I must say that I am quite impressed with the work of the IGDA’s Quality of Life Committee. They just launched their white paper, titled �Quality of Life in the Game Industry: Challenges and Best Practices�. It is a 90 page report that outlines all the crap and stupidity thats burning out all our best people. Better yet, it provides recommendations on how to make things better.

This is not trivial problem.

While maintaining quality of life is not easy (in fact, many of us willingly submit ourselves to the craziness as a test of our mettle), it will in the end help to produce better games. A happy developer is a good developer :)

I don’t think that unionization is the answer. Rather, just being smart about scheduling, management, business issues, HR, etc, etc could go a long way to improve things. Same goes for publishers, who need to stop putting on the total grind that in many ways forces studios to set unrealistic schedules and budgets…

Imagine when your dev team will be made up of mostly 10+ year veterans (certainly with some newbies to mentor, but I digress). No doubt, they’ll still make mistakes, but not the same ones every new batch of dear-in-the-headlights developers make each project…

Anyway, best you just read the paper!