While CDPR employees are crunching patches for Cyberpunk 2077, it’s time to dive a little into the topic. This short note will provide links to specific studies and experiments, as well as discuss various views on the problem of crunch from people in the industry.
Overtime is perceived as the norm
Some even approve. Many, in fact, have simply never experienced prolonged crunches. And those who have encountered it are susceptible to cognitive distortions, which is why after the fact they begin to say that “there’s no way without crunches.”.
Approval and acceptance of crunch as a given comes from people in the industry as well. Fergus Urquhart (head of Obsidian Entertainment), believes that "there is no need to rely on crunch", while justifying the processing on the basis of creative essence.
The creation process is complicated. I doubt that Einstein gave up after 40 hours a week, and I doubt that James Cameron only worked for 8 hours.
Warren Spector (founder of Junction Point Studios) thinks crunch is the result of dealing with a lot of unknown factors. According to him, crunch will always exist as long as there are these unknowns.
We work in an environment of unknowns. We usually start projects with a high-level idea and a release date and rely on others to bring those ideas to life. As we get deeper into the process, we discover that things that look good on paper don’t work in practice. What worked in prototype doesn’t work at a fully textured and lit level.
According to Spector, the only way to avoid crunch is if you’re working on a clone of another game or a sequel.
Former 2K Marin creative director Jordan Thomas and Naughty Dog co-founder Jason Rubin agreed with the idea. They believe that crunches have several positive aspects – they bring the team closer together.
Naughty Dog still follows this harmful practice and "successfully" continued it with The Last Of Us II. There were problems during development at all levels. The worst thing for some Naughty Dog developers was the time when a decision at the highest level could lead to their work being canceled without them even knowing it. An artist may have been working on something without realizing that their scene had been cut or altered. They may not have known about it for days or even weeks, resulting in hours of wasted work—a demoralizing feeling compounded by other stresses of the job. Disagreements among managers also had a negative impact. This was back during the development of Uncharted 4, when Straley and Druckmann disagreed on whether there should be guards in a stealth scene, which led to three weeks of wasted work by 3 people.
Rockstar employees sometimes worked 100 hours a week while working on Red Dead Redemption 2. This became known from interviews with more than 70 employees. While Rockstar allowed employees to talk to reporters (as long as they notified HR), nearly all of the people interviewed wished to remain anonymous. Some said they feared retaliation for speaking out about their negative experiences at Rockstar.
Marcin Iwinski, CEO and co-founder of CD Projekt Red, calls crunch a “necessary evil,” adding that “game development is hard work that can ruin your life.”.
Derek Paxton, a game designer at Stardock, says there’s no point in crunching.
Crunch makes games worse. Companies struggle to promote a specific game, but in the long run, talented developers, artists, producers and designers burn out and leave the industry.
The developers of A Plague Tale believe that there is no way without crunch, provided that they are paid for and it does not violate the law. The main thing is that you don’t need to do this in the early stages, because. To. with crunch at the very beginning of development, the team will simply burn out. Reworks are “good at the finish line” when “magic comes into play”.
And someone not only does not receive compensation, but may also be thrown out onto the street. This was the case with the employees of Sega Studios San Francisco, who were fired when the studio closed a month before the release of Iron Man 2.
Although creative director of Arkane Studios (Prey, Dishonored) Harvey Smith condemns crunch, he believes that creating video games is a hobby, akin to any creative activity. Like writing a novel, recording music or making a film, he says, the artistic process can be unpredictable; creativity is difficult to plan.
I have mixed feelings about working overtime. I don’t think any company should ask people to sacrifice their lives or health to maximize shareholder returns or anything like that, but when you truly love what you do..
In his case, it happened while working on Deus Ex. He worked 100 hours a week. And at first he even liked it, but after that he hated it.
Rafael Colantonio says that crunches are very useful – they help bring out the best in people.
It takes incredible effort to do extraordinary things. It’s very unlikely that anyone could create an amazing game without crunch. I would be surprised by this.
Arkane, like many other studios, exists on the edge. Although they don’t force employees to crunch, in practice it still happens.
