It's the same thing with acting. The number of people who want to be Hollywood actors is much smaller than the number of people who end up succeeding. So LA is full of would-be stars waiting tables looking for their big break. That makes it easy for exploitative jerks like Harvey Weinstein, so much so that "casting couch" is a common metaphor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casting_couch
Yet, somehow, it's believed that games are completely different and everyone who wants to make games is good enough to be able make living off it.
Most people realize they suck and don't try to make a career out of it.
If you look at the truly dedicated actors, musicians, or whatever, out there... the ones who practiced during High School and/or pursued Drama degrees in college... they're for the most part, as high quality as any other Hollywood actor.
You can pretty much go into any off-Broadway or even local Theater and find excellent singing, dancing, and/or acting technique.
That is to say: "Good Actors" truly exist, and most people that I've personally met in the field seem to be of "good" quality or better.
Unfortunately, life sucks for them. Just being 'good' isn't enough, you basically need to reach "Star" status to get anywhere these days.
"Stars" are often worse actors than these dedicated unknown folk actually. The thing about "Stars" is that they've built up brand recognition and have learned to generate free press through (often contrived) magazine drama.
Long story short: being a successful actor is COMPLETELY different from being a "good" actor. A good actor can take on a variety of storyline roles, memorizing lines, creating characters, holding a stage presence, etc. etc. Stuff that takes lots of practice, but there really are a LOT of people out there who are really, really, really good at this.
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To put it into technical / programming terms: no one really cares if a game programmer has excellent architecture and bug-free code. Hell, the Speedrunning community seems to prefer bug-ridden code for the credit-warp glitch, sequence-breaks, or whatnot.
It's difficult to reduce the dimensionality of people down to one continuous variable, let alone one binary variable; though some actors, I will concede, could almost manage this.
There's few objective criteria we can actually define a good/suck scale on. Acting quality is very subjective. I tend to find unknown European actors far more convincing than many big name US actors who are chosen to play basically the same character over and over again and perform the same limited two-or-three facial expressions from the set of {happy, sad, angry, confused}. As we've come to learn recently through scandal, performance on screen may not always be the first consideration of some studio execs.
If you're talking financially, that's great: we have an objective measure. If the whole point of being an actor is to make money for themselves, then I can tell you who the great ones are. To the studios though, perhaps it's the actors that will pull in the crowds but not cost too much that are the best. In other words, the amount of money they are expected to make for the studio.
Let's look at the games industry. To be a successful games developer we think we can probably agree on what is good. But to a manager I should imagine a good games developer is someone who helps ship on time and doesn't come to their door telling them what nobody else dares tell them that the bugs that QA found are deep, hard to fix and morale is low. Again, if we define by earnings tor the individual I'm not even sure where pays well.
If we define developers by money they are expected to make for the studio, I'd imagine EA and King employees must be pretty high up.
> If we define developers by money they are expected to make for the studio, I'd imagine EA and King employees must be pretty high up.
It depends on employees, both EA and King own multiple studios and have thousands of people working on projects, which don't make a dime of profit. However, on a studio scale you will notice that studios making successful games repeatedly do not have many horror stories about them and if you look into credits for those games you will see the same individuals working on such games for many years.
The majority of Hollywood actors are good at being Hollywood actors. Much of that seems to be more about maintaining an off-screen presence. For some reason many are celebrated. My point is that they may have fantastic careers and be household names, but that does not seem to correlate to acting ability.
> Of course somebody could be an amazing actor playing Santa at the mall from the point of view of children sitting on his lap.
I was not talking about actors playing Santa at the mall. I was talking about professional actors that are relatively unknown because they act in non-Hollywood productions. Few of these actors would be of interest to Hollywood.
If you look at European actors careers, they make a fraction of the money of their Hollywood counterparts but seem to have a multiple of the ability. I have watched some play different characters, all very different, to the point where you wouldn't recognise them by the character they play. They are believable as that character and bring the character to life. I struggle to say this about even the more respected Hollywood actors, because they are often cast to be very similar to the character they were in something else. There are actors that do buck this trend to avoid becoming typecast.
To me, acting is a skill where you try to bring a character to life. It involves understanding that character, feeling what they feel, portraying that feeling on camera. This is something that is lacking in Hollywood productions.
> It depends on employees, both EA and King own multiple studios and have thousands of people working on projects, which don't make a dime of profit.
