The Super Best Friends Super Best Griefing Thread - Matt's a cuck, Liam is a bitch, Pat's a loony and Woolie's Way is now trademarked

[DongBlow]

Wait a minute…..

Haha they must be reading this thread haha

 

[Alter Ego]

Most people who complain about crunch dont seem to understand that almost every industry can have periods of crunch. Even if you own your own business sometimes you have to crunch yourself into the dirt, if youre a savvy business owner sometimes youll just stop paying yourself. Pat hasnt had true hardship. I dont live Jaffe, but he is right that sometimes people just need to pull themselves up by your boot straps.

True that. Those who cry about game dev crunch so much are ignorant of the many professions that require more than the idolized 40 hours/week out of necessity. As you say, business ownership is a good example. I also like to point to sailors and other such jobs that require long stretches of living at a remote workplace, far away from family.

Ultimately, video game development is a cushy, white-collar office job with internet access. Now largely work-from-home, too.

 

[DrFaggot]

Anybody who has worked a job long enough knows about this shit. Maybe it's s news flash to gamers but REAL jobs often require you to skip lunches or work past your projected hours. The fact that Pat can even comment on this is a testament to how much he really knows about actually working.

 

[Fancy_Robot]

For people like Pat, I don't think the world extends much beyond the internet. To them, arguing on Twitter is the equivalent of debating national policy in congress.

I mean, he doesn't go outside, doesn't have a real job and doesn't have real friends outside of a small few people who are also homebodies so the internet is his life basically. If there were no internet Pat would need a social worker and meals on wheels in order just to survive.

 

[Lil Weed Lova]

It is not fair to pretend that most other jobs are nearly as bad when it comes to crunch. Hell, even within the IT sphere, being a software engineer for a company like Google or Amazon is one the cushiest professions you can have on this planet. At least among the ones that involve you actively participating in the creation of stuff as opposed to being a leech.

There are reasons why games are so notoriously bad as far as working conditions go:
1. It is impossible to be an aspiring game maker and not deal with feature creep. It's not just a shitty app where you can plan out its entire functionality beforehand. And even if you somehow manage to do it feature-wise, then polishing all those things can still drive you crazy. You either screw over your deadlines or release shit. There is no third option, only a spectrum between these two.
2. Making games is a dream job for tens of millions of people all over the world. Especially for big popular titles. This supply alone dictates shitty working conditions even for people who are not involved in the creative process. If you don't like it, there is always a line of people willing to replace you.

This is a real issue when it comes to big ass corporations like Activision that function as a weird 21st-century mix between a sweatshop and cult where the vast majority of people are slaving out in a shitty cubicle for no good money and no perspective for the future. Workers' rights exist for a reason. Everyone can argue where one should draw the line but one does not have to be a dumb union-peddling socialist to see that, wherever that line is, those companies have gone way past it.

The problem with people who are against crunch is when they start attacking small and middle-sized developers for being passionate (i.e. Carmack is retroactively getting an infinite amount of shit for the way he used to handle id back in the 90s but guess what happened when all the lazy assholes like Romero got to leave and do things "their way"). Or comparing what is, essentially, a dream job to a 19th-century worker slaving away on a local factory as if they had no other option or weren't warned a million times about what they are about to partake in.
Pat is fucking retarded and is clearly just virtue signaling by parroting whatever he heard from Jim Sterling, but you don't have to go full retard and be the devil's advocate just to shit on him either.

 

[Fancy_Robot]

It is not fair to pretend that most other jobs are nearly as bad when it comes to crunch.

Used to work in a recycling facility, I remember the post Amazon days blitz of cardboard mixed with the 95 degree temperatures (115 on the sorting line), 11 hour days and 2 1/2 hour commute for five days being pretty shit. People passing out from heat exhaustion, an older supervisor nearly dying of heat stroke, having a grand total of <12 hours to eat, shit, sleep have any sort of fun and having only the OSHA allowed amount of breaks in between. Oh and the boss of the place was a total cunt who watched FOX Business all day in his AC cooled room, only occasionally poking his head out to tell us we were lazy.

I don't remember a great media outcry for me, so I'm really struggling to feel sorry for people sitting ergonomic chairs all day in AC cooled rooms that spend 25% of their working time on reddit.

