@Background Pony #1BE5
Saying that GamerGate didn’t talk about ethics in journalism is an incredibly blatant lie. We have 1210 pages of discussion. You can clearly see posts talking about it as early as the first page of the thread. The claim that
every person involved with GG was out to harass women is a ridiculous claim, and the lack of nuance you’re demonstrating is a big reason why GG blew up as hard as it did, including the reason why I joined it despite being in agreement that there is a problem with how gaming treats women.
You claim that GG was really about harassing women, but the truth is the claim that GG was really harassing women interfered with the talk of ethics in gaming journalism more than GG actually harassing women ever did. Almost as if that was the whole goal in the first place…
@Commune
There are two types of crunch. One is self-imposed: a dev team wants to put out a game as fast as possible, often because they have no form of income, so instead of releasing the game as is they spend more time working so they can put it out before they run out of money. The other type is when a deadline is set for a game’s release, but there’s not enough time to finish the game. So, the dev team has two choices: release an unfinished game, or spend more time working on the game.
Both types stem from the same issue: time. Time spent making a game delays its release. But, games need to be finished as much as possible. Also, games tend to take a lot more time to make than people expect. While publishers often put harsh deadlines that don’t match the actual time needed, making games is also not an exact process, and often time can end up being wasted, and often it’s not really any person’s fault.
This isn’t an excuse for crunch, but it’s an explanation. Time is one of those things that all of us are limited by. We can’t spend our time writing about crunch and writing about GamerGate at the same time. We can be criticised for wasting our time, especially when our time is being employed. But crunch isn’t something we should tolerate. When a dev team can’t finish their game by their deadline, making them work crunch hours is not acceptable. If a company thinnk their employees aren’t working fast enough, then you either need to encourage them to work better, or fire them. Neither is desirable for a big company, since despite treating their devs like trash, the higher ups neither know how to make a game, or how valuable their skills are.
For independent devs, there’s not much we can do. We can donate money to fund them, so they don’t have to crunch to sell their game before they go hungry. But we can’t control what they do. They might feel obligated to finish the game faster and crunch anyway. We also can’t go giving out money to anyone who asks for it. Many times a dev team has appeared claiming to be working on something, and when given money, they simply run away with it.
Money makes the world go round, and this is true for game devs. Making your own game makes you a business, and managing your money is an important part of that. Making games is an artistic endeavour, but everyone needs to eat. While I can wish that game devs didn’t have to worry about it and could focus entirely on making their art, without having to crunch for it, they still have to abide by the dollar. The same way that a publisher has to set a reasonable deadline, an indie game dev has to have enough money to sustain themselves through the development process.
For publishers, they have to treat their employees like people. Furthermore, employees have to make sure they’re treated like people. Generally, if a company is demanding too much of their employees, then they should quit and take their talents elsewhere. But this doesn’t happen enough in the gaming industry. All of the big names crunch their employees, pushing them to go independent, an option that not everyone can simply take.
The way I see it, there’s 3 ways to try and solve this. The first is government intervention. While I’m not a fan of strangling the free market, it’s clear that the market has spoken that crunch is terrible but ubiquitous, so it’s as good a time as any to accept the government’s authoritarian grip. However, game devs are employed worldwide, and putting anti-crunch laws in a place can result in publishers moving elsewhere where they can get away with it.
The second is for game devs to take a stand and go on strike. It’s a scary proposition, but when the workforce is being trodden on, they need to fight back. The publishers are useless without people to work for them, and the devs will eventually win as long as they are united.
The last is for us, the consumers, to choose not to fund companies that crunch. There are several problems with this approach, the biggest being convincing enough people to do it. Not only that, but it needs to be clear why they’re not purchasing the game. Whether it’s about crunch, being a game one isn’t interested in, not having the money, choosing to pirate… publishers need a way to know why their game isn’t being bought, and it’s clear that they have no idea right now, so adding crunch concerns to the list of possibilities doesn’t have an effect on its own. Finally, publishers will push their lowered profits off on their employees, resulting in working them harder or even firing them.
Crunch is a huge issue, but in my opinion, it’s not directly tied to us the same way games journalists are. We can be sympathetic to the devs that have to go through it, but it’s hard for us to directly do anything about it, because it’s not us that are being crunched. Games journalism, on the other hand, is something that does affect us, since it’s based on spreading information about gaming. When the information and those that spread it are suspect, it creates distrust, and news is only as valuable as long as it’s trustworthy.
Before GG, I didn’t trust gaming journalists. The reveal that came along with GG didn’t surprise me that much, but it didn’t exactly change my position. It’s another reason why the ‘you just hate women’ angle is so ridiculous to me. The only reason why I didn’t immediately put my support behind GG was that I couldn’t believe that all anti-GG had was ‘you just hate women’. So, it was easy for me to be part of GG since it’s just an extension of what I already believed.
Crunch is different. I accepted that indies would do it, since it’s common for small business to have a rough start-up. Big business on the other hand I never thought could get away with something so awful. So the reveal that it is in fact very common was shocking. But there’s little I can do to really help the situation. I don’t think anyone who isn’t aware of crunch can do anything about it, except maybe the government. I already don’t buy games from a lot of the big publishers.
But am I really contributing much to GG by talking about it? At this point, not really. I imagine that anyone still here knows enough. I come back to this thread mostly for personal interest. If anything, GG being less serious than crunch makes it easier to talk about. GG is mostly over, and there’s little stakes left. While gaming journalism is still shit, I feel that more people are aware of that, and I didn’t really expect the problem to be completely solved anyway. Crunch, on the other hand, is a serious, ongoing problem, and it needs to be completely destroyed, as opposed to some shitty journalists, that just need their influence to be lowered to something more appropriate.
So I indulged your appeal to greater problems. At least talking about crunch isn’t wasted time, even if it’s unrelated to this thread.
