I wrote this as a comment on Gamasutra, but liked it, so I am repeating it here.

Every-time I read an article talking about hours/crunch/labor practices in the videogame industry, I feel like I am reading a therapy transcript?

If we talk about it, it will get better right?

Wrong, avoiding crunch takes discipline of financial planning and discipline of management. It takes project management that spends the time to pour over employee output and project progress data. In order to properly schedule a project, one needs to determine how much work there is, and how long it will take.

Obtaining accurate values for how much work remains and how long it takes do not spawn from "tribal experience" or "years in the industry." They are generated by spending a considerable amount of time and effort evaluating the skills and work styles of your employees, looking at process, identifying bottlenecks, and reigning in and anticipating "customer fastidiousness."

I feel that a big reason that progress towards elimination of crunch is spotty at best has to do with the fact that many mistake it for hard work. If I put in my time down in the trenches I can wear it like a badge of courage then expect the same later in my career from those that I manage.

I challenge you to look at it in a different light. You are not working your employees hard, you are increasing fixed overhead, reducing employees time with their families (often a great source of inspiration for ground breaking ideas), and you are increasing turnover.

Maybe run the numbers for you last project and see what they look like if you eliminate overtime, after-hours electricity, food orders, and comp-time.

link: http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/3715/not_everyone_feels_the_crunch.php

So I decided to make a new website because this website is so fucking ugly. My website is about cool stuff like video games and movies and things of that nature. Most importantly the title of my site is either really deep or really stupid. It's called crouton days. I hear there is a link to it somewhere in this post

[Not a link]

Just weeks before the August 31st street date of Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, EA's Pandemic Studios in Westwood California is cutting staff. When John Riccitiello spoke to Pandemic shortly after the acquisition was announced he did say to expect around 20% of the staff to be cut, now that Mercenaries 2 is out the door, looks like the guillotine has been released. Senior members of the design team, Programmers and Production Staff have all received their walking papers.

It would appear that EA may once again be playing a shell game.

1. Buy up a company for it's IP
2. Clean house
3. Crank out a bunch of average games
4. Wash, Rinse, Repeat

If you happen to be working HR at nearby Los Angeles Studios, be on the lookout for a number of talented developers shopping around Resumes.

The only games that I have played in the last month to really blow my skirt up are Castle Crashers (yeah, devnet rocks), Pixel Junk Monsters, and Geometry Wars 2. I consider myself to be a hard-core gamer, work in the industry, and love FPS games, but these three gems represent to me a gleam of hope. They represent the possibility for smaller games with a high level of polish and love to be not only good games, but financially feasible products. Development costs for PS3 and Xbox360 are astronomical, and because of this, evil publishers and their developer slaves have become increasingly risk averse. How many military, "bad ass" games can one really suck down before they pull the trigger and bring it all back up into the toilet?

BTW calling these games casual is a mistake. These are not fucking sudoku, these games get you pumped, it feels like playing SF2 back in middle school at the local arcade. I love it, kudos to all the dev teams that made these wonderful titles.

So in a spat of unemployed boredom, I put together a new website using a ridiculous domain I registered a while back:

http://www.thecausalamericansguidetothespreadofcommunisminthewest.com/?t...

The best part of the site is the google ads that have started to show up. John McCain's campaign seems to really like passages from the communist manifesto for their adwords. Apparently McCain will help us stem the red tide.

I may need some more deodorant.

Meanwhile, in the heat blasted deserts where only Servers survive, the codemonkeys at Counterfeit Girlscout Cookies wage a desperate, rear-guard action against the elite shock troops of Google's Search Engine. Men versus Machine. The Machine grows daily and it's power increases exponentially. But the Men are learning...

I am posting this video in the story section, despite it being an obvious candidate for the tubes content type. I am posting this video here, because I want to point out that this is just the sort of nerd fueled creative engineering for the sake of building things that I simply love. Since the time when I ran around my parents yard in Huggies, I have had a love to break, then attempt to re-assemble things.

I also have a love of making Internet videos. My current fascination is the driftmustang.com project, but who knows, maybe toy guns from video games will be next.

I feel that many people do understand this love. I think that one of my life goals is to never stop building things purely for the sake of building them. I think construction is one reason that both pot smoking and halloween are so popular.

Just ask my wife about the ridiculous coffee table turned server rack that she "tolerates" here in the counterfeit girl scout cooke fortress of solitude.

One of the gripes I've had with being an iPhone / OSX user is being able to keep my email synchronized. First, a breakdown of what I tried:

1. .Mac - Since paying for email is soo 1995 and the +20 to pretentious achieved from weilding a 'mac.com' address was less than desired, using Apple's .Mac service was out of the question.
2. MediaTemple - The next place I tried was the webserver that this site is on - MediaTemple. While I had no problems getting IMAP to work, MT's reliability and speed rank way to low for me to use as my main email.
3. Lastly was the official iPhone email provider - Yahoo. Yahoo boasts the coolest feature of them all, Push IMAP actually pings your iPhone when you have new mail so your mail is always current and you can save battery life. Of course, Yahoo is not without it's flaws; it has crappy email addresses (can't even use Push IMAP with a Yahoo Business account?) and the oh-so-brilliant lack of being able to check your email with ANY desktop client.

Fast forward to last week.. With my domain back in my posession from squatters, I decided to give Google a whirl. The solution that Google offers gives me the following features:

• Send mail from a custom domain.
• IMAP synchronization
• Arguably a great web client, though I'm not used to it
• Excellent spam protection
• Works well with apple Mail / other desktop mail clients
• Very fast and reliable

and what you'll need:

• A domain name
• Access to advanced DNS setup (MX records)

To get this setup you'll only need to do two simple things:

Go to Google Apps website. Setup a Google Apps account. There you will be walked through a few steps to get email setup on your custom domain name.

Setup the iPhone using Google's simple instructions.

My impression of GMail so far has been quite good. The speed and reliability has been better than any other email account I have tried on the iPhone. Apple Mail works flawlessly albeit slightly slower than POP. The only things that don't feel quite right is GMails use of labels instead of the traditional folders and the slightly awkward 'All Mail' label. Other than that, this seems like the best way to get your mail on an iPhone and stay synchronized with a desktop client.