Give it a read if you have a chance. Being a game developer is grueling work and I don't envy it.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Giving Credit Where It's Due
My Kotaku feature this month highlights a problem I hear of countless times in my conversations with game developers: The industry's problematic crediting practices. At a glance it may seem like an inside-baseball issue -- what difference does a game's credits list make to your experience as a player? -- but I hoped to try to illustrate the psychological and emotional impact these issues have on developers, surely with far-reaching implications on their investment in their work, in the sincerity and artistic generosity of their contributions, and in the future of games as a professional industry for creative people.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
I really liked that article. Super sad, though.
(I may have said this on twitter. I don't remember.)
Noah
fake edit: yeah, I totally said almost this exact phrase on twitter. *blush*
That's where gaming celebrities like you and us come in Leigh.
We gotta get out there and get papped flashing our knickers at an awards ceremony.
Then uh..... then we go from there.
Good article and best of luck to the IGDA.
I hadn't really thought of it before this, but I wonder to what extent the people behind games should look to the practices of Hollywood in terms of tools for labor organization.
There are going to have to be sweeping changes to the industry very soon regarding this issue. And they WILL happen. There are too many people coming in from outside our insular little industry who known how things work in more established varieties of entertainment, such as TV and movies.
I was speaking to a professional writer at a party earlier this year who worked on a VERY high profile game as a freelancer, basically detailing the entire plot. They eventually went with some plot changes suggested by others but the majority of the dialogue in the game was still his creation. He was guaranteed a place in the credits.
Nothing.
Now he has to either get involved in complicated legal rigmaroles to get it sorted, or leave it and have to explain it every time someone asks about it on his portfolio.
I've lost count of the amount of games I worked on as a QA Lead and got no credit for. As you say, it's held as a bargaining chip. Not only can it be used to keep someone at a company until a project is finished but it can even be used as a tool to keep a person from getting hired elsewhere. If you start work on a project as junior designer, work your way up to senior designer over the course of a long project and have a major impact on the game, when you end up "accidentally" listed in the credits as "junior", how is that going to look on your CV? When you tell the truth about it, it just looks like you're lying because the credits are right there.
The whole issue annoys me a lot and I appreciate your attempt to bring it a little further into the public light.
That's horrifying. I've been working for almost 3 years in my first industry gig, and getting your name in the credits of a game you worked on is basically your initiation into the industry. If for whatever reason I was left out, I imagine that would make my career significantly more difficult. Especially when you have made so many sacrifices to try to make your project great...that would be an extremely resonant slap in the face.
The game industry has a long way to go. Overall it lacks in method and organization...companies are still figuring out how to efficiently make a good game. For now, long periods of crunch and other sacrifices are the norm, but realistically there shouldn't be. People who accept this as a necessity are lying to themselves; if games can't be made without such sacrifices, the implication is that games aren't actually profitable when you treat your employees as well as other industries do...and I think that's a silly idea, especially when the industry is as large as it is. There's clearly demand; the process just needs to be refined.
That said, I'm not surprised to see this kind of slight occurring. I have friends in companies that, for example, won't give them a bonus for a completed project unless they're still at the company 8 months after the project ships. These kinds of things seem like blatant underhanded tactics to get employees to stay.
How about improving the actual company so that people want to stay?
Is this really such a big deal?
I just put all the games I've worked on on my resume and that's that.
If my name were missing from the credits of one of them I'd probably never even find out.
Certainly it's lame and disrespectful but I have a hard time believing it's actually hurting anyone's career
It's definitely a major problem, and I wholeheartedly support the efforts of the IGDA in this area. But all is definitely not lost.
One of my previous employers it seemed to me actually credited too many people on projects. I would look at credits for some of the titles I worked on and find what seemed like several hundred different administrative assistants for various executives on there, which rubbed me the wrong way a bit sometimes. They also credited every single QA person, even the third party contractors and publisher testers, which is as it should be.
Generally for developers the policy was that you would get a full credit if you were on the project for 40% or more of the total length. If it was less than 40% then you got an "additional" credit (Additional Art, Design etc). Our producer would also always send out the credits list for team review before the end of the project so we could ask for changes if necessary. The changes you asked for weren't guaranteed, but the credits were never a surprise. This was at a wholly owned subsidiary of a very large publisher.
This is a great article, and an example of the type of games journalism that rarely, if ever, gets done (but which should be done more often).
One little nitpick ... you should probably explicitly mention why your sources have been granted anonymity, even if the reason appears obvious (i.e. attaching their names could negatively affect their careers).
It may not actually cause serious damage to someone's career but it is most certainly small, petty and pathetic. It shows just how unprofessional the games industry still is. It is also just silly - it costs nothing at all to credit someone and, just like the occasional "Thank You" it does wonders for morale.
Post a Comment