The Reasons and Effects of Unpaid Overtime in the Games Industry
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Crunch Time: The Reasons and Effects of Unpaid Overtime in the Games Industry Henrik Edholm, Mikaela Lidström, Jan-Philipp Steghöfer Håkan Burden Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering Viktoria Swedish ICT Chalmers | University of Gothenburg Gothenburg, Sweden Gothenburg, Sweden [email protected] [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract—The games industry is notorious for its intense successful they were. The study showed that many things work ethics with uncompensated overtime and weekends at the improve when adopting agile principles, but crunch was still office, also known as crunch or crunch time. Since crunch an issue. Keeping the agile principles in mind, in particular time is so common within the industry, is it possible that the benefits of crunch time outweigh the disadvantages? By studying keeping a constant development pace, one would think that postmortems and conducting interviews with employees in the companies working accordingly would crunch less. industry, we aim to characterise crunch time and discover its It is still unclear at this point why the games industry effects on the industry. We provide a classification of crunch, continues to crunch despite evidence of its downsides. Do i.e., four types of crunch which all have distinct characteristics and affect the product, employees and schedule in various ways. the benefits of crunch outweigh its disadvantages? Is it the One of the crunch types stands out from the others by only culture of the industry that influences people to work this way? having positive effects on product and schedule. A characteristic This research intends to shed light on the game development that all of the types have in common is an increase in stress levels industry’s crunch practices and understand how crunch affects amongst the employees. We identify a set of reasons for crunch different areas of development. To accomplish this, we address and show that crunch is less pronounced in game studios where prioritisation of features is a regular practice. the following questions: I. INTRODUCTION • RQ1: What are the most common reasons for crunch Crunch time is a term used in the games industry to describe time? periods of extreme workload. During this period the employees • RQ2: What are the reported effects of crunch time on at game studios often work 12 hours per day for several product, people and schedule? weeks, or even months. Crunch has existed within the games • RQ3: Are there different types of crunch? industry for a long time and is usually carried out to ensure • RQ4: Does the games industry’s culture affect people’s that the game is released as scheduled. According to Petrillo willingness to crunch? et al. [1] crunch primarily occurs before the final product • RQ5: Does fulfilling agile principles have an effect on delivery. It does not help that the project scope tends to crunch time? be unrealistic within the scheduled deadlines. Big features will often be added during the development without adjusting By giving an answer to the questions above, our contribution the development time accordingly, a practice referred to as a) provides a better grasp of the effects crunch has on the “feature creep”. industry; b) gives an introduction to multiple crunch types that Many believe that crunch time within the games industry is can be used to define crunch; c) highlights the reasons given part of the work culture and therefore it can not be changed, for crunch by the industry; d) explores if the game industry’s leading to employees just accepting it [1], [2]. Recent research culture encourages employees to crunch; and e) pinpoints what claims that crunch time itself can contribute to late deliveries agile principles have an effect on crunch. and low quality software, making it a vicious cycle [1], [3]. The paper is structured as follows: After this introduc- Sleep deprivation can significantly reduce developers ability tion, Section II provides a summary of how we gathered to make rational design decisions and produce high quality and assessed the data and presents potential validity threats. software [1]. Working between 60 and 90 hours per week also Section III provides organizational descriptions for the four has a grave effect on the employee’s personal relationships game studios that we interviewed and assessed. In Section IV and mental health, causing many people to consider leaving we present the results of our data collection and in Section V the industry [1], [4]. These reasons should be incentives for we discuss these results from the perspective of the research the industry to want to change this practice. questions above. We finally conclude the paper in Section VI. Koutonen & Leppänen [5] conducted a study aimed to Related work does not have it’s own section, but is rather used understand how game studios deploy agile practices and how continuously throughout the paper. II. METHODOLOGY what kind of impact it had on the employees, the product and This study was split into three phases: in the first phase the schedule. we explored the current state of the art through literature and B. Data Extraction collected postmortems; in the second phase we collected data through conducting interviews and reading postmortems; in the For the third and final phase two of the researchers extracted third phase we extracted, analysed and compared the gathered the data gathered from the postmortems and the interviews data. The interview guide as well as the coding sheet used is which we later analysed and compared. The analysis and available online1. comparison can be seen in Sections IV and V. When extracting data from the postmortems we read A. Data Collection through them thoroughly and identified issues relevant to The first phase of the study was a qualitative exploration of crunch that the game studios had experienced. The issues what previous literature has said about the topic. The literature were then grouped thematically and labelled as pre-production was collected in two separate steps. Firstly, we wanted to see issues, feature creep/too big scope, planning/scheduling issues, how vastly academia had researched the topic. By reviewing publisher disagreement or pressure, communication issues, scientific papers we got a good grasp of the state of the lack of focus/focusing on the wrong things, bugs, poor man- art. We noticed that other researchers in the field [1], [2], agement/management issues, financial issues, technical issues, [4], [6] had used Gamasutra2 as an information source. We process issues, unfun game and staffing issues. therefore assessed that the website was a reliable source. Thus After the interviews were conducted we transcribed them secondly, we selected 78 out of the 180 postmortems published word-by-word in order to not alter the point that the inter- on Gamasutra after the release of the agile manifesto. These viewee was trying to make. Then we extracted data from our were all postmortems that fulfilled our inclusion & exclusion transcripts and created a coding sheet to get a better overview criteria: critically reflected on their development process rather of the information found. The extracts were coded, grouped than promoting themselves; were written by studios with more thematically and each theme given a new code. The extracted than five employees, to reduce the chance of assessing the codes were emergent and iteratively defined to arrive at the development of hobby projects; were written after the agile final set of codes. manifesto was published, since we can not assume that people C. Assessing agile in the industry had an awareness of the agile mindset before this date. A postmortem in the games industry is “a document In order to understand the root cause of why the inter- that summarises the project development experience” [1]. It viewed game studios crunch, we looked into the company’s strongly focuses on reflecting on what went right and what development process. We wanted to see if there can be any went wrong during the development. It aims to acknowledge correlation between the level of agility and the amount of the issues of development in a constructive way so that the crunch. We have used the Objective, Principles and Practices team can learn and improve for the next project. Postmortems (OPP) Framework by Soundararajan’s et al. [7] to assess are often shared on dedicated websites, such as Gamasutra, to how much the companies adhere to the agile principles. From disseminate knowledge within the industry. the principles given by Soundararajan et al. we have chosen In the second phase we conducted interviews with staff the following six that we indirectly asked about during our from four different game studios, selected through convenience interviews: frequent delivery of working software, empowering sampling. The interview questions were based on the findings teams of motivated individuals, accommodating change, con- from the related literature and the postmortems. For example, tinual stakeholder communication and collaboration, frequent we noticed in the related work [1] that the games industry reflection and improvement, as well as constant development would often influence people to personally crunch without pace. We chose to exclude technical excellence, simplicity and being told to. We made sure to take this into consideration striving for customer satisfaction from the interviews as a pre- when constructing our questions. emptive precaution since we determined that the interviewees Through the interviews we expected to get an insight into might get into a defensive stance and would potentially provide why the industry crunches, what impact crunch has on the em- biased answers if asked about these issues. It is unlikely that ployee and the product, and how many of the agile principles an employee of a technology company would say ‘no’ when aims for technical excellence strives the organisations fulfils.