Making games can be a grueling, all-consuming process. John Davison talks to developers about the significant emotional challenges of this creative and commercial endeavor.
When you fire up a new video game, some elements are easy to appreciate immediately. Pretty graphics, a rousing soundtrack, or fluid animations can leap off the screen and make you thankful for all the hard work that went in to the game's creation. However, beneath that veneer lie untold hours of struggle and sacrifice. As six industry veterans explain, creating an amazing game takes more than your time and technical prowess. It requires a bit of your heart as well. Despite occasional media flare-ups triggered by complaints about ridiculous working conditions or inconsiderate executive teams, the game-playing populace doesn't often hear about the mental burden shouldered by game creators. Executing on a creative vision, and doing so both on-time and on-budget, imposes an enormous amount of pressure on those involved.
"Making anything creative relies on you putting yourself out there and totally revealing yourself; it's scary," says Greg Zeschuk, who co-founded BioWare with partners Ray Muzyka and Augustine Yip in 1995 and retired last year. He is currently taking some time off from anything to do with games and is producing a YouTube show called The Beer Diaries about the other love of his life. "You need to be willing to be vulnerable in a very public sense. This experience changes when teams get larger and larger; if you're running part of a project, it's pretty natural for it to feel like an extension of yourself."
This sentiment is common among those in creative leadership positions. Ryan Payton is the founder of Camouflaj, a new studio working on the iOS game République, which was successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2012. Payton previously worked as assistant producer on Metal Gear Solid 4 at Kojima Productions, and later spent time as creative director on Halo 4 before leaving 343 Industries in 2011. He concurs with Zeschuk, stating, "In order to make an unforgettable game, I believe the onus is on me to find something I believe in and inject as much of that into the game as possible. I feel that the games I work on are an extension of myself, making game development a very personal and emotionally charged endeavor. I worry that I take a dangerous approach by investing too much emotionally in the development, but this stems from my belief that games should be more than mere 'products.'"
"The emotional journey, for me, looks like a seismograph," says Greg Kasavin of Supergiant Games. Before the success of his game Bastion, on which he was creative director, Kasavin was an associate producer at Electronic Arts on Command & Conquer 3, the producer of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, and later a producer on Spec Ops: The Line at 2K Games. "It's not a curve with peaks and valleys; it's a violent jagged series of near-vertical lines. I don't know how emotionally stable I appear to be, but I know I'm less so than I appear to be. My emotional state changes from day to day, if not multiple times a day. I don't have sustained periods of high or low morale. Small imperceptible things affect me in significant ways."
"In every case the precise emotional journey is different," explains Zeschuk, "though there are a few similarities. When you start a game, it seems like anything is possible; the future is bright and the possibilities are limitless. Fast-forward to the actual production phase, and you suddenly realize that if you want to finish on a reasonable schedule, you need to jettison some stuff; it's helpful to be harsh and cold to do this, even if it's painful. Then, when you're finishing, even if you think what you're making is great, I always felt a bit of trepidation around what people would think of the game. You never really know. We'd always try our best, and put forward our best work, but there's always that risk that folks wouldn't like it. The most likely outcome is that you'd end up with some mixed response, though with varying degrees of happy and unhappy people."
"When you talk about the pressure that individuals at studios go through, most people just think of the EA spouse story," says Pete Hawley, co-founder of Red Robot Labs (disclosure: John Davison currently works alongside Pete Hawley at Red Robot Labs). He is referring to Erin Hoffman's LiveJournal post in November 2004 under the pseudonym "EA Spouse," where she criticized Electronic Arts' poor treatment of employees and the expectation that they work extremely long hours.
The blog prompted a great deal of debate within the games industry at the time and triggered class-action lawsuits against EA, which weren't resolved until 2007. Hawley served as both executive producer and vice president of product development at Electronic Arts in the years after the controversy, where he worked on a number of games, including Burnout Paradise. Prior to this, he worked as development director at Sony Computer Entertainment, was head of production at Lionhead, and was a producer at GT Interactive. "The notoriety of that incident wasn't necessarily a bad thing," he says, "as it brought an aspect of the challenges to light. What everyone focused on at the time wasn't the whole story, though. Most people fixated on the lawsuit and the legal wranglings. What it really brought to light, though, was that studios and individuals go through hell when creating something as awesome as a video game. The emotional journey it takes you on is really, really hard."
