One of the things which I most appreciate and enjoy about our team on the Starsiege 2845 project is how aware our leadership, and indeed most of our members, are of the great fallacies and dysfunctions at work in the games industry today. The elaborate waste, ingrained stupidity, bureaucratic nonsense, dreadful mismanagement, IP dilution, employee abuse, poor production values, and lousy QA policies ? none of these unfortunate realities are lost on our team. As fans and artists we've watched with dismay as the industry has accepted a string of worst practices as a priori assumptions of the game development process - and we are collectively determined not to let the same things happen to us.

Therefore it comes as no surprise to any of us to read this account from an EA Widow who is having to cope with the human cost exacted on her husband by the publishing giant. They are in effect emptying him out of all his energy, talent, and love for the art of making games and are willing to planning on discarding him like a wasted prophylactic product when they have sucked every last useful drop of effort from him they can manage. Witness the status-quo for too much of the gaming industry:

This crunch also differs from crunch time in a smaller studio in that it was not an emergency effort to save a project from failure. Every step of the way, the project remained on schedule. Crunching neither accelerated this nor slowed it down; its effect on the actual product was not measurable. The extended hours were deliberate and planned; the management knew what they were doing as they did it. The love of my life comes home late at night complaining of a headache that will not go away and a chronically upset stomach, and my happy supportive smile is running out.

No one works in the game industry unless they love what they do. No one on that team is interested in producing an inferior product. My heart bleeds for this team precisely BECAUSE they are brilliant, talented individuals out to create something great. They are and were more than willing to work hard for the success of the title. But that good will has only been met with abuse. Amazingly, Electronic Arts was listed #91 on Fortune magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For" in 2003.

EA's attitude toward this -- which is actually a part of company policy, it now appears -- has been (in an anonymous quotation that I've heard repeated by multiple managers), "If they don't like it, they can work someplace else." Put up or shut up and leave: this is the core of EA's Human Resources policy.

Further on in the article she laments:

If I could get EA CEO Larry Probst on the phone, there are a few things I would ask him. "What's your salary?" would be merely a point of curiosity. The main thing I want to know is, Larry: you do realize what you're doing to your people, right? And you do realize that they ARE people, with physical limits, emotional lives, and families, right? Voices and talents and senses of humor and all that? That when you keep our husbands and wives and children in the office for ninety hours a week, sending them home exhausted and numb and frustrated with their lives, it's not just them you're hurting, but everyone around them, everyone who loves them? When you make your profit calculations and your cost analyses, you know that a great measure of that cost is being paid in raw human dignity, right?

Right?

The tragedy for this poor woman is that Larry probably does care. My experience with company executives is that they tend to be decent human beings, not acid-belching aliens bent on world domination. The problem is that Larry is no longer in control. The EA machine is running on auto-pilot, the parameters and boundaries of its dysfunction neatly defined by the requirements of its stock price. When a publicly held company reaches a certain size, a sort of critical mass, it begins to take on a life of its own. Process and paperwork begin to steer the daily activity of the company rather than principled and visionary leadership. When this occurs only the most strong willed and talented of CEOs can ever manage to save the soul of their company from the cancer of its all-too-necessary bureaucracy.

As a result, corporate malfeasance of this sort is very rarely the product of a malevolent will intent on grinding into powder the humanity of the people it abuses. More often it is instead a lack of volition on the part of the company executives that allows the situation to go unchecked. They are unwilling to exercise their conscience in contravention of the perceived necessities of a highly competitive marketplace. That their inaction or indecision is destroying the lives of human beings (who also happen to be valuable company resources when properly maintained) does not occur to them until it is too late to stop the runaway train.

EA, like many other major media enterprises, is now so deeply mired in its own habitual abuse of human resources (among other things) that it can no longer reform its practices without suffering critical damage to its profitability. So complete is the institutional derangement now that only blunt trauma can bring an end to its blundering rampage. That said trauma is now nearly inevitable, and will wind up hurting EA's bottom-line far more than a good HR policy would have, will serve as an ironic footnote to yet another tragic example of what happens when we let reports and committees run our businesses instead of principled leaders.