'Red Dead Redemption 2' May Push Games Forward, But Crunch Is Holding The Industry Back
HOW THE WEST IS RUN
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Mat: Hey Steve, do you like cowboys?

Steve: Um, yes! I do like cowboys.

Mat: Do you like the 40-hour work week?

Steve: I love the 40-hour work week.

Mat: Then do I have a piece that you should read! On Sunday night, writer Harold Goldberg published a long look at the development of the Rockstar Games' open world Western "Red Dead Redemption 2" for Vulture. The game is coming out later this month — it's been in development for seven years, basically since the first "Red Dead Redemption" was shipped in 2010.

In 2013, Rockstar released "Grand Theft Auto V." It made… approximately all the money in the world? Now they're out here talking about their new game, and something that Dan Houser — lead writer at Rockstar for this series and previous "Grand Theft Autos" — said while interviewed for Vulture was really worrying.

He said that 100-hour work weeks were happening to get "Redemption 2" out the door. That statement has a lot of people in the games industry really, really upset. They're long tired of seeing long overtime periods — as it's commonly referred to in the industry, "crunch" — leading to worker burnout and not verifiably better end products. That's what we're here to talk about.

Steve: I haven't played the first "Red Dead," but I did play "Grand Theft Auto V," and to hear that "100-hour work week" thing is both alarming and, given the depth and scale of those games, it makes sense, I guess? For me it raises this question of "do video games need to be this big?" Is there a world where Rockstar isn't working 100-hour weeks, are there places where other AAA studios can release these massive, big-budget titles and not grind their employees into dust?

It seems like something that's intractably tied up with video games and with creative industries as a whole; this notion that if you're not dumping literally almost all of the available hours in a single week into what you're working on, why are you doing it?

Jenn Sandercock, author of "Edible Games," started a weekly 30-minute break. Her managers warned her against it. Thread continues. 

Mat: I think that what we're seeing with video games and crunch is, like you mentioned, an issue of scale. "GTA" and "Red Dead" are enormous games, and every major installment in those series has been pushing the perceived boundaries of the form. Rockstar basically invented the open-world genre with "Grand Theft Auto 3," and as it has become an increasingly dominant form in AAA games, there have been ways it has stagnated as a form, or plateaued in terms of design principles. Rockstar focuses on pushing those boundaries. They do that and can do that because they've made a bunch of money in the past..

Rockstar is made up of nine studios, so if we're talking about long work weeks, we're likely not talking about a team of a few dozen — we're looking at thousands of people working like that. With video games, just because of the sheer complexity of what goes into them, you're right — somehow it tracks that it'd take a lot of work. What doesn't track is how any one person working 100 hours in a week is justified. Of course, Dan Houser was quick to say that he didn't mean the entire company works long weeks like that.

Steve: He later specified to Kotaku that this "100-work week" was just limited to the writing team, and that he himself was included in this crunch time. So that's not so much a dismissal, like "this didn't happen." Or even less than ideal. He acknowledged that it exists and that he participates in it. Which is sort of the problem?

Mat: He further defended himself by saying they don't "ask or expect" anybody to work long hours.

Steve: Oh yeah! Totally aren't requiring anyone to work 100 hours out of the 168 hours in a week.

Mat: Right. The whole thing is colored by the account Goldberg sketches in the piece of the early days at Rockstar, where that's how Dan, his brother Sam [president of Rockstar] and others worked, setting a similar example. There are past instances just in the "Red Dead" franchise with Rockstar failing to be a positive example against crunch. There was the Rockstar Spouse letter, penned by anonymous spouses of developers who alleged, among other abuses, that 12-hour crunch shifts were made mandatory.

We shouldn't have to explain why working for hours on end, often without receiving overtime pay, is bad for people's morale and physical health. It's just a fact. That crunch is seen as a necessary evil of video game development and shrugged off or downplayed like it is by Houser in the interview and his follow-up statement is despicable, and this is far from the first time its been pointed out.

Ryan McCabe of Certain Affinity recounts a personal experience with the toll of crunch. Thread continues. 

Steve: I mean that raises the question of where does this start? Is it because video games are the most impossibly complex to produce product on any market-driven timescale, or is it because of the stereotypical, romantic nineties image of guys sitting in a basement all-night coding games? Do you think it starts with the nature of making video games or with the folks who've gotten themselves in the position where they're bosses now, and they're shaping workplace culture?

