The Cog is What Makes The Machine Go

(I'd been putting #Blapril instead of #Blapril2020 in the posts. Oh yay. Guess I'm going to have to go fix that.)




What to write about Developer/Creator Appreciation Week of #Blapril?

That you have my sympathy.

You're already in an impossible position --attempting to please a (very) fickle audience, while at the same time maintain your own sanity-- and then on top of it you're typically crapped upon salary-wise by your employer and told what a "privilege" it is to work in the video games industry as an excuse. When you decide to deviate from an implicitly defined "formula" for video games, the gatekeepers come out of the woodwork to tell you that "you're doing it wrong" to be polite about it.

In short, the video games industry is a microcosm of what our pre-pandemic lives were like, but played out in public and all over the internet.

It's not as if people were going to follow the foibles of Bob's Plumbing and Propane* all over Reddit, but I can guarantee you that any post about Star Wars: The Old Republic on Facebook will result in at least a decent number of commenters saying "I can't believe this shitty game is still around, and who would ever play this piece of shit is beyond me."

For starters.

It's like seeing an ad for Ivory Soap --yes, it still exists, people-- and waiting for the inevitable "P&G is in league with SATAN!!!" comments from conspiracy theorists who thought the old P&G logo described a hidden connection to Satanists that was only revealed to a chosen few.

Or hearing the "Paul is Dead" refrain from people who still think Paul McCartney died in a car crash in the mid 60s, prior to Sargent Pepper's release.**

Besides, if there's anybody who had a deal with the Devil, it has to be Keith Richards.

***

I'd rather not crush anybody's hopes and dreams (tm), but if you're getting into the IT field --let alone the video games industry-- you have to realize that the early days of video games (70s through the 90s) are long gone, and Corporate America (tm) and the MBA people have invaded the video games industry and turned it into just another corporate drone kind of life, where the investors reign supreme.

Oh, there are exceptions out there, but in general you have to realize that video game development is a job like any other, and upper management typically looks at the developer/creator as just another cog in the machine. If you think otherwise, go listen to a quarterly investor call for a company such as EA or Activision/Blizzard.

Once, several years ago, I fielded a call from a comp sci club at a local university, who wanted me to talk to their computer science students about the exciting things I was doing in the field I was in. The presumption was that because of my field, I was getting to do all sorts of cutting edge work in IT.

"Um," I said, "I'm not sure if I'm the right guy to talk to your club."

"Why not?"

"Because about half of a job in my field is spent in meetings."

"Meetings?" I could almost hear the guy's optimism burst and deflate.

"Yeah. That and bureacracy, because [my field] is the butt end of the universe in IT. And if someone knows your name, it's because the crap is hitting the fan and people are yelling your name. If nobody knows your name, it means everything is working right, and then people wonder why they're paying so much for your time and effort."

***

So yes, developers, I hear you. I see you, and I appreciate all of your efforts.

Yes, I see the shitstorms that come out of saying things such as the story being just as important in video games as other parts, and I see the layoffs that hit your company when you still had record profits. I see you being thrown under the bus when upper management wants a sacrificial lamb for when nobody at the top could provide consistent and cohesive direction. And I see you when you are marginalized, made to feel small --or unwanted-- or stressed beyond belief when the company wants you to work 80-100 hour work weeks.

Yeah, I see you. You have my respect and my love, and I wish I had won the lottery so that I could create a game company that would do things right for their developers.

But since Powerball hasn't been so kind (not like it's ever going to, let's be real here), I can only give you my love and support.

#Blapril2020




*I have no idea if this company exists, but it wouldn't shock me if it does.

**Newsflash: Paul is not only still alive, but had a recent album release and even played Lady Madonna on the One World Together At Home fundraiser.

In Praise of the Code Jockey

I don't talk about my work at all on this blog for obvious reasons*, but at one time in the (now distant) past I worked for a software development house. Sorry, the software involved was CAD/CAM/CAE --the design software companies use to create new products-- so it's not like I worked for Microprose or something.

While I wasn't a Dev myself, I worked on the Software QA end of things. I was one of the people who designed and built the testcases, maintained and expanded our own testing software, and helped debugging the thorny problems by quickly zeroing in on which software code change was the likely culprit. It was tough work, particularly for a guy who came from a science background who puttered around coding in his spare time, but it taught me a lot about how to code, how to design software, and how to handle group dynamics**.