Amid the resounding success of Fortnite, a story has surfaced about terrible reworkings at Epic Games. The studio needed to add content and fix bugs as soon as possible. As a result, people worked 60-70 hours a week. QA department employees complained that someone was working more. But there was no way out. To. if they refused, they were simply fired. Managers called such contract workers “bodies” because they are easy to replace. A company spokesperson confirmed the overtime and said the average contractor overtime at Epic is “less than five hours per week.”.
Many stayed on weekends so as not to shift their work to others. There was a constant atmosphere of guilt and fear. People even recycled on their own volition, because “if they didn’t do this, then others would look askance”.
A 2015 survey by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) found that 62% of employees reported having crunch in their studio. Of these, almost a third meant 50-59 hour work weeks by crunch; another third reported 60-69 hours; and just under a quarter admitted to working more than 70 hours a week.
Some managers do not explicitly force employees to engage in crunch, but use other forms of pressure.
Many employers put emotional pressure on their employees, asking them to “make extra efforts”, “do it for the sake of the team”, etc. e, justifying unhealthy work-life balance.
Kate Edwards Executive Director of IGDA from 2012 to 2017
For some companies, crunches helped unite their teams and establish friendly connections. But in reality it burns people out, prevents them from continuing to work in the industry and has a very negative impact on physical, mental and social health.
IGDA statistics confirm all this. A 2014 survey found that the most common reason for developers leaving the video game industry was “poor quality of life.”.
People don’t mind crunching themselves
Someone is “sick” about the project and recycles it of their own free will. Often without even receiving any compensation for it. Some people have a martyr complex. A person deliberately drives himself. Such people do not understand themselves, they focus on giving themselves to others. And when they don’t get a return, they burn out.
There is a category of employees whose vigilance has been lulled by abstract or incommensurate compensation with costs. Witcher 3 developers reportedly received bonuses worth several salaries. For some, this is not even enough for treatment, let alone for employees who are simply burned out and can no longer work either physically or emotionally.
Some game developers have left the industry for years, like the people who worked on Fable. After 6-7 day work weeks of 12+ hours, by the end of the project, people were simply devastated and turned into zombies. It’s not easy to ignore the harm from something like this, even despite the success of the game.
Clark Nordhauser, who got a job at a major studio in January 2014 working on a game from a famous franchise, received a hint from the producer on his first day that “it would be wonderful if he stayed after work for a couple of hours.”. Eventually this developed into working on weekends. In the end, he could not stand it and left the studio and the video game industry.
I’m disappointed in AAA projects with all these reworkings that are not compensated in any way. Until some kind of union is created for game developers, I will not be able to find a place for myself in the industry.
Statistics show that many are leaving the gaming industry in search of something more stable, profitable and less stressful. Steve Holland, a former QA, admitted that he gave up his dream of developing games after he had to work 60 hours a week on games like Civilization III at Atari.
From my observations, crunch is not a one-time situation that occurs in the final mile. No, this is a requirement if you want to build a career in the video game industry.
Some justify crunches due to a bias in the perception of the choice made, a tendency to retroactively attribute positive qualities to the object or activity that the person chose. And here it doesn’t even matter whether the person made the choice himself or, say, his boss. The brain will distort this information to support this choice. If a person chooses option A over option B, he is likely to ignore or downplay the disadvantages of option A, reinforcing or underwriting new negative disadvantages in option B.
You can also add irrational amplification here. Explained by three elements. Firstly, the situation requires costly resources invested in the project. In our case this is time. This then leads to a point where the project does not live up to expectations. Finally, all these problems force the decision maker to make a choice whether to continue or not.
Crunches do more harm than possible benefit
It’s all about productivity, really. Business tries to maximize emissions at lower costs. Experiments on the topic have been carried out since the beginning of the 20th century. The well-known Henry Ford conducted a 13-year study on the impact of working hours on employees. These experiments have been repeated in one form or another many times over the past 100 years, including in the game development industry.
Longer periods of continuous work sharply reduce cognitive performance and increase the likelihood of a catastrophic error. In both the short and long term, reducing sleep by just one hour can lead to severe cognitive decline.
