The Emotional Price of Making Video Games

Mouse

This is an amazingly honest article.

au.gamespot.com/features/the-emotional-price-of-making-video-games-6404156/

"Making games can be a grueling, all-consuming process. John Davison talks to developers about the significant emotional challenges of this creative and commercial endeavor.

When you fire up a new video game, some elements are easy to appreciate immediately. Pretty graphics, a rousing soundtrack, or fluid animations can leap off the screen and make you thankful for all the hard work that went in to the game's creation. However, beneath that veneer lie untold hours of struggle and sacrifice. As six industry veterans explain, creating an amazing game takes more than your time and technical prowess. It requires a bit of your heart as well. Despite occasional media flare-ups triggered by complaints about ridiculous working conditions or inconsiderate executive teams, the game-playing populace doesn't often hear about the mental burden shouldered by game creators. Executing on a creative vision, and doing so both on-time and on-budget, imposes an enormous amount of pressure on those involved."

ScardyBob

A good read, but not unique to game development. Issues like this of varying degrees show up in many different places such as other creative industries (movies, television, books, etc), startups, and even campaigns. In fact, you could probably replace every reference to 'making a game' with 'running for office' or 'starting a business'.

Scythe

The same could be said of any big, commerical, project-based business. I know that things get mega-hectic near the middle and end of the big, multi-million-dollar, three-year-long projects of which I'm a part at my work. You build an emotional attachment to anything you work with for that long. You get frustrated when things aren't done properly, or influenced by factors outside your control.

--Scythe--

Narfwak

ScardyBob wrote: »

A good read, but not unique to game development. Issues like this of varying degrees show up in many different places such as other creative industries (movies, television, books, etc), startups, and even campaigns. In fact, you could probably replace every reference to 'making a game' with 'running for office' or 'starting a business'.

Just to play the devil's advocate... or article's advocate? I don't know. No devils required I guess: other creative industries are indeed also very stressful but unique to video game design is that you're not only creating artwork, sound, music and cinematics. You're also building often very complicated and bothersome interactive systems that your end user is going to spend a lot of their time trying to break and circumvent. Anyone who's read The Trenches is also familiar with the often grossly dysfunctional relationship between management, designers, programmers and especially QA that exists at a lot of (large) gaming studios. NS2 playtesting (shameless plug) is way the hell better than the industry standard for QA work but it isn't all that hard given how awful the industry standard is these days.

[mcnultyinspiredrant] I guess it's also worth noting that everyone interviewed in that article is an executive, a producer or a designer: they're all bosses in one capacity or another. It's good to hear management's point of view but it would have been nice to also hear from some of the ground floor (coughQAcough) guys, but I bet they'd probably get fired for NDA breach. [/mcnultyinspiredrant]