IGDA And The Good Life
I joined the IGDAs committee on quality of life a few weeks ago, offering to bring the newbie perspective to the table. Weve been asked to produce a white paper overviewing the state of the industry from a QoL point of view, to be unveiled at GDC 2004. The whole thing has been pretty illuminating.
I’m getting a health dose of reality from people who have come together to air the industrys dirty laundryall manner of things from unionization to reasons people leave the industry have come up. The industry is suffering from growing pains as well as the popularity that comes with being successful in a down economy. And besides those topics, the cowboy history of the whole thing has combined with the Hollywood, software development, and publishing aspects of the industry to form what we have today. It certainly hasnt turned me off to the industry, but its good to know just what I’m diving into. ;)
Marc Mencher of Get In the Game fame and a bunch of industry veterans from all parts of the industry are involved and were just about to break into sub teams and start the heavy lifting. I’ll be working on crunch time and job instability and I’ve already got a few contacts to interview on the topics. Most everyone agrees that the industry is full of well meaning people who want to take care of their teams, hopefully well find some best practices that will help spread the best ideas an how to do that! If you know anyone who has recently gotten out of the game industry or has some ideas about how to make the industry an even better place to work, be sure to send them my waywere going to start interviewing people in October.
Updated on October 2nd, 2013
Some of the links were broken. I replaced them with working links to pages with the same or similar content as before.