Revisiting EA Spouse - 3 Years Later (and a bit of Field Work's Insight)

Well, alright, it hasn't really been three years yet. That date isn't until November, but I guess sometimes you just can't wait to publish that anniversary article.

One thing that troubles me about this first article I link to is that (as much as I have love for SHRM) there is no mention of quality of life, reasonable work hours or anything of that sort in the ranking system. While I suspect that Insomniac has something figured out, having read some of their postmortems, I'd wonder a little bit if it is simply that their people are excited about what they're working on, and happy to put in massive numbers of hours. I wish we knew more about studios like this, but we don't.

But back to ea_spouse. I'm sure Erin Hoffman has gotten a little tired of that label, she works just down the street from me at 1st Playable, and also works as a designer/producer in the video game industry.

An excerpt from an upcoming article:

At the time the blog was published I was sitting with a group of developers working on a game based on an upcoming movie title for an unreleased handheld console. They too were in "crunch" mode, working to beat timelines which had arbitrarily been set to meet the demands of movie executives, game publishers, and console manufacturers. The game was later canceled, but those hours late at work fighting against pre-release hardware with pre-release software development kits (SDK's), new engine, in-development build system, and no proven "pipeline" for art assets or design data were not forgotten. Which is not to say that ea_spouse was wrong, but rather the situation is even more difficult and complex than we had previously envisioned.

And really, it hasn't changed all that much. Fast forward three years later and I hear more rumblings that things are amiss than I hear that they've improved. It's not a good sign, and from near as I can tell, the industry hasn't found a way to maintain some semblance of sustainability yet.

For the reason WHY that is, you'll have to wait until the dissertation is finished.

C-Out

GameDaily.Biz - Insomniac Honored with Top 10 'Best Companies to Work For'

Resistance: Fall of Man and Ratchet & Clank developer Insomniac Games has been named to the list of best places to work for. The list recognizes companies with "smart people management strategies to develop successful organizations with highly productive and satisfied workforces."

[Update: Insomniac's exact ranking was not immediately available. We have discovered now that the company placed 8th.]
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The announcement came during the Society for Human Resource Management's (SHRM) 59th Annual Conference & Exposition in Las Vegas. This is actually the third straight year that Insomniac has made the list. Last year the company ranked fourth. Insomniac (southern California's lone representative to the small business list) continues to be recognized as a best company to work for despite an increase in applicants of more than 20 percent since last year, and a combined 50 percent increase since 2005.

Moreover, it's worth noting that Insomniac is the first and only video game company named to this list, they're the only company in the history of the small business category to earn a Top 10 ranking for three years in a row, and they're the only company in the "TV, Film and Video" category to be recognized this year.
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GPTW based the results mostly on a randomly distributed employee opinion survey that measured categories such as workplace environment, management's responsiveness to employee feedback, and adherence to company philosophy. Then, each company evaluated was given a score based on the questionnaire responses. Other factors included assessments of company programs, practices and workplace culture.

Kotaku - EA Spouse Revisited

The article is filled with quotes from Hoffman, illustrating how game companies have changed since the whole situation started. It's an interesting look at how one voice can change the way an entire industry works.

GameSetWatch - Game Developer Revisits EA_Spouse, Three Years On

"In 2004, a then-anonymous letter writer, 'EA_Spouse,' penned an angry and outraged treatise to the game community chiding Electronic Arts for forcing employees to work egregious amounts of overtime. In the months that followed, development studios, the IGDA, and other outspoken individuals stood up and voiced their opinion of what it means to be in this obsessively dedicated line of work, with most of them calling for industrywide change, too. Nearly three years later, has any of it stuck? Or has the call to action petered out?"

Of course, since then, EA_Spouse has 'come out' as Erin Hoffman, and she makes plenty of comments in the article about how game company cultures (and EA in particular) has changed: "From what I understand, the Los Angeles studio has made a really big turnaround, for example. I've heard mixed comments from Vancouver, and I consistently hear bad things about Tiburon." We've heard that too, judging by a brief letter received after the article debuted, and some of the feedback on the GameWatch.org forums, set up by Hoffman to help discuss the issues.

But is it fair to single out EA? Absolutely not - all major game companies have (or have had) some degree of problems with working long hours, an edgy extension of a job that can require a lot of creative dedication. But it's when working 60 or 80 or 100 hours per week becomes corporately mandated or 'tribe'-impelled and management does nothing to stop the burnout that we get into trouble.
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[Have any (anonymous, if necessary!) GSW readers had experiences with quality of life issues being addressed thanks to EA_Spouse's publicity, or has it made little difference in your neck of the woods, I wonder?]

IT Work Sucks Time? Game Work is Worse...

So, thinking about diversity in the video game industry is important. Most people in the video game industry think it is important. While they might qualitatively have issues about encouraging women and minorities, what I think is interesting is that for the most part people haven't linked up the Quality of Life (QoL) discussion with this.

It's obvious, game companies by and large have very little in the way of HR or infrastructure, not to mention child care or many of the things that actively discourage women from getting into the field.