Indeed. But this is true of Hollywood. There are films with big name stars in it that have been complete flops. Blade Runner 2049 had Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford in it, both successful actors, but made a loss. Alcon entertainment, the main production company, certainly has overall commercial success.
> However, on a studio scale you will notice that studios making successful games repeatedly do not have many horror stories about them and if you look into credits for those games you will see the same individuals working on such games for many years.
The phenomenon you describe to me would in fact suggest that it is less down to individuals than the studio attracting the right people or at least not rejecting them. Perhaps people who are more passionate about making good games can't suffer being in a team that is churning out bad games. I'm not sure this is simply down to the one-dimensional projection of the people being bad developers. You can be passionate about development and have limited development skill. I'm not sure it's necessarily better to have the technical skills and be dispassionate.
Sure. And people who come to LA want to become one too. I am sorry if I've made you think I am talking about European actors when I replied to a comment mentioning Hollywood, Los Angeles and people coming there.
>The phenomenon you describe to me would in fact suggest that it is less down to individuals than the studio attracting the right people or at least not rejecting them.
Studios are not intelligent entities, they don't hire people by themselves. Hiring people is a job for individuals and one can suck at it just like at any other job. If you look at the events where a studio had been disbanded/went bankrupt but the significant number of staff banded together and formed a new one or it had been saved by an investor, you will notice that the new studio with the same people performs the same or worse than the original. It's up to you to decide if it's because of skills, passion or anything else. I just pointed out the phenomenon of being unable to make living from selling games one's made and its prevalence.
This is an important point, most of the people who have the talent have spent their lives in their fields of talent and have little idea how to make money off of it and neither have the contacts to such people who can help them do it.
*larger
There are scores of models who are more attractive than your average big name actor who fail to break into Hollywood because they can't act.
There are a few genius actors that made their way into Hollywood because of acting, not looks. But they are an exception to the rule. The vast majority of movies are mediocre and feature rather attractive actors (actresses in particular) whose acting is very basic and non-remarkable.
Not every role calls for a pretty face and sexy body, and a person can have a long and comfortable career filling those roles.
The cornerstone of the case against unions isn't that we should stop respecting people, it's that unions are often no longer the best way to accomplish that goal.
Not to detract from early labor movements, the fights for basic workplace safety and overtime in the twentieth century and those people standing up to violence and harassment for basic human rights were heroic.
I'm glad we had unions, but they also have a dark side, where they can function more like a corrupt cartel over time.
Even without Hoffa-style criminality, they can become unintentionally, institutionally abusive. I've worked blue collar jobs in the rural US and had coworkers rant about their family getting eaten alive by the system. They'd explain how the unions would abuse their new probationary employees by making them work triple shifts in order to drive them away from the profession. I've known career extras desperate for a SAG card basically excluded from doing what they love because the slots are capped, and they're aging out of their passion while they wait their turn. Paying your dues can have a few meanings for people in those jobs. That's even setting aside how it creates steep power differentials that become a magnet for predatory gatekeepers like Weinstein.
I don't feel like typical pro or anti union positions do justice to the complexity here.
I think you have to acknowledge that unions have put a spotlight on massive social failings. But I think we also need to recognize their pathologies as well. Generally we need to move those solutions into less partial laws and courts, instead of creating another unchecked center of power over workers.
>Generally we need to move those solutions into less partial laws and courts, instead of creating another unchecked center of power over workers.
Those most in need of the labor rights and respect unions traditionally afford are often those who have almost no access to the legal system. Fundamental problems like that are very difficult to fix, so in the meantime unions are the best way to accomplish that goal.
This seems like a powerful concern in theory but the facts make me more optimistic. I haven't found, say, OSHA to be toothless in practice, the DOL routinely brings aggressive overtime violations cases, and enforcement of the civil rights act against particularly southern hotels and gas stations by federal courts are all powerful counterexamples.
They are not comprehensively solved problems, but clearly demonstrate that organs of state power can and have been used in defense of marginalized groups. I'd say especially Federal courts, but several agencies have done impressive work too.
OSHA is toothless in practice. For large companies the fines are negligible.
https://www.ishn.com/articles/108358-osha-issues-tiny-penalt...
