Yup, that’s pretty much what it’s like…

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I worked in the gaming industry for a decade before moving on … this is precisely WHY I moved on.

Now, I didn’t work on any game teams.  I started out in Network Operations – babysitting EverQuest servers all night long and running patches whenever they were necessary.  From there, I moved into the development side, but I chose to work in Internationalization rather than on a game team.  The code that I wrote did fascinating things like conjugate Russian verbs, and that meant the amount of time we were in crunch mode was dramatically reduced from what a majority of the people working on game teams experienced.

At the beginning, I had a lot of fun … but towards the end, I hated every. day. I. went. to. work.  Our manager would frequently tell us to code things one way, then abruptly change his mind in the middle of development, not tell a soul, then yell at us all when we came back with what he originally asked for.  It was like working for a Magic 8 Ball that would randomly blow up on you for absolutely no reason.  At the end, I was getting migraines on a nearly daily basis and having some serious health problems.

Plus, a lot of game developers are lazy assholes.  Not all of them, but a LOT.  Way more than in any other part of the IT industry.  I can’t tell you how many times I’d walk into the office of two of my senior coworkers with a difficult coding question only to find them playing whatever game was hot for them right now.  Hell, management even allowed them to set up their desks so that you couldn’t tell what they were doing unless you went through a maze of desks.  “Sorry to interrupt your game of what-the-fuck-ever, but I have a question about what you’re getting paid for…”

Then there’s the sexism … often, I was the only person with boobs that were not man boobs (and there were a lot of man boobs) in the room.  The women who were there were in Customer Service, Community Managers, Administrative Assistants, HR Reps and QA.  Even game designers (which is a fancy phrase for some-guy-who-inputs-crap-into-a-spreadsheet-all-day) were primarily of the penis-wielding variety.  The women that WERE there were often getting in trouble for having sex with their managers in their bosses, or having sex with their managers in the parking lot, or having sex with their managers at company offsite convention events.  All the while, the company is trying to “attract female gamers” by putting on “beauty pageants” set up by Maxim to find what tramp should be the next ‘Firiona Vie’.

Sick.  The one they picked hadn’t even PLAYED an MMO, EVER.

But yeah, watch the video … it’s not so much fun to ‘work in video games’.  It’s more like sending your career through a forced death march.