Everything has already been invented before us
More than a century ago, Dr. Ernst Abbe made observations of working hours and productivity at the Zeiss Optical Works in Jena, Germany. As plant director, he reduced the working day from 9 to 8 hours and kept careful records of daily output per worker before and after the change. His experiment confirmed observations from the 19th century: moderate reductions in working hours increased total output.
Philip Sargeant Florence’s Economies of Fatigue and Unrest and the Efficiency of Labor in English and American Industry summarized the accumulated evidence from the 1920s:
A decrease from 12 to 10 hours leads to an increase in daily productivity; further reduction to 8 hours results in at least maintenance of this value; further reductions, while increasing hourly productivity, seem to reduce total daily output.
Productivity is not linear
What is management trying to achieve by sending employees on death marches?? Achieve maximum output, want to produce a (good) product as cheaply as possible. At the same time, it is desirable to minimize resources that increase the cost of finished products, unless absolutely necessary.
Let’s imagine a manager who https://rainbow-riches-casino.co.uk/login/ does not understand the issue and thinks in discrete units. Let’s say if an employee produces 16 units in 8 hours, he should produce 18 units in 9 hours and 20 units in 10 hours.
Where O – total production volume, X – a given volume of production for a control number of hours, designated Y, A t – actual number of hours worked. In this hypothetical situation, increasing the time t – the easiest way to increase output O.
This assumption may be valid in the limited case where operating hours are extended for a short period. But research and years of experience in other industries have shown that the limits of such surges are reached sooner than most people think.
A more realistic representation would take into account changes in hourly productivity. These changes occur mainly due to 2 reasons: physical and mental fatigue that occurs in the later hours of a long day, and accumulated physical and mental fatigue that accumulates over a long period of crunching.
O = P(t1, t2, t3…tn)
Where O – general output, and P() – changes in hourly productivity that occur over time t1 – tn. In this equation P() is a function, not a constant. P() will vary depending on the employee. P() will also vary depending on the hour, because people are not machines and do not perform the amount of work evenly throughout the day. Finally, P() will vary based on past work days because people, for example, perform worse if they haven’t had enough sleep.
Sydney J. Chapman in “Hours of Labor” (1909) gave such a diagram.
Curve height P represents a worker’s productivity (productivity per unit time for a given number of hours worked per day).
There is a point b, in which more hours do not create more value. In fact, after b Every additional hour worked gives a negative value.
The Chapman diagram assumes that a workday of a given length is maintained for a significant period of time. Thus, he includes both simple and accumulated fatigue in his model. At first, the decline in productivity per hour simply reflects the effect of fatigue on both the quantity and quality of work performed at the end of a given day. But in the end, daily fatigue is aggravated by cumulative fatigue. That is, any additional output produced during extended hours today will be more than offset by the reduction in hourly productivity tomorrow and the following days.
Michael White in 1987, drawing on extensive research in the engineering, construction and printing sectors, found that longer work durations tend to lower the long-run equilibrium level of output.
La Jeunesse in 1999 details a series of studies in the US that provided evidence confirming that longer working hours lead to long-term decline in productivity.
Even during one extremely long day, production can grind to a halt as an exhausted employee becomes unable to work. Or the outcome may turn negative as tired employees make catastrophic mistakes that destroy previously completed work.
Essentially, labor productivity declines over time. A worker who creates 10 widgets per hour at the start of a shift may produce only 6 per hour at the end of the shift, peaking at 12 per hour a couple of hours into the workday. Over time, he works slower and makes more mistakes. This combination of slowness and bugs eventually reaches a point of zero performance, where each widget takes a very long time to create, and each subsequent one somehow gets corrupted. When this level of fatigue is reached, the risk of serious accidents leading to large and costly losses increases.
When developing Call of Juarez: The Cartel, the developers from Techland were full of enthusiasm, but due to fatigue they made mistakes that later had to be corrected. People worked 7 days a week. After finishing crunches, some people’s immune systems simply shut down and they immediately fell ill.