 

[Lil Weed Lova]

Used to work in a recycling facility, I remember the post Amazon days blitz of cardboard mixed with the 95 degree temperatures (115 on the sorting line), 11 hour days and 2 1/2 hour commute for five days being pretty shit. People passing out from heat exhaustion, an older supervisor nearly dying of heat stroke, having a grand total of <12 hours to eat, shit, sleep have any sort of fun and having only the OSHA allowed amount of breaks in between. Oh and the boss of the place was a total cunt who watched FOX Business all day in his AC cooled room, only occasionally poking his head out to tell us we were lazy.

I don't remember a great media outcry for me, so I'm really struggling to feel sorry for people sitting ergonomic chairs all day in AC cooled rooms that spend 25% of their working time on reddit.

Because 11 hours is barely a crunch by video game standards. It's a regular day. Make it a 13-16 hour workday 6 times a week + commute (or literally sleeping under your desk and washing in the bathroom) + no vacation for months on end combined with the constant stress of having to meet intentionally impossible deadlines as opposed to just clocking it in and out. This is what people talk about when they complain about crunch. This shit is real.

Also nobody gives a fuck about people who make cardboard but many are passionate about video games and empathetic to people making them. Go figure.

 

[Ash97]

the podcast should be called the "Black & White" podcast at this point, because that's how Woolie and Pat see every issue

 

[Yeshuash]

Because 11 hours is barely a crunch by video game standards. It's a regular day. Make it a 13-16 hour workday 6 times a week + commute (or literally sleeping under your desk and washing in the bathroom) + no vacation for months on end combined with the constant stress of having to meet intentionally impossible deadlines as opposed to just clocking it in and out. This is what people talk about when they complain about crunch. This shit is real.

Also nobody gives a fuck about people who make cardboard but many are passionate about video games and empathetic to people making them. Go figure.

Back in the day I remember reading interviews in gaming magazines from game devs who talked about how they would have to sleep under there desk so they could finish there games. Back then it was viewed as cool and an act of passion for the craft.

also, the same people who screech about crunch are the same ones who get a panic attack when a games premier is pushed back.

 

[Fancy_Robot]

Because 11 hours is barely a crunch by video game standards. It's a regular day. Make it a 13-16 hour workday 6 times a week + commute (or literally sleeping under your desk and washing in the bathroom) + no vacation for months on end combined with the constant stress of having to meet intentionally impossible deadlines as opposed to just clocking it in and out. This is what people talk about when they complain about crunch. This shit is real.

Lol vacation, boy what do you do for a living

We had to work 12 once a week but whatever. The work hours weren't the crunch part, they were every day, every week of the year... occasionally devs having to do the hours I did routinely because they goofed off too much early on AGAIN is making me not want to feel bad for them, especially in the context of them having it worse than me. The reasons deadlines exist is because otherwise things would never get done. A general sentiment held by Barack Obama no less

Deadlines, Schmedlines...

“If you don’t set deadlines in this town, things don’t happen.The default position is inertia.”– President Barack Obama July 22, 2009We enter another weekend with yet another health care deadline hanging low on Washington’s horizon. It will be neither the first nor the last time that gauntlets...

www.pbs.org

You push back the deadline you'll still have crunch, because crunch largely exists from lazy workers not doing much until the deadline approaches. These people are lazy oafs who bitch to Kotaku anonymously about supposed work conditions they have temporarily with no real way of substantiating it and they get saps repeating the horrors of crunch to make people feel sorry for them

Woolie is one the biggest bitchers about crunch, you know, the guy who "can't" do a podcast because his back hurts from lying down too much. That's the type of person emailing Kotaku

 

[MooseGump]

The whole crunch situation makes me wonder how the fuck crunch actually is while it's happening, rather than after the fact by le anonymous source
I want one major company to be like, "Fuck it, we put several cameras in the offices so EVERYONE sees how our devs work under crunch" without them knowing, but that would cause a stink eh

Edit - not for every project but for one major project that we know will have the dreaded crunch of bad times

 

[Lil Weed Lova]

Back in the day I remember reading interviews in gaming magazines from game devs who talked about how they would have to sleep under there desk so they could finish there games. Back then it was viewed as cool and an act of passion for the craft.

also, the same people who screech about crunch are the same ones who get a panic attack when a games premier is pushed back.

