For years I’ve pondered a paradox:
- 1) The fact that crunch is poisonous to creative work
- 2) The fact that many of my favorite games were made with crunch
My answer:
Crunch allows a team to naively reach a crucial creative state, at high personal cost.
It can be reached without crunch.
To get it outta the way: It is a matter of fact that overwork causes burnout, and burnout will fuck your ability to do anything, especially anything that requires creative problem solving, self-motivation, or lateral thinking. There’s plenty of literature on this if you want to learn more.
Next let’s talk about some production traits that, when true, lead to teams making better games:
- High expression of personal aesthetic
- High creative alignment
- Rapid decision making
- Low friction between decision and implementation
- Bespoke detail work
High Expression of Personal Aesthetic:
Your personal aesthetic is basically a combination of:
- Your artistic and personal values
- The heuristics and habits you rely on to make quick decisions
- Your artistic process, usually honed over years
Your personal aesthetic is basically the engine that makes your work human. It’s why your work is a reflection of your self, and it is absolutely crucial if you want your work to deeply connect with people.
We also have team, studio, and cultural aesthetics. They are the SHARED artistic and personal values, shared heuristics for quick decision making, and shared process amongst the group in question. We can think of these as an aggregate of personal aesthetics.
High Creative Alignment:
“Creative alignment” is basically a measure of how much a team is on the same table. Do they have the same goals, do they understand the vision, is their work all meshing together to create a greater whole.
This is often achieved by having a singular “source” of vision in the form of a director. Their personal aesthetic drives the entire project. Sometimes this takes the form of micromanagement, healthier versions may look more like shared inspiration, evangelism, and clearly communicated goals.
But it can happen in other ways. Sometimes you see collaboration between multiple empowered leads who own different domains and work well together.
For example: Majora’s Mask, where one director owned the dungeons and main quest, and the other owned the story, sidequests, and 3-day system.
On SMALL teams you can achieve high alignment by working closely together, getting to know each other, and having constant or frequent touch points where you talk and see each others’ work.
Finally—and this will be important later—once the game is built out enough, then the game itself becomes a source of alignment. The overall shape is there, so if everyone is trying to make all their work fit well into the game that is already there, it’ll probably fit well together, too.
Rapid Decision Making:
This one is pretty simple: In my experience, people’s decisions are a stronger reflection of their personal aesthetic if they can safely skip over-thinking, over-planning, and red tape, and instead rely on their… not just gut, but their internalized rules and heuristics.
Low Friction for Implementation:
Most creatives seem to thrive if they’re able to quickly turn a decision or an idea into something that’s present in the game. The flip side of “rapid decision making” is “rapidly seeing the results of your decisions”.
Bespoke Detail work:
When I say this, I’m basically referring to handcrafted moments and touches. Is your team putting in handcrafted touches at just the right moments, with just the right impact? As a general rule, the other elements I listed are a prerequisite for this.
This kind of detail work is how we get, say, secrets perfectly placed in levels. How we make the game acknowledge every player curiosity, or delight players with surprises. It’s how, say, the Ocarina of Time team made signs cut along your sword swings and butterflies turn to fairies on your deku sticks.
Big Teams and AAA:
You might have noticed… ALL of these production traits I listed become geometrically more difficult to achieve the bigger your team and game are. Basically all AAA game production is like wearing a strait jacket: all of these things are nearly or completely out of reach.
If every time you make a decision as a designer it requires…:
- Multiple rounds of approval from stakeholders
- Additional work from QA, animation, VFX, writing, loc, env art, other designers
- And navigating around content lockdowns like string lock, or env lock
That means you can’t make quick decisions OR have quick turnaround. Expressing personal aesthetic becomes difficult because so much of it exists in our gut and our quick choices. You’re stuck with the choices you made when creative alignment was less clear, and you can’t inject bespoke detail.
Coming Back Around:
OK SO now that that’s alllll out of the way, how the hell does this relate to crunch?
It’s simple! Crunch is often a state of:
- 1) Loosened constraints
- 2) Rapid decision-making
- 3) Rapid implementation
- 4) High alignment because the game is nearly finished
With all of these conditions met, we get a period with lots of bespoke detail work that highly expresses personal aesthetic.
And that’s it! A team that fails to allow these conditions to exist earlier in development, which describes almost all AAA games and a lot of other games too, can as a last-ditch effort lean into crunch to get their game over the quality finish line without ever understanding WHY it works.
Takeaways:
One takeaway could be “oh so we can just crunch to make a game good”. But obviously that is not a reliable method! We see it fail more often than it succeeds. But a lot of our seminal games WERE made this way, and due to survivorship bias it can look like a good strategy.
A better, more important takeaway is that we should devote as much energy as we possibly can into creating these ideal creative conditions earlier in production.
We should delay lockdowns responsibly. Maximize flexibility. Minimize red tape. Achieve high alignment in healthy, empowering ways earlier. Schedule an EXTENDED period of detail work after the shape of the game is present and playable. Lower quality bars judiciously to allow freedom.
Anecdote:
This understanding started to come together for me a few years ago, and I have only one anecdote about a time I was able to push our team to work more this way on Destiny 2:
We were reusing the Hive Dreadnaught from Destiny: The Taken King for a new seasonal expansion. The Dreadnaught from Destiny 1 was the best-ever Destiny destination, in my mind. The reason? The team crunched really hard at the end on just pure polish and detail work after most of the shape of it was there.
The result was a place that was FULL of hand-make touches around every corner. It was varied because a lot of different designers (with different personal aesthetics) were able to work independently towards shared goals they were highly aligned on, and it was all GOOD, you could feel the humanity.
So I pitched to our creative director that we should dedicate a week to be a “game jam” week mid-production where all the designers and artists could be set loose to make features or do polish with zero red tape. Do the work, ask for forgiveness later, figure out what we can keep after the fact.
It was a smashing success: there was more excitement and energy than I had ever seen on the team before, we had a suuuuper productive week, nobody worked long hours, and we ended up with lots of really cool touches and moments that could never have existed in a top-down plan.
There were hiccups and stuff with it too, because the reality of AAA is that no work exists in a vacuum and everything creates downstream work. So we couldn’t keep everything that came out of that game jam week. But man was it exciting and fun and demonstrated a way better way of working.