ignored as a possible determinant of success. It may be that game designers work so hard at creating systems that respond to player input to determine success that they are unwilling to accept that their own success is not determined solely by their own input. Every Game Developers Conference (GDC) is glutted with talks about how an indie studio was successful that year, with the hidden subtext (although often neither hidden nor subtext) that if you just complete the same steps as they did, you’ll be successful too. If designers believe that luck is a huge factor, then all our hard work on design and analytics seems like a waste of time. Naysayers to luck fall into confirmation bias. They choose not to remember the games they have played that were good but not commercially successful, or games that were commercially successful but not good. Instead, they remember only games that were good and commercially successful and conflate their commercial success with their quality. Events like GDC reinforce a selection bias. Besides the niche “Failure Workshop,” no one gets invited to talk about games that did not go gangbusters. And in the odd cases in which those talks are accepted, they do not fill up like the talks for the latest successes.

In 2018, an average of 130 new games were submitted to the iOS App Store every single day.¹⁷ Hundreds of thousands of games are available at any given time on that platform. If there were a special sauce to success, then the average game would make a sustainable income—not, at the most generous estimate, $4000.¹⁸ Minimum wage is, in most cases, a better bang for your buck.

¹⁷ App Store Metrics. (n.d.). Retrieved June 26, 2019, from www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/appstore/submissions.

¹⁸ Louis, T. (2013, August 10). “How Much Do Average Apps Make?” Retrieved June 26, 2019, from www.forbes.com/sites/tristanlouis/2013/08/10/how-much-do-average-apps-make.

That does not mean that making games is a fool’s errand. I teach students every day whose dream is to make games. If I believed that there were no reason to do so, I could not morally do what I do every day. What should be resisted, however, is the notion that those who are successful became so in a deterministically reproducible way. This is why some clones succeed and some fail. Temple Run got lucky in a world of exploding endless runners. Then they built off that fame. Flappy Bird had singular organic growth where thousands of similar quick-twitch games failed. The clones that followed and mirrored it in every way, and even those that improved on it, did not have that seed of luck. Hard work on design and implementation matters, but at some point you must submit to the random permutations of the market.

Summary

• Crunch is the practice of working extended hours in an attempt to accelerate development.

• Crunch allows for increased productivity in the very short term. However, that boost is offset by reduced productivity later.

• Find a good team to work with that communicates well, understands and prepares to take reasonable risks, and is open and transparent regarding what does and does not work.

• Revenues in the game industry are Pareto-distributed. There are a small number of big winners and a large number of releases that have no reach at all.

• Hard work and careful practice are controllable determinants of success. However, they are not the sole determinants.

Conclusion

To err and err and err again, but less and less.

—PIET HIEN

A work is never completed except by some accident...

—PAUL VALéRY

Writing a conclusion for a game design book, especially a conclusion for a book such as this, seems inappropriate. A conclusion is supposed to wrap up the topic. However, if I have been successful here, you should not feel like you are ready to wrap up anything. Instead, you should be inspired to learn more about all the possible areas of knowledge that a designer can leverage. For practical reasons, this book could not cover all the areas that are of interest to a designer; its mission was destined to be incomplete. Hopefully, I have been able to help cultivate the curiosity you need to become a successful game designer.

The thesis of this book is to open your mind to all the disciplines of knowledge in the world. For that, our education is never complete. As we end here, I will point out a few avoidable dangers that can keep you from success in this area:

• CONFUSING “WHAT I LIKE” WITH “WHAT IS GOOD.” This is so universal that I see it in myself, in students, in new professionals, and in established game design veterans. Your taste is a useful barometer for directing your focus. It’s easier to make something good if you can use yourself as an infinite playtest loop, judging every design decision by your personal metrics. But what you like is not necessarily what is best for the game. For most people “This game is good!” is equivalent to “I like this game!” Many design arguments end up boiling down to “I like X!” versus “I don’t like X!” That cannot be resolved. As an example, I find Minecraft incredibly tedious. But it is undeniable that the game is good in myriad ways. I find the Dark Souls games painfully unenjoyable. Yet I can admit games like these exhibit masterful cultivation of “fiero.” Dead Rising is one of my favorite video games of all time, but I can admit that it makes dozens of design mistakes along the way.

Instead, use a framework that lets you focus on the design goals of the game that you are designing, and let that line of thinking guide you. I may really enjoy collection mechanics, but is that necessarily appropriate in my arcade shooter? Possibly. Do I want to include it because I like it or because it will be best for the game?