My point is that there's a difference between people in a small or midsized passionate studio sleeping under the desk because they all care so much about their project and thousands of faceless drone animators/programmers/modelers/testers being forced to do the same for no credit, no royalties etc under the same pretense.

Lol vacation, boy what do you do for a living

We had to work 12 once a week but whatever. The work hours weren't the crunch part, they were every day, every week of the year... occasionally devs having to do the hours I did routinely because they goofed off too much early on AGAIN is making me not want to feel bad for them, especially in the context of them having it worse than me. The reasons deadlines exist is because otherwise things would never get done. A general sentiment held by Barack Obama no less

Deadlines, Schmedlines...

“If you don’t set deadlines in this town, things don’t happen.The default position is inertia.”– President Barack Obama July 22, 2009We enter another weekend with yet another health care deadline hanging low on Washington’s horizon. It will be neither the first nor the last time that gauntlets...

www.pbs.org

You push back the deadline you'll still have crunch, because crunch largely exists from lazy workers not doing much until the deadline approaches. These people are lazy oafs who bitch to Kotaku anonymously about supposed work conditions they have temporarily with no real way of substantiating it and they get saps repeating the horrors of crunch to make people feel sorry for them

Woolie is one the biggest bitchers about crunch, you know, the guy who "can't" do a podcast because his back hurts from lying down too much. That's the type of person emailing Kotaku

I have already explained why deadlines in videogames are much worse than they are in different fields. The moment the higher-ups notice that you're managing something just fine, they increase the workload by adding more, often unplanned, features which eventually pushes you into the crunch. That's the point. People crunch on EVERY big game. You can't just say "just work good, lmao" because there are no examples of people doing that in the entire industry. The only thing that differs is the severity of the crunch and how much you're getting out of it.

The whole crunch situation makes me wonder how the fuck crunch actually is while it's happening, rather than after the fact by le anonymous source
I want one major company to be like, "Fuck it, we put several cameras in the offices so EVERYONE sees how our devs work under crunch" without them knowing, but that would cause a stink eh

Edit - not for every project but for one major project that we know will have the dreaded crunch of bad times

Developers are forced to sign up NDAs for a reason. Talking about any of those details publically can land you a lawsuit if you're not careful, setting up a bunch of cameras will probably fuck you up for life.

 

[Fancy_Robot]

I have already explained why deadlines on videogames are much worse than they are in different fields. The moment the higher-ups notice that you're managing something just fine, they increase the workload by adding more, often unplanned, features

You think this only happens in gaming? Have you ever had a job before?

 

[Lil Weed Lova]

You think this only happens in gaming? Have you ever had a job before?

"Gaming" is among the few industries in the west that will consistently try and push this idea all the way past 80 hour weeks. Which is double the legal amount.

And, yes, I had my share of jobs, including in the gaming industry. I never really got to the crunch part personally, but got enough friends to see the kind of shit they had to go through. And that studio wasn't even one of the bad ones.

I don't know what else to say to you. You are clearly past any good faith at this point and will keep pretending that this shit is alright (despite never experiencing this kind of workload by your own admission) just because chinamen manage to do just fine with their suicide nets or African children get to experience worse in the cobalt mines or some other inane stuff. If you want to base your beliefs around opinions that are the direct opposite of what a bald red retard on the internet says, then you do you.

 

[Fancy_Robot]

I don't know what else to say to you. You are clearly past any good faith at this point and will keep pretending that this shit is alright (despite never experiencing this kind of workload by your own admission)

Workload of being an active redditor in my perfectly air conditioned room.

Pretty cool "someone in the industry" still hasn't seen this first hand

 

[Love Machine]

It is not fair to pretend that most other jobs are nearly as bad when it comes to crunch. Hell, even within the IT sphere, being a software engineer for a company like Google or Amazon is one the cushiest professions you can have on this planet. At least among the ones that involve you actively participating in the creation of stuff as opposed to being a leech.

There are reasons why games are so notoriously bad as far as working conditions go:
1. It is impossible to be an aspiring game maker and not deal with feature creep. It's not just a shitty app where you can plan out its entire functionality beforehand. And even if you somehow manage to do it feature-wise, then polishing all those things can still drive you crazy. You either screw over your deadlines or release shit. There is no third option, only a spectrum between these two.
2. Making games is a dream job for tens of millions of people all over the world. Especially for big popular titles. This supply alone dictates shitty working conditions even for people who are not involved in the creative process. If you don't like it, there is always a line of people willing to replace you.