From a knowledge worker’s perspective, a programmer produces more good code and fewer bugs when well rested. We spend about an hour to enter working mode. The next few hours are usually the most productive. Later in the day, when we are already starting to get tired, productivity drops – it takes more time to fix a simple mistake or add a simple feature that we would have processed in a few minutes at the beginning of the day.
But management sometimes doesn’t care about employees at all, or they are simply incompetent. During the development of Battle for Middle-earth, developers were forced to work 7 days a week. And if “you are not at work on your day off, then blame yourself – even if you are sick”.
A study by the Institute of Management (Worral and Cooper, 1999) found that 68% of managers surveyed believed that their long working hours had a negative impact on their productivity. Similarly, a US survey found that 62% of US managers agreed that shorter work hours give workers greater incentive to be more productive (US News, 1997).
5-day with 8-hour working day as standard
At one time, after the publication of ea_spouse in LiveJournal, conversations about the quality of life in game development gained new life and relevance. Thousands of people online took part in the discussion.
In response to that post, the Work Less Institute of Technology published an article “PSYCHOPHYSICS IN CYBERIA”, which referred to the research of Dr. Ernst Abbe.
Ernst Abbe, the head of one of the largest German factories, wrote many years ago that a reduction from nine to eight hours (by more than 10 percent) does not entail a reduction in productivity. At the same time, with an increase in working hours, there is a decrease. This statement by Abbe seems to remain true after millions of experiments around the world.
In Prosperity Covenant, Tom Walker writes that output does not rise or fall in direct proportion to the number of hours worked. In 1848, the English Parliament passed a ten-hour workday law, and total output per worker per day increased. In the 1890s, employers experimented widely with the eight-hour workday and repeatedly found that overall output per worker increased.
In the first decades of the 20th century, Frederick W. Taylor, the founder of scientific labor organization and management, prescribed a reduction in working hours and achieved a significant increase in productivity per worker.
In the 1920s, Henry Ford experimented with work schedules for several years and finally introduced a five-day, 40-hour workweek with six days’ pay in 1926. For what? Because his experiments showed that the workers in his factories could produce more in five days than in six.
Increasing working hours only reduces productivity in the long run
With a 60+ hour week, a small increase is actually noticeable. This works for a few weeks, after which the expected decline occurs.
Intuitively, many people believe that a worker who produces 1 widget per hour during an 8-hour workday can create 8 to 16 widgets during a 16-hour workday. This is the basic logic behind crunches. But labor productivity largely depends on the past days. From the summary report "Scheduled Overtime Effect on Construction Projects" published by the Business Roundtable in 1980:
If a work schedule of 60 or more hours per week continues for more than 2 months, the cumulative effect of decreased productivity will cause the project completion date to be delayed beyond what could have been achieved with the same team size in a 40-hour week.
Productivity drops when working 60 hours a week compared to a 40 hour week. Initially, the extra 20 hours per week compensates for the loss of productivity, and overall output actually increases. But a Business Roundtable study says productivity starts to drop very quickly when moving to a 60-hour week. In about two months, the cumulative loss of productivity had decreased to the point that the project would actually go further if you just stuck to the 40 hour work week all the time.
The same report cites studies that show overall productivity in an eight-hour workday is 16% or 20% higher than in a nine-hour workday.
A 2017 study by Marion Collewet and Jan Sauermann on call center workers found that as the number of hours increases, the average call handling time increases, meaning agents become less productive. This result suggests that fatigue may play an important role even in predominantly part-time jobs.
An impressive analysis on Gamasutra showed that crunch in no way improves the final result of a game project and does not in any way help the project get out of its predicament.
Effect on the body
People don’t get enough sleep during crunches; some people sleep right at work. During these periods, a sea of coffee and energy drinks are consumed, which in themselves burden the body, and then there is also stress from overwork and lack of sleep.
Brett Douville, who worked on Star Wars: Republic Commando and many other games at companies such as Bethesda and LucasArts, said that after a long period of overtime and 70-80 hour weeks, at some point he could not even get out of the car, because. To. he had no strength at all. He sat in the car for almost an hour, not really knowing what to do. At the same time, the only thoughts spinning in my head were that every minute was precious until they released the game. Yes, the first thing he thought about in his situation was the release of the upcoming game, and not a possible heart attack.