Mat: As someone who works in a creative industry, and from what I've read of the history of games, I think it does have a lot to do with the bootstrapped, up-all-night fantasy of pouring your passion into a project and then reaping the rewards of that effort. The thing that fantasy always elides is the hard work is ultimately for the sake of making the product, and not ever for the sake of indulging or cultivating those passions.

With games as recent as "The Witcher 3," you have a higher-up at CD Projekt Red who talked about crunch as though this is just the way things are, but I don't think they have many people enthusiastically agreeing with them on that point. There are lots of people who shrug their shoulders and say that's accurate, but I don't think crunch has a reputation these days of being lauded? At best its seen as necessary, and that's the end product of early development in the culture of the industry working like that.

It also stems from early games industry contract work, where individual programmers were expected to deliver things on a monthly turnaround for a floppy disk — so there was time crunch imposed upon them by the earliest managers and bosses in the system.

 Rockstar Games

Steve: I understand that deadlines exist and there's a need to lay out a roadmap for products like video games. You need to deliver it at some point, and where not delivering on a certain date becomes an issue. At the same time, it sort of feels revolutionary to advocate for the most obvious things like "people should be able to spend time with their family" and "have a healthy work-life balance." It's wild that, somehow, the management structures in the games industry aren't wise against it?

Mat: Even if they don't see it as necessary, they don't reform the management practices that inevitably lead to it. That's just bad management.

Crunch compounds with other labor issues in games, including discrimination because of gender or race, and with mismanagement in other regards. Not just "who is doing what for how long," but with how projects are funded, whether or not there's even a runway on which to make and ship a game. Crunch is something that's a fallback, and is not desired by the managers. It makes all the other ways in which making games is hard, and where the industry is exclusionary or not supportive to the people in it, that much worse.

People are critiquing this 100-hour comment in part because it appears in this same article where they're talking about eight foot high scripts and stuff — like it's a marketing point. It's so ingrained that there's a portion of the audience that buys games who will see that and their first reaction won't be "that's horrible," but "Wow, people have worked really hard on this thing I'm about to go spend 60 dollars on."

Steve: This might be a large tangent — but with purchasing games there's this constant framing in terms of of the value that you're getting as a player. It's no surprise that Rockstar, in this exclusive piece with Vulture, has all these bullet points to go through. They want you to know that, if you're thinking about buying this game, that — I hate to use this phrase — you're getting your money's worth? I think popular games criticism has always been framed by "should you buy it, is it worth your money?" Play time is one element of that, and if you only get a few hours it's like "the developers cheated me out of my money. As if the experience is only valuable in however long it distracts you.

The other thing I want to square with this is that, in the Vulture piece, Dan Houser says something like "after they made 'Grand Theft Auto 3' they made all this money, and money was never an issue for them." They even paint themselves as outside of the games industry, like "we don't really go to E3, we don't really give press exclusives." For Dan Houser to be like "we spent 100-hour work weeks to get this game out the door," it's like — did you really need to?

Jared Rea, a former Social Media Manager for Nintendo, talks about working as a Quality Assurance tester for Atari. Thread continues. 

Mat: I want to be perfectly clear. If the rest of Rockstar signed a sworn statement saying "We only work reasonable work weeks with plenty of vacation time," and were able to provide receipts — and really what happened was this core creative writing team, for a limited period of time, worked themselves 100 hours a week to finish the script, I'd still think that was bad.

It'd still be unhealthy. Even if it was a choice only Dan Houser made for himself, I wouldn't say that is something worth being proud of. That speaks to something that goes way beyond games, and even beyond creative work. Despite having norms that were fought for and have been protected by legislation — and also eroded by legislation and deregulation — having an individual drive where you romanticize the idea of pouring your all into one product is not uncommon.

I fall prey to this. I don't think I know anybody who would say that they don't sometimes. But there are stops and checks that can be implemented, especially if you have $6 billion from "Grand Theft Auto V," that you can implement at your own studio so that even you, the boss, don't end up working 100-hour weeks. You can hire people to tell you to knock that off.

If crunch is a necessity, then it really does bring into question whether it's even worth it. And I think the answer is "No," but that won't stop people from buying games. That's not even necessarily going to stop me from buying "Red Dead" because if you're going to be plugged in to games at large, you're pressured to look at AAA output, regardless of the problems inherent in its content, let alone in its creation.