"OSHA has fined Tower King II Inc. $12,934 for the death of three workers who were attempting to install a new antenna on a communications tower in Miami. This is the maximum fine for one serious citation. "
"U.S. Rarely Seeks Charges For Deaths in Workplace"
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/22/us/us-rarely-seeks-charge...
Also, under Trump
It's not exactly like children losing arms to looms and being locked inside enflamed textile mills.
The fact there's still some work left to do doesn't imply we've made no progress.
It does show that unions haven't been able to comprehensively fix these issues either, though.
someone standing up for your rights and asking for compensation to do it is a lot more than any kind of ridiculous disruption mode you can imagine.
so much of the next generation is being told coding is the only job skill they'll need, what do you think will happen when they've flooded the market? we live in a plutocracy waging a war on workers rights, we are gonna need unions and we're gonna need them immediately.
They sure would be awfully fine institutions if that's how they actually worked.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17218381
Sorry it's a wall of text. I suck at brevity.
In my defense it's a complex topic and I'm trying to credit some good points on both sides.
And ok, I was too flip in my last comment, frustrated that its parent seemed to completely ignore my main point. At their best, maybe some unions do still work that way.
Many don't though. Most blue collar guys I know found the teamsters especially abusive.
Separately, investigations into construction in New York invariably find its unions rife with mafia-ties and racketeering.
But there are some good cases out there too, I'm sure. I just think the best of both worlds is to incorporate fair practices into our legal structures, rather than create new centers of power.
The thing is, in the absence of corrupt union power, you got nothing and there's only corrupt corporate/employer power.
If you can solve for that, it'll be great. And I agree it's tragic and awful when the corrupt corporate power is only balanced by corrupt union power, none of it giving a damn for ordinary people. But that's power for ya.
waves tiny anarchist flag, or something
"Eventually, however, it was corruption that led Scrivano to leave the industry, after one of his studio’s investors stole the majority of the company’s funds and disappeared without trace."
Clearly, the person who made off with the money would not benefit from a union.
How would a union have stopped corporate insider theft?
e.g. how about decentralization into smaller, independent, labor organizations focused on local issues, which build on open-source legal artifacts for governance, negotiations, threats and defenses?
But beyond that, it’s about values. You can’t start with a business culture that rewards competitive greed and narcissism over empathy and cooperation and expect it to suddenly start acting against its own core ethics.
But I agree with you that values are central. I'd back more investigations to uncover corporations with internal cultures more like Enron and root out bad actors in such places earlier, if we could do that fairly.
> Those most in need of the labor rights and respect unions traditionally afford are often those who have almost no access to the legal system.
This seems like a powerful concern in theory but the facts make me optimistic. I haven't found, say, OSHA to be toothless in practice, the DOL routinely brings aggressive overtime violations cases, and enforcement of the civil rights act against particularly southern hotels and gas stations by federal courts are all powerful counterexamples.
They are not comprehensively solved problems, but clearly demonstrate that organs of state power can and have been used in defense of marginalized groups. I'd say especially Federal courts, but several agencies have done impressive work too.
The laws are controlled by politicians whose campaign money comes from people whose interest is to exploit workers.
But those making that argument never bring up a workable alternative for accomplishing that goal, other than everyone should quit their jobs.
"I'm glad we had unions, but they also have a dark side, where they can function more like a corrupt cartel over time."
I cannot take this argument seriously when the management side of things is acting in the exact same manner, and no one seems to bat an eye.
Because it isn't the case. Short of actual slavery, management does not hold a monopoly on an individual's employment. If someone's employer is crap, they can move to another job. If they don't like their industry, they can try going into a different one. At least here in the US, labour is in relatively short supply.
Yes it is.
"Short of actual slavery, management does not hold a monopoly on an individual's employment."
If they decide to fire you, you've now lost your ability to feed and house your family.
"If they don't like their industry, they can try going into a different one."
So don't try to improve anything, just give up.
Despite this blatant extortion, I really have nothing else against the union. Their cut is quite small and they provide services and subsidies you can get your money back through (not that I've ever taken advantage of because everything's in Icelandic, but still...)
But on the other hand, I was almost forced to stop working and subsist on the peanuts the union pays because of a strike that had nothing at all to do with my own working conditions or even those of my co-workers or even people in the same industry (one of the side effects of unionizing in such a small population is the union sphere of influence is quite broad).
So from my experience, I think you've hit it on the nose.
