Anthem - PrEAying it Doesn't Suck

[Psyren]

I can tell you first hand that hospital doctors have to do it. Residency is practically slave labor. I've always heard stories of lawyers doing it as well. I can't speak for every job on the spectrum but I know it's not unheard of in a lot of industries.

That's not really a standard to hold game development to though. While I won't say that medicine and law are totally bereft of creativity, their mandate is not to provide fun or engaging experiences to people either the way that it is for, say, a game designer, animator, or artist. In other words, if you run your game studio like a law firm, it's easy to see how the end product might not be a great game.

(You could also argue that law firms and hospitals are no better at avoiding our hypercapitalist hellscape than the games industry is, but that's a separate topic altogether.)

[Anteros]

That's not really a standard to hold game development to though. While I won't say that medicine and law are totally bereft of creativity, their mandate is not to provide fun or engaging experiences to people either the way that it is for, say, a game designer, animator, or artist. In other words, if you run your game studio like a law firm, it's easy to see how the end product might not be a great game.

(You could also argue that law firms and hospitals are no better at avoiding our hypercapitalist hellscape than the games industry is, but that's a separate topic altogether.)

I'm not saying that it's a good practice, just that it happens. In fact I hate it. If anything it's worse in medicine than the game industry. I'd rather play a poorly written game because the writers were tired than have a doctor hurt someone.

[The_Jackal]

That's not really a standard to hold game development to though. While I won't say that medicine and law are totally bereft of creativity, their mandate is not to provide fun or engaging experiences to people either the way that it is for, say, a game designer, animator, or artist. In other words, if you run your game studio like a law firm, it's easy to see how the end product might not be a great game.

And on the fundamental level, it doesn't matter. There's lots of evidence showing how productivity nosedives when working too much overtime, and in the case of Anthem, it doesn't appear that the core issue was a lack of diligence on the part of the designers and developers, rather a terrible lack of vision, leadership, and organization at the top. They clearly didn't know what kind of game they were making for the many years it was in development, which is why it was excreted out at the last minute as a half-baked looter-shooter.

(You could also argue that law firms and hospitals are no better at avoiding our hypercapitalist hellscape than the games industry is, but that's a separate topic altogether.)

At risk of going off topic, they're way worse, which is one of the principal drivers of the high cost of care in the US.

While there's no question that doctors' training should be rigorous, there's no evidence to support that the adverse working conditions forced onto new residents is actually good for making them better doctors, or good for their patients. Working 80 hour weeks has been long since proven to be counter-productive, and hospital mistakes regular spike as a new crop of residents is thrust from med-school into the country's teaching hospitals.

In many ways medical industry operates like a cartel, and one of the crucial aspects of running a cartel is limiting competition by raising barriers to entry into your market, and the huge educational costs and length indenture required to be able to legally practice medicine is part of those barriers to entry.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com...ured-servants/

OT rant off.