Why Computer Game Development Fails to Live Up to its Fun Image
Notwithstanding some common myths, the people that make video games are not working in a care-free environment. Video game corporations and their employees have to deal with a number of interior and exterior issues. These issues, necessarily, lead straight to assorted disorders and mental issues. In rare cases, they may even develop initial symptoms of arthritis.
For major video game companies, or the ones that already have powerful footholds in the industry, the strain can come from performance anxiety. Pressure is exerted on these firms to up the ante since they actually have a reputation for quality and fun in terms of video game design. Gameplayers have become used to the tough standards of previous game offerings and, naturally, they anticipate a raised level of quality from new versions or the most recent games. This steady demand for something new and better, combined with the generally unstable nature of the modern business environment causes performance anxiety from the computer game developers to the standard programmers, even up to the producers who call the shots in game development.
For other corporations, it is not the corporation's reputation that's at stake. Their own stressor is the drive to to outclass their own prior offerings. Outdoing their own product is just their obsession. A notable example of this is Blizzard, the developer and publisher of the “Warcraft” and “Starcraft” games. Both games were famous for making the best of technology existing at the time, as well as being some of the finest games in the Realtime Strategy (RTS) genre. In South Korea, “Starcraft” is still played heavily notwithstanding being having been released over ten years ago. Buckling under the pressure, some anonymous staff have reported that if Blizzard management didn't implement an open time frame for releasing follow ups to the above games (in prinicple, to ensure quality), most employees would have suffered from extreme cases of performance anxiety. This has resulted in Blizzard, as a corporation gaining a rep for taking about a decade to produce a follow-up to one of their titles due to problem with staff learning how to deal with anxiety and the pressure.
Of course, it's not simply the mind that's worked and drained by being in the computer game industry. The body is just as large a target for numerous problems, as the mind is. After all , games still need to be designed, the ideas need to be developed, and the beta releases have to be driven thru a rigorous quality testing process.
For the visible and auditory side of the games, the most likely problem would likely be muscle pain and headaches. Some have reported signs of arthritis. Artwork for video games goes thru multiple processes, and it's not entirely unusual for artists to get asked to rush through the art idea for the game. For smaller companies, one or two artists might be given strict cut offs for the concept art of more than one project. The rapid pace of drawing makes them subject to muscle pain, while the recurring thinking and visual analysis may cause headaches.
Another section of the company which will suffer from muscle pain would be the programming team. Games need to be coded, with each work of art and every bit of story converted into a language that the PCs and consoles can understand. Most people are not aware of exactly how much goes into even a simple video game like “Tetris” far less some of the 80-hour long epics produced by SquareEnix, a major Japanese game developer. This is further complex when there are numerous possible interactions within the game’s context, ranging from character creation options to how categorical in-game capabilities have interaction with one another. Now, top that off with a deadline, and you're all set to see programmers afflicted by symptoms of arthritis, possibly with migraine headaches as the spiteful cherry on top.
Headaches are also far from alien when it comes to the quality assurance groups, who are tasked with playing the beta versions of the games. Beta versions are unreleased, incomplete versions of the game that need in depth testing to see if everything works. Aside from that, the quality team must also check on the other game elements,eg difficulty or the plot. Since the beta versions are unfinished, there are naturally a number of graphical issues, some of which have been observed to cause migraine headaches.
For millions of gameplayers around the world, they enjoy the virtual worlds without even knowing the large pressure and lots of headaches that came in designing their fave video games. For most youngsters, playing computer games is pure fun. But for the game-makers, developing video games isn't play time at all.
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