This is a real issue when it comes to big ass corporations like Activision that function as a weird 21st-century mix between a sweatshop and cult where the vast majority of people are slaving out in a shitty cubicle for no good money and no perspective for the future. Workers' rights exist for a reason. Everyone can argue where one should draw the line but one does not have to be a dumb union-peddling socialist to see that, wherever that line is, those companies have gone way past it.

The problem with people who are against crunch is when they start attacking small and middle-sized developers for being passionate (i.e. Carmack is retroactively getting an infinite amount of shit for the way he used to handle id back in the 90s but guess what happened when all the lazy assholes like Romero got to leave and do things "their way"). Or comparing what is, essentially, a dream job to a 19th-century worker slaving away on a local factory as if they had no other option or weren't warned a million times about what they are about to partake in.
Pat is fucking retarded and is clearly just virtue signaling by parroting whatever he heard from Jim Sterling, but you don't have to go full retard and be the devil's advocate just to shit on him either.

Tl;Dr game devs are just weak, spineless, and not in touch with reality? That's a brutal cut down.

 

[Crab Zone]

Back in the day I remember reading interviews in gaming magazines from game devs who talked about how they would have to sleep under there desk so they could finish there games. Back then it was viewed as cool and an act of passion for the craft.

Back then alot of what they were making were games they had passion for. Its a lot different when the game your making is some AAA nightmare that needs to be hyper monetised and focus tested for the biggest appeal possible. Its like if you compare a smaller indie film maker and his team who make some great movies with lower budgets and limitations. But then they get bumped up to huge studio films and are working around a whole bunch of deadlines, constraints, studio approval, test screenings ect. Its hard to keep that level of passion because so much is out of your hands.

The Gaming industries crunch times are weird because there are companies that 100% abuse the employees passion and grind them into dust with crunch. I think everyone can agree thats fucking garbage. But essential crunch to make deadlines or fix problems that come up are a part of the industry. You know that going in as you do in any industry that ships a product. Hell even retail jobs have sales periods where management asks you to take extra hours or work extra days. So long as its within the laws of your country and you get compensation its just a fact of life you do the work and get over it.

There are some modern examples that demonstrate you can make a big AAA game without crunch like Ratchet and Clank. But thats Insomniac a first party studio who made Spider-man which was a fucking huge hit, they get a steady injection of funding from sony to support its development of games and grow the studio to accommodate multiple projects + longer dev times. Those studios are the exception to how games are made.

 

[Left Ass Cheek]

Also nobody gives a fuck about people who make cardboard but many are passionate about video games and empathetic to people making them. Go figure.

Untrue. I don't care about limp wristed game devs anywhere near as much as I care about cardboard, let alone the people who make it.

 

[p-wog]

Just because most can acknowledge crunch is part of the industry and happens everywhere doesn't make it right. However, bitching about it as someone who isn't even related to the industry doesn't do anything to fix the problem either. Pat doesn't give a fuck about crunch he just wants the easy "good boy" points/ego boost on social media for shouting about it.

 

[Terror Rism]

something i've noticed about pat specifically, he seems to have never grown emotionally past shit he dealt with a full decade+ ago. if a character, person, or situation mildly reminds him of something that upset him when he was 19, it becomes "OH MAN, OH MAN I REMEMBER THIS GUY, MAN I HATED THAT GUY, FUCK THIS GUY MAAAAAN IT'S JUST LIKE THAT GUY" then glues his eyes to the chat in order to cackle at the 2 people that have the same issues and agree. this way Jerk From High School isn't winning guys, he's winning, look at the these guys that also hate him in chat/on twitter!

i think he's hyperfixed on game dev crunch culture (aside from the good boy points) because the only actual significant "work" he's ever mentioned having to do is at a grocery store, being also fairly underpaid and overworked while incredibly easy to replace, so he thinks "that's LITERALLY me" when he sees game devs have to put in 75 hour work weeks and has to act like it's his personal cause or else the grocery store from 15 years ago will win. jaffe is just the retard he's chosen to occupy that space in his mind this time, and donating to random charities he doesn't care about is his "fuck you, dad" to his old boss or whatever.