Thu 27 Jan 2005
You know there’s a problem when a studio is promoting the fact that, due to its success, it has a new fully equipped office with “crunch mode accommodation“. What does that mean exactly? Soft carpeting? Ample space for sleeping bags? On-site laundry? Sadly, I often hear from studio heads who point to how well they care for their employees because they “treat them so well during crunch”… But, this is the first time I see it promoted on a company web site (thanks to Noel Llopis for pointing it out).
A few other quality of life related links I’ve recently come across:
- Tight deadlines ‘bad for hearts‘: setting tight work deadlines can raise the risk of suffering a heart attack six-fold!
- The humorous “The Twelve Days of Crunch Time” from before the holidays…
- Artists in the Japanese anime industry have got it pretty bad. Sound familiar?
- Wired on the true measure of success, proposing a metric for national happiness…
- NOP World compares work/life balance across the globe and launches “Culture Score” as an index of global lifestyle issues.
Will we ever learn? Well, there should be lots of inspiration coming out the Quality of Life Summit that the IGDA is hosting at GDC…
January 28th, 2005 at 3:04 pm
I was told here in Japan it’s illegal to sleep at the office. And yet, at one major company I worked at they had rooms full of double decker cots for sleeping on. 12 of them per floor!
Walk around most Japanese game companies and you’ll see quite a few sleeping bags under people’s desks :-(
May 24th, 2005 at 10:08 am
I used to work for the above mentioned company that says “Crunch Mode Accommodations”.
The building has a loft area on top of the studio.
The loft consists out of 2 recreation rooms (tennis table room and pool table room). A Braai area. A small kitchen. An area with a few tables.
The actual crunch mode accommodations are 3 rooms (with 5 beds in total, of which 2 are double beds) and a shower.
May 26th, 2005 at 2:18 pm
And they’re the “first licensed game developer on the African continent”.
Did someone sneak in an international game developer licensing board when I wasn’t looking? Or are they talking about developing game animals?