Crunch has been a necessary evil not just in game development but other types of development as well. The idea of working long hours has been embraced by game developers to complete a certain project and has unfortunately become a norm. I have had my days as a game producer once, I recall people packing up toothbrushes and food for their over-stay in the office because it's days prior to launch and the game isn't playable yet. On Sunday mornings, when the week ends, we would go have some beer, go home, get around 5 hours of quality sleep and go back to the office to finish up the game.
A post at Waypoint uncovers Tanya Short's observations and what she has to say about how crunch is now an epidemic in the workplace, particularly in software development. The article also shows various reasons why developers work themselves to death. She then shortlists the reasons why the game industry has adopted and painfully justified crunch into ten distinctive characteristics, and then shares it online in a crusade against crunch and that we can work without it.
Short also emphasizes that we conspire our own horrible long work hours because we prefer overwork over risks of being idle. In the end, crunch time may be inevitable and we forgive ourselves when doing so it is really up to us if we continue crunching or not.
"The truth is that many game developers crunch ourselves. We choose the risks of overwork over the risks of idleness. We are conspirators in our own self-destruction, whether we work for big companies or we work for ourselves. Even as we say we disapprove, we also tend to say it is necessary, or unavoidable, or some other word that absolves us of our decisions."
-Game designer Tanya Short, as reported by Gamasutra.com
What is crunch?
Personally, I would call this the Mufasa moment when the king of lions is hanging on a cliff about to fall off a stampede of wildebeest and Scar is just there on top staring at you. At this point, either you pull your strength altogether and get back on track or just fall and find another job. I have had my own shares of crunch time and I have to literally live in the office until the game is back on track. I was one of the game producers of some small time online and mobile game bundled together and our schedules were constantly pushed back due to feature creeps - read all about this. Anyway, I have to admit, doing crunch for a game or for any other development feels really horrible, but in the end you reap the rewards, plus you can smirk about it and say, 'hey, I just got out of a difficult situation.'
For technicalities, crunch is a point at which the development team has lost all hope, thinking that they have failed to achieve milestones needed to successfully launch the game as scheduled. The term is widely used in the video game industry, particularly development and main reasons stay the same, the work is complex since games require artistic and aesthetic requirements on top of programming.
According to Short, science proves all the time that crunch is harmful for developer and product. She adds that it's a lifestyle that is not good for people with disabilities, dependents, and has other life passions since you will be working over 45 hours a week and then doing it nonstop for a couple or more weeks will certainly harm not just the worker's body but the quality of the game itself. She ends her point that doing so is also not efficient. Ultimately, her philosophy is that while crunch may be necessary, being aware of the problems first-hand is one step to develop something without doing crunch time. Here's a video of students crunching over a due game.
