Besides challenging designers to perform impossible tasks, Day One of GDC also challenged Hank Howie to solve the current-most prevailing industry question in a 60-minute session. Better Games (and Quality of Life) in 40 hours per week drew a massive crowd. It was available to all attendees, not just the ones who panned out the big bucks, so it sold out within milliseconds of the doors opening. Unfortunately, that meant that there were a lot of casuals in attendance and few people who could actually make anything happen were able to get in the door.
Essentially Howie offered solutions and advice, summarising some of the common themes that came out of Tuesday's QoL full-day tutorial. He basically argued that to make both better games and happier employees, significant planning needed to come in at the early stages, and managers needed to stick to schedules without forcing workers into six months of crunch hell. The session over-ran, as expected, as Howie had to field countless questions from disgruntled (and exhausted) workers, and allow one or two infomercials from representatives of other organisations.
QoL was a hot topic this year, or perhaps more attention was paid to it because of the explosion of pubic awareness of the issue after the publication of a post by the now-famous ea_spouse. At the IGDA VIP luncheon, Francois Dominic Larameé was given one of the newly coveted Most Valuable Player awards for his work this year on the organisation's QoL White Paper.
I also met a couple of guys in the bar on Tuesday night who had a UK-based company providing assurance to publishers that games would be done on time, by working with developers to review early schedules in order to make sure the intentions proposed are realistic. More companies of this sort could continue to alter the models utilised by the industry, but in the end should have a positive impact on employee quality of life.
Next time, however, any session intended to address this burning topic should get a bigger room.