If more mature IT companies haven't managed to figure it out, I'd doubt that most game companies can figure it out.

The structural conditions of the game industry are something the I hope once I've finished with my dissertation, and hopefully made the conversion into a book that it becomes a new object of discussion.

Oddly all of this homebrew and access and ... frequently comes back to the fact that by and large the video game industry has actively disabled its own mechanisms for learning from their own mistakes. Combined with churn rates and nothing in the way of institutional memory, you're bound to repeat the mistakes of the past... over and over.

Gartner - Gartner Advises IT Leaders to Recognise Complementary Gender Strengths

"Psychologists tell us that women, on average, are better than men at building trust and collaboration that underlie relationships," said Mark Raskino, research vice president and Gartner fellow. "They excel at listening, in communications and social skills and in understanding other people's views. A battle of the sexes for the important emerging skills and roles in IT would be healthy, but it's typically such a male dominated function that there's not even an active debate."

Gartner said that chief information officers (CIOs) worldwide are increasingly focused on recruiting people who can build relationships across multiple stakeholders, cultures and orientations. However, it warned they risk failure in many global initiatives if they are not able to attract and retain talented women in their IT organisations. "CIOs currently don't seem to be aware that social networking systems, vendor and portfolio management, collaborative knowledge work and several other areas in IT would benefit from typically female capability traits," said Mr Raskino.

According to Kathy Harris, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, businesses have traditionally focused on resolving gender diversity issues with a series of tools intended to get more women in business and management positions. "Most traditional programmes have looked to change the way people feel, their organisational culture or they have simply waited for women to catch-up. But it is next to impossible to change the way people feel or think and it takes years to change organisational culture. Most organisations have made little or no progress and most women will give up long before they catch up."

Ms Harris highlighted that as we are on the brink of a true global environment, diversity is not an ‘HR initiative' but an inherent factor in every exchange, conversation or meeting. This demands traits and capabilities that span established stereotypes, psychology and behaviours.

"The solution is to change the game. Given the ambitious business drivers ahead of them, businesses and IT organisations specifically can't afford to miss their objectives because they fail to attract half the talent base. Diversity is not common sense or an issue of policy; it's business survival," Ms Harris added.

Gartner concluded that IT organisations need to redevelop their capabilities and this requires the gender mix to change.

Computerworld - IT Managers Fear Growing Technical Gender Gap

Weary of answering late-night alerts and troubleshooting calls, Bethany King finally had enough. Six months ago, she closed the book on a 12-year stretch as an IT storage administration professional to become an IT auditor.

"I had a 14-year-old daughter that I didn't want to leave alone at 3 a.m.," said King, who was allowed to shift to the more flexible IT job at The Empire District Electric Co., a Joplin, Mo.-based electricity supplier.

"That really was one of the reasons I got out. I could've made it work, but it's just a choice that I made not to," she added, noting that her husband is a firefighter who works various shifts.
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Some attendees noted that not only are women leaving such jobs, few are showing interest in joining the expanding profession.

The U.S. economy is expected to add 1.5 million IT jobs by 2012, according to Department of Labor statistics. At the same time, Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc. predicts that by 2012, 40% of women now in the IT workforce will move away from technical career paths to pursue more flexible business, functional, and research and development careers.
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Dot Brunette, network and storage manager at Meijer Inc., a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based retailer and a 30-year IT veteran, said that women are tending to migrate out of IT-related storage jobs because of their long hours and the demands that users of such technology can place upon them.

"IT is very much a culture and it consumes a lot of time," said Brunette. "I think women in that regard are at a real disadvantage." She noted that companies can fail to attract female workers, or see them leave key IT jobs because they fail "to provide day care at work, or work-at-home options for someone who leaves to have a child."

GameDev.Net Picks up the IGDA Article

GameDev.Net seemed to pick up the article I wrote, which prompted me to check my blog site. Seems that a few rogue links snuck into the article from the time I sent it off to the IGDA and when it hit the website. I'm following up on that.

IGDA published "Quality of Life in a Global Game Industry" on their web site

When the talk which this article is based on was given at GDC 2007, it was interesting that the majority of attendees were not rank and file developers, and were instead managers and producers concerned how to handle the complex issues of QoL and a quickly globalizing video game industry. In part this reflects a broader understanding of QoL issues as being a problem which the industry must face from a top-down perspective rather than from the bottom-up. Publishers, studio managers, producers, and leads must all face QoL concerns head on. It is also the perspective of this researcher that more needs to be done at the level of hardware manufacturers to provide resources for developers to better address the complex set of issues that ultimately lead to poor QoL.

IGDA Article on QoL in a Global Game Industry Live

My recent IGDA article on Quality of Life in a global game industry is now live on the IGDA website. We'll see if anyone notices. :) I try.

Quality of Life in a Global Game Industry

The rise of game development studios across the globe and the increased use of offshore and inshore outsourcing could have developers feeling like they are losing leverage in making arguments for good quality of life practices. But, does globalization and the ability to outsource work really abdicate the need for quality of life both at home or abroad?