Why would you think that? There's a reason that secondary strikes have been made illegal in the US, and that reason is not "they don't work".
AFAIK in the movie industry few publishers and or studios actually have any production staff on hand. Instead what happens is a core team write and pitch a movie idea. Only after they've gotten funding and done preproduction then they hire contractors short term (1-3 months) to make the movie.
In games most studios hire all the staff. They then have the issue that between projects 90-95% of the staff have nothing to do. There's no income and the company is burning money.
Unions may or may not help those movie contractors get a good price for their services but they don't guarantee jobs any more than the game industry AFAIK.
Should video games be run more like the movie industry?
As for your idea of "getting burned" because a company wants to make a different game, I have a game designer friend who used to think that way. He seemed to forget he was being paid $80k a year for his game ideas regardless of if they got used or not. If he wanted to profit from his own ideas he needed top stop selling them for salary to his employer.
However, the conversion to Hollywood-style waves of contractors hasn’t happened in games largely because the workers aren’t as interchangeable as they are in movies. Game pipelines have been very custom and quirky. It takes a long time to ramp up and get effective at a particular studio. That makes hiring and releasing a whole team for a single project very inefficient.
Or, at least it has been that way. All this is a big reason why Unity and Unreal Engine have become so popular. By becoming standardized pipelines, they “make hiring much easier” because new hires can show up already familiar with the engine. Give it another decade and the Hollywoodization of gamedev may yet happen.
I don't think the video game studio system is under that kind of pressure, but it also allows independent studios to function.
(I find the modern movie and TV industry similar to the tech world, where each movie is a startup. That's even how a lot of the business are structured - directors and writers put together a pitch, sell investors or production companies on it, and then form a company to produce the film.)
Money is one reason people do things, but rarely the only one. Especially smart, creative people. The notion that people lose the right to complain as long as the paychecks keep coming is poisonous.
the game designer sold his idea to his company and then complained the customer didn't use the product the way the designer wanted. it might be frustrating but it's not the designer's choice. the designers choice was arguably not to sell the idea in the first place. once sold it's no longer theirs to control
in general that designer's attitude was forgetting that they had actually gotten paid for their ideas. they took their salary for granted and forgot they had a business arrangement of getting paid for their ideas.
A closer analogy is a film director being upset that the studio didn't live up to the expectations created during the deal negotiation process. That happens all the time with films, and approximately nobody tells directors, "You got paid; STFU."
Googling that it seems to be a little more interesting:
>Biomedical research charity Wellcome Trust gave Ninja Theory a $395,000 grant to do research on mental illness, and that helped Ninja Theory make such an ambitious and research-based game on its own as an independent studio.
Wellcome Trust isn't a government organisation - it was set up by Sir Henry Wellcome who made a fortune in phrama.
Also Ninja Theory's history is pretty messy with bankruptcies, layoffs and deals gone wrong.
Gamers seem to have a growing sense of entitlement.
For better or worse, entertainment shapes public policy. So it's no surprise that the government gets involved.
I know people in both industries and guess what. You are so utterly correct.
Seeing the number of turds that Hollywood produces continuously, I fail to see the promised "magic" that unions help create.
Unions, above all, help those on the lower part of the bell curve. They commoditize labor, introduce standard metrics, push towards mediocrity and destroy competition between individual contributors. I am now on a third week of crunch, without weekends, all to make it to the Steam sale; something that a union would fight against. But it's a crunch I'm highly motivated for, and one I will personally benefit from; a union would limit my ability to push forward and advance my career.
I can also negotiate quite well on my own behalf with employees. If I was in a union, I would, through involvement in collective negotiation, effectively share my strong negotiation position with other developers in the industry, bringing them forward and print me back. Why the hell would I do that?
No, a union would just make sure you're actually paid for it, instead of being coerced into giving away your life for absolutely nothing.
"I can also negotiate quite well on my own behalf with employees. If I was in a union, I would, through involvement in collective negotiation, effectively share my strong negotiation position with other developers in the industry, bringing them forward and print me back. Why the hell would I do that?"
So "fuck you, I've got mine".
I see these games coming out of other countries that are amazing and these studios seemed to have got grants and investment from the government i.e. HellBlade, , . Do we not do that here stateside? It's also unfortunate some of the most talented dev's I've met even quit CS field entirely after doing game development. Do video game creators get the same mental health services those in the entertainment unions get?