Good sleep is the key to productive work
Colonel Gregory Belenky, director of neuropsychiatry at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, conducts research for the Pentagon on improving the productivity and combat readiness of soldiers in combat environments. In his 1997 article "Sleep, Sleep Deprivation, and Human Performance in Continuous Operations," he writes that mental performance decreases by 25% for every 24 hours of continuous wakefulness. Sleep-deprived people can maintain accuracy on cognitive tasks, but speed decreases as time spent awake increases.
In the study, FDC [Artillery Fire Control Center – ER] teams from the 82nd Airborne Division were tested in simulated continuous combat operations lasting 36 hours. For 36 hours, their ability to accurately determine range, azimuth, altitude and charge was unimpaired. However, after about 24 hours, they no longer understood where they were relative to friendly and enemy units. They couldn’t understand what they were shooting at. Earlier in the simulation, when there was a request to strike a hospital, the team assessed the situation, the nature of the target and rejected the request. Later in the simulation they begin to fire without hesitation, regardless of the nature of the target.
Continuous work reduces cognitive function by 25% every 24 hours. Several nights in a row have a serious cumulative effect.
Lack of sleep impairs complex cognitive abilities, including the ability to understand, adapt, and plan in rapidly changing circumstances. Various sleep deprivation studies indicate that mental operations involving the prefrontal cortex are particularly susceptible to degradation due to sleep deprivation. 36 hours of sleep deprivation resulted in consistent declines in cognitive tests including verbal fluency and nonverbal planning, both of which are tasks with significant involvement of the prefrontal cortex.
Their model, based on empirical results from laboratory and field studies, suggests that 7-8 hours of sleep each night is needed to maintain high levels of performance over days and weeks. A consequence of sleep deprivation is a decrease in the mental abilities that support situational awareness and tactical acumen.
Designer Clint Hawking, who worked 70-80 hours a week on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, wrote about memory loss as a result of the stress and anxiety associated with developing the game. As a result of stress and lack of sleep, at some point he realized that he had completely lost his memories of some events from the past. Even when his friend, who had visited him 6 months before the conversation, tried to discuss the last visit, Hawking not only did not remember any individual episodes, he had no memories of that trip at all.
In a study of nearly 6,000 British civil servants followed for about ten years, working 3 or more hours of overtime per day was associated with a 60% increased risk of heart disease, including heart attack, angina and death from heart disease.
More likely to make mistakes
During crunch periods, the percentage of errors increases. While most of them will be easy to fix, some may be worth the entire rework. Longer hours and lack of sleep (just 1-2 hours less per night) seriously impair the ability to use the brain productively.
It has long been known how closely fatigue and accidents at work are interconnected. It can be seen everywhere that in the first hours of work, when fatigue does not play a significant role, the number of accidents is small, and this number decreases again after long pauses.
Employees suffering from burnout are more likely to make spontaneous and irrational decisions. An analysis by the British Psychological Society found that participants with signs of burnout showed more spontaneous and irrational decision making. They were also more likely to avoid making decisions.
Moreover, according to a study from the British Medical Journal, employees who work more than 48 hours a week are more likely to drink heavily than those who work a standard week.
In a study on the effects of sleep deprivation, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that subjects who slept 4 to 6 hours a night for 14 consecutive nights showed significant cognitive deficits equivalent to not sleeping for up to 3 days in a row.
Intern studies have shown that staying awake for 21 hours is as harmful to drivers as having a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08, which is the legal limit for drivers in the United States.
The report is the latest in a series of studies by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Women’s Hospital in Boston to quantify the dangers associated with long shifts with little rest. Researchers say working more than 24 hours causes trainees to make serious medical errors and poses a threat to public safety.
Lack of sleep leads to disasters
On the night of March 24, 1989, the giant oil tanker Exxon Valdez set sail from Valdez, Alaska, into the calm waters of Prince William Sound. In these clearest possible conditions, the ship made a planned turn out of the shipping channel and did not turn on time. A huge tanker ran aground, causing a million gallons of crude oil to spill. In its final report, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found that sleep deprivation was a direct cause of the crash. The immediate cause of America’s worst oil spill was that the third mate had slept only 6 hours in the previous 48 years.