"My emotional state changes from day to day, if not multiple times a day."
Regardless of the best intentions of those involved, executives or otherwise, the care and attention required means that work-life balance becomes a major issue on any game project. "It's exciting and energizing, but it's almost a reality-show-type environment," Hawley explains. "You're stuck in a room with a bunch of like-minded individuals, 20- to 30-something dudes. It's just not healthy. It definitely develops these Lord of the Flies-type situations. You've spent so long together that you develop a group craziness. You witness the very pinnacle of sleep-deprived in-jokes, and songs that are unique to the group. To this day I can't hear Journey without thinking of Burnout, because Alex [Ward, Criterion's creative director] would play it every single morning."
Payton is struggling with similar issues and has become increasingly aware of struggling with a healthy work-life balance since starting to work for himself. "I've worked a minimum of 70 hours per week since République began development in November 2011," he explains. "As I did with Halo 4, I only play games, watch movies, and read books that are relevant to République--that's my hobby. Making games is my hobby; it's my passion, and it's my lifeblood, as I liquidated everything I had to get this sucker off the ground. I even sacrificed my relationship with my girlfriend, ending a five-year relationship."
"Thankfully she later took me back and has helped me disconnect a little bit from the emotional demands of my games, which was something I very desperately needed." That disconnection has come in the form of finding something a little more balanced in favor of "real life" as well as game development work. "I still work 70 hours a week and still dream about the game," he explains, "but daily exercise and turning off email after 8 p.m. is actually making me a happier person. Does that mean my emotional investment in game making is waning? I sure hope not. That's probably why I'm afraid to have children."
Jake Kazdal spent much of his career as a designer, illustrator, and artist before forming his own studio, 17-Bit (formerly Haunted Temple Studios). His career includes time working on some cult classics like Space Channel 5 and Rez, as well as working on UI design for Boom Blox at EA and as a concept artist for Command & Conquer 4. His first release as an independent developer is Skulls of the Shogun, which was recently released on Xbox Live as well as for Windows 8 and mobile. Kazdal, like many of those interviewed for this story, has grown up with the games business, and has had two children since his career began.
On the subject of work-life balance within studio culture, he has a lot to say. "This is a serious topic," he states earnestly. "I don't get to spend nearly as much time with my family as I would like or need to. I have two young boys. They're 1 and 3 years old, and the fact is, I need to work a lot to get things done. Regardless of how busy I am, I've started going home and having a normal dinner and bedtime prep with the family twice a week. If I don't, my wife is going to kill me."
"Some nights I'll go back to work from home after the boys go to bed, and unless there is something major burning, I try to spend every minute of my weekends with the family as well," he adds. "Of course, there is always an hour or two of email and the like to distract me in the mornings, but I'm working very hard to spend more time with my family. The boys are growing so fast, and it breaks my heart to only see them a few minutes a day, but I'm sure I'm not alone in this situation."
James Mielke is one of the lucky ones. Previously an editor at Electronic Gaming Monthly, he moved to Japan to work as a producer on Child of Eden at Q Entertainment, before moving on to be both the producer and musical director on Lumines Electronic Symphony. He is currently a producer on two different projects at Q-Games in Kyoto, Japan. "I can only speak from experience, and my particular case isn't that dramatic. I always make sure my home life doesn't suffer as a result of my professional life."
"I visited Neversoft one year, when they were still working on Tony Hawk in the early 2000s," he recalls. "They made a big impression on me because they ran strict 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. hours, with a little more time put in during crunch. They were adamant about getting better results out of refreshed staff, and not grinding them down. In Japan, a large percentage of dev teams here famously work their fingers to the bone, and I don't think that's healthy. I'm lucky to have worked for two very progressive companies in Japan where I haven't had to burn the midnight oil."
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