Here's an interesting little polemic from a blog called, Lost Garden. Under the header, 'The joyful life of the lapsed game developer', the writer makes some familiar points about the hell that is modern videogame production, pointing out the long hours, lack of recognition and creative hopelessness of it all. Yes, we've heard a lot of this before, notably from EA Spouse, but Lost Garden brings some facts and figures into its analysis:
"There are more lapsed game developers in the world than there are current game developers. Let's look at some back of the napkin numbers. The average career in the game industry is 5 years. With 800 mainstream games a year and an average team size of 40 developers, we have a rough population of 32,000. If 20% leave a year, that's roughly 6,000 new lapsed game developers every year. Over the past decade, that rapidly adds up to 50,000 or more lapsed game developers."
This reminds me of the employee churn rates cited by Eric Schlosser in his new fast food expose, Chew On This (The Guardian has an extract here). Of course, the five year figure given on Lost Garden is much better than the 3-4 month job span Schlosser attributes to young burger flippers - and you have to hope that creating videogames (even endless sequels) is more fulfilling than chanting "would you like fries with that?" 6,000 times a day.
But from what this lapsed developer claims there do seem to be subtle similarities: a high-pressure environment dominated by young staff, the treadmill-like working practices, a pay packet that fails to reflect the hours that go into the role. And of course, both industries have become scapegoats for a generation of over-weight kids with turbo-charged attention spans. Does this mean the next Supersize Me or Fast Food Nation is going to come from videogaming? Is Morgan Spurlock going to report, bleary-eyed and chronically depressed, on a month spent testing game code for 20 hours a day?
Or is the Lost Garden out of step with current working practices?