The final report of the Rogers Commission (on the Challenger accident) stated that the decision to launch during the critical teleconference was wrong. The Human Factors Analysis section suggests that lack of sleep "could have been a significant contributor".
Space Transportation System Number 6, Orbiter Challenger, lifts off from Pad 39A carrying astronauts.
Many studies note that lack of sleep affects mental and physical performance differently. Unlike complex mental abilities, sleep deprivation does not affect simple psychomotor performance, physical strength and endurance. For example, a soldier can fire in just as tight a group at a fixed target after 90 hours without sleep as after a good rest. However, when shooting at targets that appear in random places on the shooting range, the effectiveness drops by 10% of the base level.
If you are interested in learning how this works on a physiological level, I recommend watching the video from AsapSCIENCE.
Recovery
Working more than 40 hours a week, regardless of the breakdown, results in the need for recovery. And the recovery period is usually longer than the crunch period.
Some people claim that during crunches they are actually more productive and that they get more done. But this is only an imaginary feeling, which for the most part has nothing to do with the real picture. The increase in productivity lasts only for the first time, after which it falls, but at the same time the feeling that a person is doing more does not go away as usual.
In the midst of crunch, you may be working hard (see. also the sunk cost fallacy). And then you try to convince yourself that it was the right decision. At the end of Indie Game the Movie, reflecting on the past year of depression and isolation, Edmund McMillen, watching the sales of Super Meat Boy skyrocket, says that “it was worth it.”.
It takes great courage to admit that there is a possibility that you have made a mistake that has cost you hundreds or thousands of hours for no benefit. Instead, especially after the emotional turmoil of launching the game, it’s much easier to believe that all this agony was worthwhile.
Actual productivity turns out to be much lower than imagined, which neutralizes the whole overwork idea.
The reason for this is that even if they do more real work, when people work more than 35 hours a week, they come at a cost in productivity. This is because there are too many hours:
Costing you because of the wrong higher level decisions you make (i.e. what you decide to work on in the first place).
It costs you a lot because of the opportunities you miss because you are too focused on your work and too stressed.
Productivity isn’t just about the work you do; it’s the work you do minus the time and energy you spend cleaning up the consequences of your mistakes and bad decisions. Research has shown that after you work more than 35 hours a week, especially when you’re doing something creative, you tend to do more harm than good.
Ford, after announcing the 5-day work week, gave an interview where he spoke in more detail about why at that moment it was the most favorable time for these changes. He thought about everything globally within the framework of the economy of the entire country.
Business is the exchange of goods. Products are purchased only as needed. Needs are only satisfied when they are felt. They mostly make themselves known during leisure hours. A person who works 15-16 hours a day ultimately wants only a corner to sleep and a piece of bread. He doesn’t have time to develop new needs.
People with a five-day work week will consume more goods.
People with more free time have more clothes. They should have more variety of food. Naturally, they should have more services of various kinds.
As a result, he notes that a five-day week is not the final solution, nor is an 8-hour workday. Ford assumed the next step would be to shorten the workday rather than the week.
Fewer hours is better?
Changes or differences in working hours do not result in the same changes or differences in work efficiency because people tend to work more efficiently during shorter hours.
Denison (1962) suggested that at the level of working hours in 1929 (when weekly working hours averaged 49 hours over 52 weeks), the reduction in hours would have been fully offset by the increase, which would have left output unchanged. In 1957 (when the average workweek was 40 hours), Denison observed that a ten percent reduction in working hours would result in only a six percent reduction in output.
La Jeunesse (1999) argues that shorter workweeks lead to higher productivity based on efficiency wage theory (Akerlof and Yellen, 1986), which argues that there are good reasons why higher wages can lead to greater productivity. This is due to the fact that higher wages lead to greater employee motivation, reduce staff turnover (if the offered wages are higher than competitors), and attract higher quality and highly qualified candidates. Reduced staff turnover, in turn, leads to reduced training costs. Evidence supporting this theory comes from Ford Motor Co. in 1914, which achieved increased productivity by significantly increasing wages and reducing working hours.
