Videos From the IGDA Annual General Meeting
I took three videos while I attended the IGDA Annual General Meeting at the Game Developers Conference on March 26, 2009.
The first you see here is a video of outgoing Board Chair Jen Maclean preemptively addressing the issue of the QoL controversy surrounding then-board-member Mike Capps’ statements (more here, too) at the IGDA Leadership Forum. I am missing the first ~30 seconds of her statement, sorry about that.
The second video is of Scott Macmillan, one of my fellow volunteers with the Boston IGDA chapter. During the Q&A session, he read a statement denouncing the IGDA board’s official response to the QoL controversy. Maclean’s response to Scott is also in the video.
The third video is of John Feil, who was an IGDA board member for five years and is critical to the organization’s crediting efforts. During Q&A, he makes three points. (1) Commending the IGDA’s response to the EA Mythic crediting controversy. (2) Denouncing the IGDA board’s handling of the QoL controversy. (3) Questioning the new website technology for igda.org and the organization’s history of adopting and ditching web technologies at great cost to the organization. Jen Maclean responds to points (1) and (2), Jason Della Rocca responds to point (3).
I will let these videos speak for themselves right now, but I will be posting my response later this week. I have spoken about this publicly; you can see some of what I have to say on the original IGDA forum posts here and here. I also made a statement at the annual general meeting, which I did not take video of. To the best of my recollection, here it is:
To me, it doesn’t really matter whether Mike Capps was allowed to say what he did or not at the Leadership Forum. We as a membership elected him. This points to problems with the IGDA’s electoral procedures: in the six-sentence summary we see on the web form for each board election, it’s impossible to understand people’s positions. You can look at the archive.org records of Mike Capps’ personal statement when he was running for the board. He claims to be in favor of quality of life, but does not define what quality of life is. There’s no room for nuance or for dialogue. I think that those running for election owe it to the members to give them more information. This is why I launched dariusforigda.org in support of my bid for the 2010 IGDA Board elections. Members will be able to go there and see my policy positions and make an informed decision whether or not to vote for me. I encourage others to do the same. Thank you.
Kent Quirk Said,
April 4, 2009 @ 6:02 am
Ok, maybe I’m blind, but I can’t find the links to the videos. I see a bunch of links to forum threads, one of which contains a link to a single hour-long video. What am I missing?
Darius Kazemi Said,
April 4, 2009 @ 7:35 am
The videos are embedded right inside the post… you don’t see them?
Kent Quirk Said,
April 6, 2009 @ 6:21 pm
Wow, no, I don’t. I did a view source and I see the object tags, but they’re simply invisible in Firefox 3.0.7 on the Mac. I see a text post with some inline links, but no images at all.
Kent Quirk Said,
April 6, 2009 @ 6:22 pm
FWIW, they show up fine on Camino. :/
Macguffin Games » Blog Archive » My Part in the IGDC Quality of Life Discussion Said,
April 7, 2009 @ 7:20 am
[...] (For more on this subject, along with a link to video of John Feil’s statement on the subject, check out Darius’ post on his IGDA candidacy blog.) [...]
Omen Said,
April 10, 2009 @ 1:29 pm
The guy in the second video breaks the format of the question section in order to give a statement about how he believes people should stay within their formats.
great……
NN Said,
April 13, 2009 @ 3:21 pm
Quote: “The mission of the IGDA’s Quality of Life Committee is to make the process of game development easier and more pleasant for everyone.”
By accident or design, the IGDA co-opted the “EA Spouse” uproar with a two-pronged diversion.
The first prong of the diversion was to generalize a specific, quantifyable, well-researched issue - overtime, its regulation and compensation - into a generalized “Quality of Life” issue encompassing free soda, company barbeque and other irrelevancies.
The second prong of the diversion was to take a clear, indisputable conflict of interest - excessive workload and workhours without guaranteed, adequate compensation - and proposing that this conflict could be sidestepped by identifying and resolving inefficiencies in the production process.
It is important to recognize this “Efficiency Fallacy” for what it is: You cannot resolve a conflict of interest by initiating a lateral search for Magic Bullet and Free Lunch. In the event that production processes were suddenly improved at no cost, then schedules would be shortened and objectives would be scaled up, keeping the amount of overtime demanded right where it currently is.
The inversion of the “Efficiency Fallacy” is the proposition that “if you work smart you do not have to work hard”, which implies that overtime is the result of employee deficiencies, and not the choice and responsibility of management.
It is certainly the case that our production processes are inadequate and inefficient. It is also likely that, by and large, management and consultants are more qualified and more likely to identify and implement process improvements if there is demand for it. As the IGDA’s foray into consulting demonstrates, it is the demand that is at issue.
To the extent that these improvements are not happening, it is not so much evidence of the kind of pervasive ignorance that an after-hour IGDA volunteer committee effort could in some way address, but an indication that the incentive structure that would encourage any possible reforms does not exist.
To the extent improvements have been implemented in the industry, it has usually been for reasons other than overtime, and the results appear to demonstrate that the amount of overtime (once excessive blunders are eliminated by minimal competence) is largely independent of production efficiency.
Why? Because the overtime is not systematically tracked, and hence, it is compensated at whim (bonus, comp), if compensated at all. In the absence of defined pay, overtime does not have to be tracked, does not have to be evaluated as a cost factor, and does not materialize as a quantifiable cost on the development balance sheet. As it is not tracked, any production process and HR effort to reduce its occurence going forward is guaranteed to fail or fizzle.
Overtime is a cost. The demand and supply of overtime resulting from a market, a market that is distorted because teh costs are not properly accounted for. Ultimately, the only relevant question is whether the cost is to be billed to the employee, or to be deducted from the owners’ and shareholders’ profits.
If overtime can be avoided in a given situation, it will be avoided only in proportion to the balance sheet costs it adds. At present, the only explicit cost commonly tracked is the production expense resulting from overtime meal services.
The IGDA could have responded to the “EA Spouse” debate with an focused effort exclusively aimed at defining recommended Best Practices for overtime tracking and by defining adequate compensation.
The IGDA then could have pushed hard for industry-wide tracking and reporting of overtime. If annual salary surveys combine salary and additional compensation with actual hours worked, IGDA members would be and would have been empowered to “vote with their feet”, esp. in the volatile labor market at the beginning of the next-gen cycle.
Further, the IGDA could have measured better to what extent its own multi-year education and lobbying efforts proved to be effective. As the IGDA has to some extent positioned itself as a purported alternative to collective bargaining efforts, the actual results of the 4+ year IGDA efforts on QoL would give us an idea as to how successful that approach has proven so far with respect to demonstrable reductions of overtime, or advances towards actual compensation.