There were projects I was assigned to that pushed me to the limit --physically and mentally-- and I will be forever grateful to my wife for tolerating me during those insane hours. But no matter how hard or long I worked, the Devs worked even harder. When I was pulling 80 hour work weeks, they were hitting 90. I would frequently get to work at 4 AM so I could make progress without having people drop by, and there would always be about 3-5 Devs in the building, coding away.***

You'd think that the hours and demands would keep me from wanting to make the jump from QA to Developer, but you'd be wrong. I looked up to those people, because I admired their coding skill and their drive. They were creative, they were fun, and yet they were serious about getting the work finished. It irked them when we had to release the software when they knew there were bugs in the system, but the decision was never theirs.****

So you can imagine the smile on my face when I read Ravanel Griffon's post at Ravalation about Developer Appreciation Week.

***

The idea is a simple one --to acknowledge the devs in the game industry-- and give them a big thumbs up. Give a shout out to the dev team (or teams) that you admire the most and why you like them. Basically, make them feel welcome.

And believe me, I can do that.

When I criticize a game, I make a clear distinction between the game and the dev staff itself. The dev staff almost never control the release schedule, they're on a tight timeline, and they're chronically underpaid for the amount of hours they put in. I knew a guy who used to work for a dev team that put together Betrayal at Krondor, and I heard stories about how they had to do it for the love of coding and designing games, as the money was definitely not the same for the game devs as it was for other software developers. They have to work with tradeoffs and limitations of the hardware, they recognize that people will find weaknesses that they never envisioned, and that meeting expectations is often a fool's errand.

We gamers don't exactly help our cause either, as we are frequently cranky, overly nitpicky, and demanding of a standard that nobody could ever hope to achieve. And if the devs ever do catch lightning in a bottle, they set themselves up for an impossible standard that gamers will try to force them to meet.

But here's a shout out to all the devs out there, trying their best to make gaming fun and meaningful.

***

Oh, you wanted some specific dev team?

Well, I think I'd have to go with giving some love to the original SWTOR development team. You know, the ones who had to deal with he inflated expectations that accompany the Bioware name, the KOTOR brand, the Star Wars Galaxies loyalists, the amount of money EA spent on development, and EA's own promotion that SWTOR was going to be a WoW killer. With a expectations like that, nothing less than WoW-like numbers and subscriptions would mean success.

And as we know, SWTOR did not reach those numbers.

Was that the fault of the devs? No. They made an MMO that was essentially "WoW in space", but with specific class stories with light or dark side endings. The technical challenges of the MMO genre meant that SWTOR couldn't expand the Star Wars universe and provide persistent changes based on your choices (such as with other Bioware titles such as KOTOR, Mass Effect, or Dragon Age) without massive use of phasing like WoW used. The devs felt that in SWTOR the journey and the ability to play around in the Star Wars universe was the important part of the MMO*****, while the semi-transient MMO community believes "the game begins at max level."

In spite of all of those expectations and challenges and misreading of tea leaves, the original SWTOR devs produced a very solid MMO that continues to hold its own over the years. I still love the classic game (L1-50), and based on how the mini-Reds have reacted to the class stories, those stories still hold up well several years on.

SWTOR had to change in order to survive with a steady stream of updates, end game content, and switching to F2P to stem the bleeding. To compare with another heavily hyped AAA title, I'm actually surprised that Wildstar is still around because I thought they'd waited too long to convert to F2P. SWTOR has not only survived but gotten mentions on the E3 presentations from EA, and it would have been all for naught if those first devs hadn't decided to change the game rather than simply circle the wagons.

So here's to the original SWTOR dev team, who hoped to catch lightning in a bottle but ended up having to change the game's entire focus to survive. It was no small task, but they met the challenge and left us a legacy.






*I mean, really. I've no idea why some people natter on about their jobs on blogs, because you're just simply begging for trouble. When I was hired at all of my jobs, one of the requirements for the gig was to sign non-disclosure agreements, and I've seen people fired from their jobs for what I'd term innocent discussions on social media. So why risk it?

**Also known as "how to run meetings and keep from going nuts when people don't listen to you."

***There was once an April Fools Day prank played on the entire development staff where every time you opened a new window on the SGI workstations from 3 AM through Noon the machine would play a little jingle and make a weird laugh. The first person to discover it loved to come in at 2 AM to work on his graphics coding when nobody else was around, and so he opened a new window at around 3 AM and he nearly fainted. I heard later that for a few short moments he thought his workstation was possessed.

****I and several other QA people were also on the release team, and we frequently argued for more time to fix the bugs, because we could see the impending train wreck a bad release would make. The release manager would also agree, but we were overruled by senior management who had their own agendas.

*****My evidence for that is the MMO itself. WoW is designed to get you to max level as quickly as possible, Wildstar went totally old school and recreated the attunement quests to even begin to raid, and LOTRO is designed to immerse yourself in Middle-earth. If the journey wasn't as important to SWTOR, we wouldn't have had 8 separate class stories and plenty of group quests per planet.