I have been working flat out for 3 years to get this degree as a mature student.
I know what long hours are as i work 2 jobs as well as the degree.

For me EA has a point about improving working methods and making sure you get the best people you can to work for you. But its not about woking harder Its about working smarter. ( commonsense is it not)

Personaly In life i have found that people are more poductive when they feel appiciated, when EA talk about rewarding their employees perhapse they should consider somthing else other than throwing money at them.

I wanted to go in to games becaurse i wanted to make fun games and id hope id have fun doing it along the way, it seems to me i sould reconsider my options and become a plumber or a builder at least ill get some time with my family =)

I guess what im saying is that we all need a balance bettween our work and personal life.

If were not happy with the way things are we should change it. Lets destoy the culture that destorys our personal lifes for the sake of all our familys and those of who’m will followus in the future so that this cool way to have fun will still be fun to make=)

See http://www.igda.org/qol/open_letter.php

I’m honestly just flabbergasted by how damaging EA is to the industry.

Walter, I’m definitely including Maxis as part of EA. But also, wouldn’t you consider the EA sports games as more than mediocre, for what they set out to do?

I would, though I usually don’t think about sports games much, partly because I just don’t play many of them, but also because they seem relatively isolated in terms of the discourse that goes on between videogames. Not that they’re not important, of course.

(Incidentally, the interesting thing about Maxis is that they’ve managed to retain their identity and status under the EA umbrella. I think that they just might be the sole exception to the rule.)

Malcolm, I agree with Aaron that we can look to the film industry to see examples of good work being created in a money-oriented, commercialized setting. But I’d modify Aaron’s comment to not take the example of shoestring-budget-sized film projects, and instead look at mega-budget film projects with huge teams. With small shoestring budgets, in many ways it’s more possible to make artistically interesting work; since you have no money for visual spectacle, it’s all got to come down to making something really compelling on a personal level, which requires talent and hard work, but not lots of money. (Granted, you often need money to attract the best talent, but not always.)

There are plenty of cases of big budget film productions resulting in some great work. My favorite films tend to be the smaller budget ones, because they tend to be more intimate, but who could deny that big budget films such as The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca or Dr. Zhivago or Saving Private Ryan or Blade Runner are amazing works of popular art.

Game production differs some from film production though, especially in this relatively early stage in the history of game development, where the technology is still so much in flux. With big budget game productions, you have this huge ocean liner of a team that’s can be difficult to be flexible and spontaneously creative with. And with so much money on the line, the team managers (e.g., the executive producer, as Pausch describes) are going to be pretty risk-averse.

I think the way artistically interesting work can still happen in this situation, is with team managers who really know what they’re doing, and up front can come up with a design that takes an acceptable amount of design risk — a design that is similar enough to past designs to ensure it won’t fail but different enough that it will be interesting. However there may not be a whole lot of room for iteration and improvisation during production, since signficantly changing course is so expensive. It’s tough.

In such big teams, it’s the team managers steering the ocean liner that are going to create the framework for an artistically interesting work to be created (or not). The “factory-like” team then executes within this framework. Although each team member may have only their slice of the project they’re building, each individual piece need to be awesome if something great is to be achieved. So both the managers and the team itself need to perform well; both are required to pull off something good.

Another analogy I like is building a cathedral; you have master craftspeople sculpting all those faces and statues and elaborate decoration, probably in harsh factory-like conditions, within the overall structure laid out by the head architect(s). I think many would say the great cathedrals are complex works of art. (Hmm, maybe some would say the construction of the Pyramids is a more accurate analogy. Although it appears that the popular belief that slaves were cruelly forced to build the Pyramids may just be a Hollywood myth.)

It happens in movie studios and theatre companies all the time. You can read numerous tales of shoestring productions that almost didn’t make it without everyone burning out, but ended up being amazing anyway.

(Pausch writes that 40% of CMU ETC grads get hired at EA, plus 10 summer interns per year.)

Are there any such figures for grads of Georgia Tech’s IDT program? (Not necessarily for getting hired at EA.) I realize it’s not as production oriented as CMU’s ETC program: it’d be interesting to know what sort of impact that has on IDT grad employment in the game industry.

Whatever the case, I know that I personally would want nothing to do with EA from a production/design standpoint (unless we’re talking about Maxis). While it might be a meritocracy as far as internal advancement goes, it’s quite obviously a mediocracy when it comes to content. And in truth, one has to wonder if a mediocracy of content doesn’t really wind up hampering the supposed meritocracy: if only mediocre ideas get greenlighted, this should naturally favor people who come up with appropriately mediocre ideas, rather than the best ones.