I often wander between favouring and hating the idea of a 9-5 culture at work. On the one hand it fits in nicely with a family life where we work to enjoy ourselves, we turn up, do some work, go home and disconnect and plug ourselves into an entirely separate life.

On the other hand, what we do as game developers is a creative process, it requires thinking, passion and creativity that simply cannot be turned on and off at preset times of day.

Imagine a day like this:

• 9am – be creative and passionate when you punch in
• 12pm – stop being creative and thinking about your art.
• 1pm – start being creative again, now, you’ve only got 4.5hrs remaining
• 5.30pm – stop thinking, park your creativity, go home, disconnect
• rinse and repeat.

What happens if I’m on the brink of a brilliant discovery at 17:15 and I need that extra bit of time but I have to leave at 17:30?

I would argue that this simply suits a certain time of person and that person isn’t into making games they love, they’re looking for a job churning out mundane average “product”. Something to do to get paid for and keep them off the streets, something they don’t have to think about and get emotionally invested in. Maybe they’ve been burned out and are looking for an easy life, 9-5 does have it’s appeal sometimes.

A corporate culture like this will ultimately mean that the business itself becomes a function of it’s indoctrined staff, a reflection of the people who work there and the ones who made the decision to make it like this. This may succeed for a time but I can only guess that it won’t last forever.

Now, I am absolutely not advocating disregarding Working Time Regulations and forcing people to work every hour of the day. I’m not saying to over-burden people so they have no choice.

What I am saying is that people don’t think and contribute in this prescribed manner, people change, some people are so into what they’re doing that they want to work weekends anyway, you just can’t stop them. Sometimes you have an off day and haven’t got an idea in your head. You’re fundamentally being told that caring about what you do isn’t what your employer is looking for and the consequence of this is that you will find another outlet.

I think that flexibility is the key here and enabling people to contribute as much as they can to their art, in a way that suits them (within reason) can only be a good thing for the game and the business. We should be results focused and not get hung up on whether someone clocks in at a prescribed time.

We demand a lot from our developers and we need to recognise and reciprocate the gift of time and effort.

Do I support hard 9-5 working hours? No, for all the reasons above

Do I support developers making games with passion and creativity, whenever that may be? Yes

I recently reconnected with an old friend who’s been a Freelance Game Programmer for many years, I asked him what advice he could give to someone just starting out and here’s his top tips:

I particularly like his ethos: “value-for-money & minimum hassle”, because contractors/freelancers have a general reputation for being otherwise (Expensive & demanding)

Rhys Twelves, 12 Code Monkeys Ltd, UK
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/rhystwelves


Here’s Rhys’ reply:

The only real tips I have are:-

1. If you can, try to avoid VAT registration due to the overhead of quarterly returns, and the VAT man being able to audit you more readily.(unless you employ someone to sort this all out)

2. Get a good accountant, they are worth their weight in gold, as they know what you can/cannot claim for as a legitimate business expense, and give could advice as to where to invest your profits.

3. Make yourself as flexible as possible. Making games is still a black art (in terms of production especially) and so plans will almost cetainly change from milestone to milestone. For a contractor/freelancer it is important that you can adapt with the project (within reason). If 5 days/week becomes 6 or even 7, then you should already have plans afoot that can support the change. It’s a second-guessing game, but it’s worth it.

4. In my experience, being flexible can be more valuable to production than being fast/excellent at your work. If a producer knows they can rely on you to be in the office on any given Sunday, they’ll take that over having to find work for you from somewhere because you finished your milestones early.

5. To be honest Simeon, I’m still learning as I go along, and different companies have different needs & expectations, but my ethos (if you can call it that) is to be “value-for-money & minimum hassle”, and only because contractors/freelancers have a general reputation for being otherwise (Expensive & demanding).

Rhys is a top bloke and I highly recommend him for any programming task you’ve got. You’ll be amazed at the knowledge Rhys has, how insightful his views are and just how quickly and well he solves problems. Rhys is worth his weight in gold.

Without looking it up, what does quality mean to you in terms of how you feel about a game or service? On it’s own it almost has no meaning, it needs to be preceded by something like “low” or “high” for it to make sense. Lets investigate it’s true meaning.

I think in every day life in the UK we actually omit the word “high” when we use it on it’s own. “I saw a quality film last night”, “the customer service was quality” all have to imply high quality as it doesn’t make sense on it’s own. A poor quality game is one that crashes all the time, looks shoddy and I think the most important one is that it lacks some decent gameplay.

But what does it mean to you? Quality is an entirely subjective concept, I think it typically refers to our expectations, we feel something that exceeds our expectations is “high quality” and something that falls short is “low quality”. Therefore, we may disagree on whether a game is low quality or whether I did a high quality job for you. Think about what expectations people may have about your game or service and consider how you can improve from there. It almost always doesn’t come from just spending more time at your desk.

In order to be consistently perceived as high quality you must exceed expectations, go the extra mile, be dedicated to what you do and turn out amazing work. Put that little bit more love into the game, pop in that little featurette. Failure to exceed expectations instantly places you in the realms of average and may even render your offering as low quality and it will take a long time to recover from that.

There is real satisfaction to be had in giving someone a gift and making a difference in their day and you ask nothing in return.
Do you give little metaphorical gifts in your work or your games? Little bonus items people aren’t expecting?

I recently connected with long time promotion and pioneer of Agile game development, Clinton Keith.

We got talking and he pointed me in the direction of his book, Agile Game Development with SCRUM, which I’ll be picking up soon.

If you’ve read it, what did you think?

I’ve often been asked “How do I get automatic updates?” so I’ve written a nice simple to follow guide on how to Subscribe To Updates for Game Linchpin including Social Networks, RSS Feeds and EMail updates too.

Stop by and let me know your thoughts.