Adam Boyes, CEO of Iron Galaxy Studios, describes how he fed crunch culture in his earliest jobs in games. Thread continues.  

Steve: You had mentioned earlier today that reading this news impacted your enthusiasm for picking up this game, knowing that it was built on using a labor practice that, to say plainly, really sucks.

Mat: I should clarify, when I said that it wasn't as though this is news to me.

Steve: No!

Mat: If you were to ask me at the Gamestop register, "Red Dead" in hand, "Do I think that crunch happened in the creation of this game?" I would say, "Yes, and that's bad." I think what this piece really threw into focus with me, and that the statement Hauser gave to Kotaku hasn't resolved for me, is the idea of lauding that bad practice.

Steve: So, not buying this game is not going to help the problem of crunch.

Mat: No. It's not going to help the artists and programmers who did pour however much time and effort they did into building that world. If you don't buy it. If you don't play it, their work gets seen by one fewer person.

Steve: This was brought up when Telltale laid off 250 some people with zero notice, and rightly made a lot people upset that this critically acclaimed studio — that, arguably, reinvigorated the adventure game genre — could do this to their employees. There was talks of potentially boycotting the final season of "The Walking Dead," in response to Telltale prioritizing concluding their game over paying their former employees severance. But there were some laid-off employees who publicly voiced that they just really wanted to see this thing come to market.

So I guess boycotting "Red Dead Redemption 2" because of opposition to what is, clearly, terrible labor practice, in some ways could hurt the folks that worked on it. If things are going to get better, the change has to come within the industry. And there's a nascent effort for unionization within the games industry.

Accessibility consultant and speedrunner Clint Lexa, who has hemiparesis, explains how crunch heightens disability issues. Thread continues. 

Mat: It has to be industry-wide because we've seen this play out even with small independent teams where the self-directed choice to overwork oneself in service of finishing a product runs rampant. In that regard, Rockstar is not all that different or particularly more evil, scale and resources aside.

I've written about games that, themselves, deal with the demands and realities of labor in their stories before. This is something that Rockstar has not shied from in the past either. In fact, you could say that all of their big open world games deal with representing a world where work is a fundamental part of the story they're telling. In that regard, it's disappointing that Rockstar games are very easy to criticize for being fairly juvenile or for having fairly reductive takes on these things.

If you, the player, want to live your Wild West fantasy that is going to, in marketing speak, create a living world and really respect the realities of the Wild West as it pertains to race, especially indigenous peoples, and as it pertains to exploitation of laborers and of sex workers, all these things — if you are then not going to respect someone whose job it is to evaluate that game and who problematizes the process it took to make it, then why are you even interested in the story the game is trying to tell you in the first place? 

Then again, in this Vulture piece Houser proudly says that you can skip most of the story by pressing a button — which is his way of saying "by shooting everyone in front of you." So if that's what you're ultimately there for, then my appeal is landing on indifferent ears anyway.

Games critic Jackson Tyler weighs in on why "crunch actually costs more" is an ineffective argument. 

Steve: That's the thing. The popular picture of "Grand Theft Auto" and to some degree the rest of Rockstar's catalog, is that they are escapist fantasies where you can do everything and anything with little consequence. But in terms of narrative they are games that are all highly critical of the world they exist in and present. "Grand Theft Auto" roasts just about everything in popular culture — light beer is "Pisswasser," Facebook is "Lifeinvader," and cable news is "Weazel News" — but they've yet to include a single overworked game developer. The closest they've gotten to any sort of public self-reflection is poking fun at the gamer stereotype in the form of Jimmy De Santa who loves to play "Call Of-" er, "Righteous Slaughter".

Mat: I don't doubt that there are people at Rockstar, even probably some higher-ups, who see crunch as a real issue.

Steve: On one end you have the folks who are developing video games as a passion project, and thus feel like they have to dump as much time into it as possible to "break in." On the other end, you have Rockstar, which is a company with thousands of employees, arguably the most successful developer on the planet, still struggling to meet deadlines.

It's kind of fitting that we are publishing this on National Boss Day, but I can't think of a situation in which "passion" hasn't been turned around and used to exploit the passionate. How do we stop individuals running on two hours of sleep a night because they just really want to get their game out there being used to justify or excuse industry-wide crunch? I think that starts with the boss.

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