Idle Weekend January 24, 2018: It’s Back, Baby!

[Jake]

Idle Weekend January 24, 2018:

It’s Back, Baby!
with copy! Idle Weekend 1/21/18 It’s Back, Baby! This weekend, we talk about what it takes to make a game come back into the conversation, even if it’s just our little corner of the internet. It’s because we have a little Bloodborne on the brain, and a little Darkest Dungeon in the hands. And Strangers Things afoot. Note! Rob’s audio is a little funky in this episode, but he’ll have his proper mic back next week.

Discussed: Bloodborne, Dark Souls, Darkest Dungeon, Stardew Valley, LA Noire, Night in the Woods, GTA V, BioShock: Infinite, Life is Strange: Before the Storm, Quantic Dream, Battlestar Galactica (with spoilers!), Counting Crows, Star Wars, Blade Runner: 2049, Stranger Things, The Shape of Water

 

• Listen on the Episode Page
• Listen on Soundcloud
• Listen in iTunes

[SL128]

Depending on why you disliked The Force Awakens, you might really like The Last Jedi since so much of it felt like a "fuck you" to a lot of the areas in which TFA was incompetent, and even some of the worse ideas of the Original Trilogy. In general the story is driven by characters' motivations and how they respond to events, as opposed to a characters being morphed by the need to set up a moment in a story that desperately wants to one-up its predecessors.

My non-spoilery takes on some ways in which that shakes out:
Spooky oh-so-mysterious Snoke? Nobody gives a shit.
Death Star but BIGGER DESTRUCTIVER? not size it's how you use it lol
Where do Rey and her powers come from??!! Actually what matters is characterization.
Our heroes return just as we imagined them! Well, there's actually a lot which is problematic with that mentality.
 

[Henke]

Here's the GTA Online story: https://kotaku.com/gta-online-updates-push-crime-into-the-suburbs-frustra-1797737125

[marcushast]

Regarding your talk about crunch.

 

The data on that has been clear for a long time. Overtime is counter productive. (https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-backfire-for-people-and-for-companies) You can crunch for a short time (one or two weeks) with increased productivity, but after that it goes off a cliff. And really, if you do crunch you need to spend LESS TIME working afterwards to get back to your baseline productivity.

 

For anyone that's interested in the myths and mistakes about "knowledge workers" I highly recommend the book "People ware" which demonstrates (by citing scientific research) that much of industry standard is in fact "worst practices". (Such as open landscape working environments.) (Here's a blog that goes through some of the points in the book: http://hotcashew.com/2014/02/lessons-peopleware/)

 

The reason so many companies do this is (and this is my guess) that you can put number of people and floor space in an Excel sheet to calculate how much money you "save" by cramming people together. It is very difficult to do the same to show the decreased productivity.

 

Hanlon's razor applies: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

[SL128]

6 hours ago, marcushast said:

The reason so many companies do this is (and this is my guess) that you can put number of people and floor space in an Excel sheet to calculate how much money you "save" by cramming people together. It is very difficult to do the same to show the decreased productivity.

 

Hanlon's razor applies: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Adding to this, managers probably aren't going to get fired on a bad project for doing the standard approach which 'should logically' increase output, whereas they probably will for 'being negligent' and letting people 'slack off.' So while some managers may know what's better for the project, they're much more likely to know what's better for them.

[theBobert]

oops, wrong thread! Sorry guys!

Edited January 27, 2018 by theBobert

[marcushast]

On 1/27/2018 at 12:11 AM, SL128 said:

Adding to this, managers probably aren't going to get fired on a bad project for doing the standard approach which 'should logically' increase output, whereas they probably will for 'being negligent' and letting people 'slack off.' So while some managers may know what's better for the project, they're much more likely to know what's better for them.

Very true.

 

And let's not forget that financing a triple-A game is something that takes somebody that is borderline insane to begin with. It's an extremely competitive field and extremely difficult to recoup losses from a bad bet. (Contrast to eg movies where you can at least sell it on DVD, Netflix and stuff like that. Even a bad movie is likely going to have a long tail.) Putting money into game development is not something you do if you want to get rich, it's something you do if you want to make games.