When a Video Game Stops Being Fun
By RANDALL STROSS
HARLES DICKENS himself would shudder, I should think, were he to see the way young adults are put to work in one semimodern corner of our economy. Gas lamps are long gone, and the air is free of soot. But you can't look at a place like Electronic Arts, the world's largest developer of entertainment software, and not think back to the early industrial age when a youthful work force was kept fully occupied during all waking hours to enrich a few elders.
Games for video consoles and PC's have become a $7 billion-a-year business. Based in Redwood City, Calif., Electronic Arts is the home of the game franchises for N.F.L. football, James Bond and "Lord of the Rings," among many others. For avid players with professional ambitions to develop games, E.A. must appear to be the best place in the world. Writing cool games and getting paid to boot: what more could one ask?
Yet there is unhappiness among those who are living that dream. Based on what can be glimpsed through cracks in E.A.'s front facade, its high-tech work force is toiling like galley slaves chained to their benches.
The first crack opened last summer, when Jamie Kirschenbaum, a salaried E.A. employee, filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, accusing it of failure to pay overtime compensation. He remains at the company, so I spoke with him by phone last week to get an update. He told me that since joining E.A. in June 2003 in the image production department, he has been working - at the company's insistence - around 65 hours a week, spread over six or seven days. Putting in long hours is what the industry calls "crunching." Once upon a time, the crunch came in the week or two before shipping a new release. Mr. Kirschenbaum's experience, however, has been a continuous string of crunches.
Crunches also once were followed by commensurate periods of time off. Mr. Kirschenbaum reports, however, that E.A. has scaled back informal comp time, never formally codified, to a token two weeks per project. He said his own promised comp time had disappeared altogether. At this point, he said he would be glad to enjoy a Labor Day without laboring, or eat a Fourth of July spread at some place other than his cubicle, pleasures he has not enjoyed for two years. The company said it had no comment on the lawsuit, but it is likely to argue that Mr. Kirschenbaum's image production position is exempt from the laws governing overtime compensation.
A few days ago, another crack opened - one large enough to fit a picture window. An anonymous writer who signed herself as "E.A. Spouse" posted on the Web a detailed account of hellish employer-mandated hours reaching beyond 80 hours a week for months. No less remarkable were the thousands of comments that swiftly followed in online discussion forums for gamers and other techies, providing volumes of similar stories at E.A. and at other game developers.
I learned the identity of the E.A. employee described in the anonymous account and spoke at length with him in person late one night, adding a third shift to the day's double that he'd already worked. He seemed credible in all respects, in his command of technical detail, in his unshakable enthusiasm for the games he works on - and in his pallor.
For around $60,000 a year in an area with a high cost of living, he had been set to work on a six-day-a-week schedule. On weekdays, his team worked from 9 to 10 (that is, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.), and on Saturdays, a half-day (that means 9 to 6). Then Sundays were added - noon to 8 or 10 p.m. The weekly total was 82 to 84 hours.
By tradition, Silicon Valley employers have always offered their bleary-eyed employees lottery tickets in the form of stock options. E.A.'s option grants, however, offer little chance of a Google-like bonanza. An employee who started today with an options package like that of the E.A. worker just described (and who stayed with the company the four years required to fully vest) would get $120,000, for example, if the share price quadrupled - and proportionally less for more modest increases. The odds of a skyrocketing stock grew much longer this month, when the company said competition had forced it to cut prices on core sports titles.
Still, the company is a generous warden: free laundry service, free meals, free ice cream and snacks. The first month, the E.A. employee recalled, he and his colleagues were delighted by the amenities. But he said they soon came to feel that seeing the sun occasionally would have had more of a tonic effect.
This employee, who has not had a single day off in two months, is experienced in the game software business. But he said he had never before had to endure a death-march pace that begins many months before the beta testing phase that precedes the release of a project.
Jeff Brown, a company spokesman, declined to comment on E.A. Spouse's allegations. Mr. Brown did say that the company was interested in its employees' opinions, as illustrated by its employee survey, conducted every two years. This suggests that it needs to conduct a survey to learn whether a regular routine of 80-hour weeks is popular among the salaried rank and file.
Asked about reports of employees working long, uncompensated hours, Mr. Brown responded that "the hard work" entailed in writing games "isn't unique to E.A." He is correct; smaller studios demand it, too. The International Game Developers Association conducted an industrywide "quality of life" survey this year documenting that "crunch time is omnipresent." The study urged readers to tell "the young kids just starting out" in the industry to reject the hours that lock them into "an untenable situation once they start wanting serious relationships and families."
Electronic Arts' early history has none of the taint of present labor practices, and many who are acquainted with the old E.A. and the new E.A. have publicly lamented in Web forums the disappearance of the generosity practiced by Trip Hawkins, who founded the company in 1982. Mr. Hawkins, who has not been associated with E.A. for many years, said that he was not surprised by E.A. Spouse's story. He called today's E.A. a corporate "Picture of Dorian Gray," its attractive surface hiding a not-so-attractive reality.
INDEED, E.A. is noticeably young in appearance. After Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, spent a sabbatical last spring as a researcher at the company, he wrote, "I am 43 and I felt absolutely ancient during my time there." He said the place felt to him like "Logan's Run," the 1976 science fiction movie in which no one is allowed to live past 30 - and he felt even older when he realized that the 20-somethings were too young to know the reference.
The company has 3,300 employees in its studios developing game titles, and it hires 1,000 new people a year. (Company officials said voluntary turnover is about 10 percent annually.) In the past, it has hired only about 10 percent of new studio personnel directly from college; it has set a goal of increasing that to 75 percent, which would skew the median age still younger.
Professor Pausch listed cost savings from lower salaries as one reason E.A. wishes to shift hiring to a younger group. The company also recognizes that fresh graduates are the most suggestible; Professor Pausch said he heard managers say that "young kids don't know what's impossible." That, however, they will learn when they get their schedules.
Randall Stross is a historian and author based in Silicon Valley. E-mail
domain@nytimes.com.
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