Once again, inspiration for posting comes from another blogger in the Manosphere, in this case Dave from Hawaii, with his take on the US, but which applies to a good chunk of the Western World too, exposing unholy alliance between Corporations and Goverment for screwing the civilian population.
It is when the larger trend is seen that the small incidents make sense.
The videogame industry, an entertainment industry like many others, is an interesting one. Part design, part creativity, part coding, its batches of fresh meat can’t come from either unskilled immigrant labor, and the natural repulsion to the High IQ-Low Testosterone enviroment in there keeps the AA wimmin away.
None of those are neccesary. Fresh meat come from the surplus of Technician/College Graduate/Self-educated, starry-eyed 20-something guys that don’t know any better.
Given that eternal source of fresh meat, the larger corporations can simply do massive marketing and churn out mediocre game after mediocre game, burning out developer teams by crunching them in sub-human terms.
Now, that’s a massive accusation Gx, I hear you say. Well then, let’s take a look at the incidents. We have several.
Evidence A: The Scratchware Manifesto.
Written a decade ago, although forgotten for being an attempt at over-glorification of the indie industry, it raises several points about the nature of the office enviroment and the corporations role on it:
Descriptions of crunch seem to have a lot in common with the kinds of work practices you find south of the border. Here’s one from Ion Storm Dallas, as reported in Salon. It’s rife with ‘I love my vampire masters’ baloney.
All-nighters, 18-hour days, sleeping at the office — John Romero’s posse keeps up a “death schedule” to get Daikatana out of beta.
Since Daikatana’s inception, elite and obsessive gamers have road-tripped from around the world to work with their hero, Romero. They’ve quit school, left relationships and literally built beds under their desks to live and breathe nearly every breath in the house Romero built. Their commitment to a self-described “death schedule” — the final, endless rush to perfect their game — isn’t just some start-up novelty, it’s a way of life.
“Aaaaarrggggggggh!” Shawn Green screams as he thrashes his computer keyboard against the ground. It’s midnight in the coders cove of Ion Storm and the cubes are as dark as the city below outside. Green, a stocky, long-haired programmer in a paunchy black T-shirt, hunches like an ape at the beginning of “2001″ and whacks keys across the floor like loose teeth.
Green, the 28-year-old lead coder on Daikatana and a veteran of id Software, is 14 hours into one more 18-hour day. In a few minutes, he’ll take his first and only break, heading off to an abandoned abortion clinic to practice with his doom-metal band, Last Chapter…
“I call myself a mushroom,” Weasl told me as I crouched inside, “because I’m always working in the dark.” With a couple extra layers of felt draping his cube, there’s not even the slightest trace of light, let alone fresh air. But Weas� doesn’t seem to mind. “Darkness is really helpful when you’re trying to shut out outside influences,” he explains, tweaking an animated pool of lava on his screen. “After you spend enough time in here, your personality adapts.”
After you beat a child repeatedly, it’s personality adapts, too.
Veterans of the Office Wars in design companies can relate to said tales. And they wouldn’t be Office Wars if the internal rewards for a work weren’t decided for who markets the idea better to the upper echelons of the totem and who speaks more with the media and the costumers. The latter have been almost eliminated, a sad but certain consequences of making the brand more important than the human beings on it:
For the first 100 years of the US, corporations were highly limited. But they were plotting and planning their release. They got their big break during the Civil War. At the same time that black folks were getting freed from slavery, the vampires of Wall Street were slipping their bonds, setting up a slave system for all of us. In 1872, they convinced the Supreme Court that corporations had all the rights of a person. And that’s what we have today; America Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of GlobalCapitalists’R'Us.
Bingo. The top dog changes, but the Corporation is still there. Immortal. Immoral. Outliving it’s hosts.
Once again, I need to remind people that this was written in 2000. It took a recession and the Obushama regime to make that truth sink in, and getting people to wake up from their indoctrination is HARD.
Evidence B: The EA Spouse.
Another lawsuit of a disgruntled employee would be usually swept under the carpet and given an out of court settlement to the ones not so easily dismissed, but this case was not meant to be like that. His wife whined on LiveJournal:
Within weeks production had accelerated into a ‘mild’ crunch: eight hours six days a week. The producers even set a deadline; they gave a specific date for the end of the crunch, which was still months away from the title’s shipping date, so it seemed safe. That date came and went. And went, and went. When the next news came it was not about a reprieve; it was another acceleration: twelve hours six days a week, 9am to 10pm.
And the kicker: for the honor of this treatment EA salaried employees receive a) no overtime; b) no compensation time! (‘comp’ time is the equalization of time off for overtime — any hours spent during a crunch accrue into days off after the product has shipped); c) no additional sick or vacation leave. The time just goes away.
This crunch also differs from crunch time in a smaller studio in that it was not an emergency effort to save a project from failure. Every step of the way, the project remained on schedule. Crunching neither accelerated this nor slowed it down; its effect on the actual product was not measurable. The extended hours were deliberate and planned; the management knew what they were doing as they did it.
That expousure, which attracted the MainStream Media attention (because was a woman saying it, of course) made the lawsuit a victory.
It needs to ba said that 60-hour week only create efficient cultures of slacking. Hence, IP blockers, and the whole NSFW culture. BTW, IP blockers can be bypassed easily. (Thank me for that link latter).
Evidence C: Infinity Ward Lawsuit.
Another lawsuit. In this case, Activision decided that it was cheaper to fire the creators of Modern Warfare 2 than pay them their due royalties and bonuses. That was for creating one of the best selling games of all time. They reward? They were held hostage by thugs for “insubordination” like local shop owners paying money to mob bosses at gunpoint.
Let’s examine the kind of slimeballs that make those decisions, in this case Bobby Kotick, Activision’s CEO. Here’s some words from him:
“I don’t think it is specific to video games. I think that if you look at how much volatility there is in the economy and, dependent upon your view about macroeconomic picture and I think we have a real culture of thrift. And I think the goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks that we brought in to Activision 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.”
“I think we definitely have been able to instill the culture, the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression.”
Well, you read it from the man. That’s the writing on the wall in Corporate America, creating easily scared sheeple that will happily submit to almost slavery for a pathetic salary, and if they refuse? There’s the way out, we got college graduates and unskilled labor. Good luck paying your taxes/family/child support!!
Although there’s a place in hell for slime balls like Kotick, they are replaceable and the next schmuck will keep the program in place. Just the same as the Wall Street shiny boys. Corporations themselves must be held accountable, or else we are just going to be consumed by an amoral parasite ruled by an algorithm of profit.
Wouldn’t surprise me if they become self-aware one of these days. Stranger things have happened.
-Gx1080
