Game production and blogs

This article by the wife of a man who works for Electronic Arts is interesting for more than one reason.

1) She talks about a ruthless exploitation of labour that would be illegal here, no matter how much money they paid, and which most likely is illegal in the United States as well. I will have problems buying an other Electronic Arts game, I will have flashes of broken homes, ruined lives and burned-out programmers.

2) It points towards a change in the production models for computer games which I was asked about on State of Play II – somebody asked if I thought innovation would cease due to the large companies taking over game production. At the time I was optimistic and said that the economic benefit from pushing the hardware by way of more and more challenging computer games would keep the innovation in the game industry. After reading this, I am not sure. Burned-out people are not innovative.

3) The story was taken from a Live Journal and published by IGDA under the creative commons. The writer is anonymous, to protect herself, but an organisation such as IGDA still posts the whole thing, picks it up and reuses it. What do they know about Electronic Arts, in order to pick up this anonymous, unreviewed article off a blog and post it on their site? Or does it just look convincing? Interesting content, and free?

Yes, lots of interesting questions. And a well written piece, too!

Link by way of Reality Panic