I see a lot of the games designed around the “retro” visual and gameplay aesthetics of the late 1980s and early 1990s as an expression of this. The designers likely grew up with games of that aesthetic and since they were foundational for them, they end up expressing that through their design, whether or not it’s needed to solve the problem statement of the game.

This problem also exists when discussing game design itself. Much of what has been written on the topic can be distilled down to “I like X, so X is good game design.” Be wary of that. I tried my best to avoid that in writing this book. The risk is that you limit your craft to an echo chamber of possible design ideas. There is nothing wrong with considering the things you like. After all, you picked up this book, so you have marvelous taste. But do not consider only the things you like.

• DRAGGING DOWN INSTEAD OF BUILDING UP. Crabs reportedly exhibit a bizarre behavior. If you put one crab in a bucket, it will easily climb out and escape. Put a bunch of crabs in a bucket, however, and they will pull each other down in their own efforts to escape and none will be able to climb out.

In my early years as a designer, all I could see was poor design everywhere I looked. My newfound skills helped me determine rough edges to which I had previously been oblivious. And so I was noisy about them. This can be for spiteful reasons (“I don’t know why people like this; it is so broken! I’m so much smarter than they are!”) or for helpful reasons (“Your game would be better if you did this”). Regardless, in both cases, it serves as criticism. Jean Sibelius is credited with the quote “A statue has never been set up in honor of a critic.”¹⁹ Although not empirically true, and likely too extreme a position, Sibelius’s intent was to discount critics as incapable of giving meaningful feedback. If you act consistently as a critic, you will likely also be seen as a naysayer or as unhelpful.

¹⁹ De Törne, B. (1937). Sibelius: A Close-Up. Boston, MA. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The fear of this criticism keeps novice designers from releasing something until it is perfect. They toil to buff out all the rough edges in an endless stream of perfectionist busy work and never end up releasing anything. Designers who do not fear the crabs pulling them back down release, even though their game may not be perfect, and they constantly get better because of it.

Remind yourself of the beauty that is found everywhere. What is markedly harder to do is to celebrate the things that are great instead of pointing out the things that are not. This is especially true because of my final point.

• THE “INDUSTRY” IS SMALL. LinkedIn recently released a report that showed that the industry in which it matters most to have a network of people you can trust in order to find a job is “computer games.”²⁰ When LinkedIn users started a new job, it was more likely in computer games than in any other industry (almost twice as likely as in the average industry) to already have been connected long-term to someone at the hiring company.

²⁰ Rigano, P. (2015, March 9). “Industries Where Your Network Matters More Than You Think.” Retrieved June 26, 2019, from http://blog.linkedin.com/2015/03/09/industries-where-your-network-matters-more-than-you-think.

When I was a sophomore in college, I got a job in a dorm as a resident assistant (RA). I really did not like the head RA, who was an upperclassman. He represented everything I disliked about college, and so I was an insufferable jerk around him and actively worked to undermine him with the residents every chance I got. At one point, our feud got to be too much, and one of the professional staff pulled me aside and told me that although it was obvious we had a dislike for each other, I needed to step back and consider what this acrimony was doing to my ability to be trusted as a leader and to get things done in the community. That, of course, is a sanitized version of it. In reality, he told me what a jerk I was being and told me to shape up. Something about that intervention really clicked with me. When I acted more like an adult, I became much more successful at getting events organized and at getting buy-in from other people because I stopped radiating jerk particles.

I see students going through this transition (both successfully and unsuccessfully) all the time. Convinced they are “right,” they do everything they can to prove it, regardless of the collateral damage. In proving they are smart or right or clever, they ruin their relationships with their peers and signal to others than they are not a positive force to work with.

The professional community talks with each other at conferences and online. Designers get reputations. But do not focus just on the “torpedoed career” end of the spectrum. The designers who get reputations for being awesome, positive people are in high demand. Would you not rather be that designer? Those who believe that they will work solo forever and never need another human being are living in a fantasy that ignores the fact that even solo developers need others to get the word out to create a community and for financial or critical success.

When you consider all the terrible, back-breaking labor that the world employs to prosper, making games for a living has to be seen as a good way to spend that time of your life that you designate as “career.”

I cannot imagine myself doing anything else. Even when my career shifted away from making games to teaching others about making games, I kept making them. There must be something deep inside me that requires me to do so. I cannot put that genie back in the bottle. Why would I want to?