Opinion: The Law of Diminishing Returns

[In this reprinted #altdevblogaday-opinion piece, 5th Cell's lead animator Tim Borrelli explains the problems crunch introduces by comparing overtime work to his experiences overtraining with powerlifting.] Every so often, the hot topic of crunch/overtime/extra hours comes (read: anytime a jackass like me writes a post about it or the mainstream media decides to interpret what a jackass like me writes as a scathing commentary on the state of the industry). Sometimes, though, high profile people say something about overtime, and it incites a reaction, no matter what the intent. It's no surprise to anyone, in any industry, that overtime can creep into all facets of our lives. In the case of me being both a powerlifter and a video game developer, overtime has come in the form of overtraining and crunching, respectively. Not this kind of crunch, guys For powerlifters, overtraining generally involves training your body so hard that it effectively cannot recover -- your basal body temperature drops, your central nervous system begins to shut down. For game developers, crunching is typically a point in a project that requires developers to work 60, 80, or even 100 hours a week to hit a deadline, pushing our mental capacity to a limit. In both cases, you become lethargic and your sleep suffers, furthering the lack of recovery. The belief for both overtraining and crunch is that the extra time put in will result in higher quantity and quality of results. Our ability to cope with such overtime hinges heavily on the amount of time we have to recover from engaging in it. This recovery, whether or active (by, say, deep tissue massage or engaging in an unrelated interest) or passive (by relaxing on the couch or playing video games), can only work if those needing it are given the proper amount of time and resources to ALLOW it to work. All The King's Horses Recently, I spent a large amount of time training for a national powerlifting competition. I trained for five months, competed in a local meet as a warm up, and then trained for another two months before the national meet. During the initial five months, I worked very hard in the gym and took regular breaks from training so my body could recover, and I saw great gains in strength. At the local meet, I set a personal best in the deadlift, and walked away happy. He probably overtrained something. After the local meet, I took only a few days off, and then decided that I had recovered from the first meet and the stress it had put on my body. Since I had limited time before the national competition, I spent the next two months working even harder than I had before. Not only did I not take enough time off after the local meet, I eliminated any down time from my training, effectively giving my body no time to recover. After several weeks of this new training plan, I actually felt weaker. I started skipping workouts and making excuses to myself to not push it too hard. It got to the point where I didn't even want to compete in the national meet anymore. I was burnt out, stressed out, and flat out tired. Even still, I set a goal to break my personal record for total weight. In fact, I planned on pushing myself to move more weight than I had ever done, even during training. So, what happened? I failed. I didn't allow my body to recover from the incredible stress I was putting on it, and as a result when it mattered most I couldn't compete at my full potential. I didn't reach my goals, and the national meet was one of my worst in recent memory. All The King's Men Game devs are probably wondering what this meathead, lunkhead, Planet Fitness-reject's story has to do with them. Well, to paraphrase Matthew McConaughey in "A Time To Kill," just imagine if what I described above was the progression from a press demo to a final build (or, maybe the progression from shipping a game to working on the next one). Imagine that the whole team gets behind polishing the absolute hell out of the first hour of gameplay. We spend a good six months of time getting the first three missions right. The scripting, the code hooks, the character performances, everything. We show it to the press during the months leading up to launch, and all of our attention is focused on that one hour of gameplay shining like a star. We probably looked like MC Hammer on crack at times, too. After all of that, the realization sets in that we have three months to finish the game. We have to get ALL of that hype into the rest of the missions, the gameplay, the general feel of the game. Maybe this mission here doesn't have enough of what dude from Kotaku loved, and maybe those animations there don't live up to the expectations of our publisher. So we start spending extra time revamping, changing, cramming in content. Features creep in. Hours start piling up. Some of us are thinking, "I'm working extra hours because I believe in the project," so when we hit a wall at 10 PM, we push through it. Suddenly it's Thursday, two weeks before submission, and we've already put 50 hours in this week. We start to check in bad data. We break the build. We snap at co-workers. We're no longer being smart or creative about making the game -- instead we're going through zombie-like motions to just get it done. We just want to ship this thing and move on to the next project. And that passion we had? Starting to dwindle, if not gone already. Sound familiar? Putting It Back Together The thing is, though, that it doesn't have to be like this. There can be good overtime. For example, I've overtrained my deadlift and seen incredible gains by pushing myself on heavy days and taking a month away from the next heavy session. I've worked 50-60 hour weeks, with five (and rarely six) days a week for no longer than two or three weeks to get a deliverable out the door, and have produced work that was higher quality and more rewarding, with no negative effect on my health or marriage. What made the good overtime better than the bad? After the bad overtime, I was done. I thought I had recovered enough, so when I tried to (physically and mentally) get back into both activities, I couldn't. I was done, and wanted out. I considered quitting both powerlifting and game development after the last bad overtime experience with each. In the case of the good overtime experiences, I was able to take the proper amount of time off that both my body and mind needed to recover not just AFTER the overtime, but DURING it. The work I put during these smaller pushes was of higher quality, more rewarding in the end, and most importantly, kept me engaged in I was doing and looking forward to getting back to it at full tilt as soon as I could. It can be argued that if we want to be successful, we have to push ourselves harder than the average in our fields. It doesn't, however, have to have a negative affect on the things we are passionate about. We've all read the reports, seen the opinion pieces, heard about EA Spouses and Kaos' "thousand yard stare." I've read articles on how overtraining has blown out knees, biceps, backs, and worse. Everyone universally agrees that too much overtime is bad -- bad for your health, bad for relationships, bad for studio morale, bad bad bad. Smell The Roses Don't let life pass you by. Overtime exists, and it's not going away. I'm not suggesting that it does. I'm not going to rant about crunch time ruining lives. I'm not going to claim that my life has been horribly affected by working overtime or training too hard. I am, however, going to say this -- we all need to manage it better. I don't mean that we need to plan better (we know), or avoid feature/exercise creep (we try), or never put in overtime (we will). I mean that we as individuals need to manage how we represent ourselves while working overtime. We need to be conscious of the fact that people who are interested in what we do (powerlifting, game development, insert-your-interest-here) are going to look at us as an example. They'll see us doing stupid things in the gym or working 100 hours a week, and see us wearing both of those things like honor badges. They'll see us tweeting about how we're "crunching to make the game better for you, the consumer!", or read our Facebook post about how we just totally killed a training session and can't walk right now -- but hey, "no pain no gain!" Those people will enter our fields and expect that to be the norm, the right way to do things, and they will never question those methods until they too are burnt out. And that's a damn shame, because we can prevent it. We can teach these newcomers a different lesson -- to not make the mistakes that we did. We need to encourage them to come into our industries and change them for the better. When all is said and done, people will only remember the 4-million-on-day-one sellers, and not the people who worked hard and sacrificed to get the game to that point. We'll only remember the monster numbers that a powerlifter put up at Worlds, but we'll never see the training that was put in to achieve that. So let's take back that part. Let's do it smarter. Let's follow the Law of Diminishing Returns. [This piece was reprinted from #AltDevBlogADay, a shared blog initiative started by @mike_acton devoted to giving game developers of all disciplines a place to motivate each other to write regularly about their personal game development passions.]