La Jeunesse (1999) suggests that a shorter workweek will similarly lead to increased productivity. By working less, employees have more time to improve their health, invest in their training, are more rested and alert during work hours, and therefore make fewer mistakes.
In 2017, a 23-month experiment in Sweden involved 68 nurses in two groups: one working a regular 40-hour workweek and the other working a 30-hour week. The goal was to determine what impact (if any) fewer hours would have on employee productivity and job quality. Like all research, it has its own criticisms, but the findings can nonetheless be used to inform employee wellbeing and engagement practices around the world.
Researchers who followed nurses noticed that they worked more efficiently with two fewer hours in their daily schedule. They became more adept at time management and were even able to spend more time with their patients.
Nurses were also more likely to go above and beyond to provide exceptional care. One researcher noted that "they had more time to sit and listen, read a book, watch the newspaper with them, or comfort those who were not feeling well". This increased standard of care is extremely beneficial for patients, especially the elderly and those suffering from mental illness.
Shorter work hours not only produced better outcomes for patients, but also improved employee health. It found that nurses who worked six hours a day used 4.7% less sick leave and were absent less frequently than their colleagues who worked eight hours a day. In contrast, nurses working eight-hour shifts increased their use of sick days by more than 60% during the study.
Stress levels were also significantly reduced during the trial, which contributed to improved mood and energy among staff.
It is important to note that fewer hours of work did not affect nurses’ wages. Although this made the experiment more expensive in the short term, proponents argue that the reduction in work hours would actually reduce costs in the long term due to significant improvements in employee health, productivity and work quality.
The study concluded that nurses working six-hour shifts were generally more active, less sick, less stressed, and had less back and neck pain than nurses working eight-hour shifts.
In New Zealand, a company that tried a four-day work week claims people were more creative, more punctual and more energetic.
For two months, 240 Perpetual Guardian employees worked 4 days a week (32 hours instead of 40) and received a salary of five.
Jarrod Haar, professor of human resources at Auckland University of Technology, said employees reported an improved work-life balance.
What to do?
Among the current good examples, we can recall Supergiant Games, which recently released Hades. There are no crunches in the company and there are even forced holidays. The secret of the studio is the combination of personalities in the team. Many studios have problems with burnout, layoffs, or other equally detrimental factors. Supergiant – no. 10 years later, all 7 people from Bastion are still working for the company, along with 10 new employees who were hired during other projects. Greg Kasavin, the studio’s game designer, attributes this to a conscious focus on health and personal growth.
Chad Grenier, game director for Apex Legends, opposes crunch and says Respawn refuses to force the team to do it in order to deliver content faster. Replying on Reddit, Grenier noted that they are against crunches. To keep up with adding content to the game, they expanded the team by 2 times from the launch of the game. However, before this summer, an anonymous employee complained about crunches in the company. At that time, Grenier explained this by quarantine and the difficulty of working remotely.
Morgan Jaffit, creative director at Defiant Development, which developed Hand of Fate, says the company doesn’t practice crunch at all. The studio management believes that it is counterproductive to force employees to overwork.
Employees are not our property. We ask them to work no more than 8 hours. It seems to me that if something doesn’t go according to plan, then management should sacrifice time, not ordinary employees. After all, it is precisely this that is to blame for the problems that arise during development.
The reasons for crunches are usually always the same. Derek Paxton explains that, in general, the gaming industry places little emphasis on management. Many producers either don’t have the experience needed to handle these large and incredibly complex projects, or the company doesn’t give them the authority to do their job. Producers become communicators and assistants rather than team managers, and in some companies they are considered subordinate to game designers (because “the game comes first”!").
He notes 4 key external forces that cause crunches:
And instead of discussing problems with the publisher/investors, many studios prefer to remain silent and impose crunch on the team, because. To. otherwise they might lose the contract altogether.
The industry needs to acknowledge that crunch is harmful. We need to stop taking them for granted and justifying them. It is important to maintain the right culture within the company.