[Deer-ly]

welcome to crunch, and the culture.
 
 What is Crunch Culture
 Crunch culture endorses that employees feel “the struggle” as part of their creative process. In other words, the belief system is that employees'   passion to produce results should outweigh everything else including stress, fatigue, and mental health.
 
  The most common excuse is "No body has a gun to there head" in the words of ChrisOfTheDead: "Yeah you are, my employment is in your hands and if you don't like that i   don't wanna crunch your gonna let me go and I'm gonna be out of a job."

 Most studios don't mandate crunch periods, they don't have to. Over 50% of game dev's expect crunch from there employer. At EPIC games an anonymous employee said that he   averages 70 hours a week and that there's probably 50-100 people in the same boat. "The company give's us almost unlimited time off, but its almost impossible to take the time. If I   take time off then the workload falls onto other people, and nobody wants to be that guy." another anecdote reads-- "I hardly sleep. I'm grumpy at home. I have no energy to go out.   Getting a weekend away from work is a major achievement. If I take Saturday, off i feel guilty. I'm not being forced to work this way, but if i don't, then the job wont get done." 

 Self mandated crunch usually come from a good place, doesn't always mean its okay. 
 It's a double edged sword you need people who really care about the work they do, the more they care the better they're work will be. Unless that drive is kept in check it quickly   becomes self destructive.



 At BioWare while under the 7 year development of Anthem a term used in the military for early stage ptsd.
 
 Stress casualty 
  
  At BioWare a "Stress Casualty" is when someone has such a mental breakdown from stress they're just gone for one - three months. 
 "some come back, some don't" 

 I have to assume the people up top cracking the wip must either not realize or not care that burning burning the candle at both ends completely drains you of any passion you might   have had. A tired,
stressed, unhappy, employee working the same hours as a sweatshop worker is not likely to put out there best work. 
 
 CDPR Crunch + The Players
Many of the game devs received such hateful messages over the release date alone.
  
  
  
 and there are people out there that support crunch saying it makes games better.
 
 
 
 
 Halo 2 Crunch
 
 The halo 2 crunch was remembered as brutal and they thought they were going to die. 
 "The strain of time led to a new way of thinking about crunch by Bungie" and "There's a crunch you wanna do, and a crunch you have to do" 
 
 "The one you want to do can be awesome, because you have passionate people who are excited and have cool stuff to work on... but you have to be careful. People can be so excited   that before you know it they're getting burned out."
 
 I'm not the best at structuring so instead of making my own arguments and points i will hyperlink some articles that you can look at in your free time and that i can reference later
 Eurogamer's article
 gamespot's article
 BT2G's article

 Naughty Dog
 "The studio is open about (crunch culture) in interviews... and it's managers deliberately seek out perfectionist in art, design, engineering and all the other disciplines that make a game   happen"
 "...at naughty, nobody ask the devs to crunch. Nobody hast to ask. They'll be there anyways"

 Martin O'Donnell
  is an American composer known for his work on video game developer Bungie's series, such as Myth, Oni, Halo, and Destiny O'Donnell was Bungie's audio lead until April 11, 2014.
  Marty's most famous saying and something he kept on his white board at Bungie 
 
 
 Think of the goose as the people and the egg's as the creations, Consumers/Managers obviously don't carve up geese as a hobby but that does mean there treated fairly. 
 people don't actually want to kill the goose but they don't seem to have a problem kicking it in the stomach, but a goose that's been kicked in the stomach isn't going to want   to lay more egg's, doesn't even wanna get out of bed. You want to pet the goose every so often and not hit it with a crowbar.
 
 Gmod relevance 
To conclude
 i make this because i see people not just here but in other communities, games, places, all just slave away at working on the community/game not taking account mental health,   physical health or hygiene.  I am myself guilty of this and i hate seeing others fall into the same trap. and then burning out feeling like shit afterwards. 
 
  from pauling
 
  A good post by star

 So take a rest at the bonfire friend know you don't need to overload yourself. This isn't just to gmod this goes out to retail workers, fast food, all of you that work in that type of area involving crunch or crunch culture. but in gmod specifically to not just staff but all players, you don't need to be on at all times even if you want to apply for staff you don't need to get on the server all day to grind out enough hours you should slowly play up to the required time so you don't get burned out. same with staff you don't need to constantly play to prove your dedication to the server even little bits here and there are enough, to do a good job.

This whole thing is because of this video and its a great video about crunch and crunch culture and if you watch it you'll see that this was like 90% this video. but if you don't want to watch the video with funny cartoon man here is reading. im bad at this man just take my forum post

[RussEfarmer]

TL;DR stop worrying about people cheating on a children's hide and seek server and go for a walk.

Seriously though, this is a video game. The entire community isn't going to unravel if someone is using a soundboard on TTT at 3am. If you get an on call staff ping and say "Ugh, really?" instead of saying "Yeah I can check that out", speaking from experience, you're doing it begrudgingly and are only doing it because you don't have anything else to do and want to feel responsible for something. Wanting to be responsible for something isn't a bad thing, it makes us strive to do a good job and help people, and leaves us feeling satisfied. However, if you've stopped enjoying the experience, it's only serving to suck away your time and energy you could be using to feel happier.

If you think to yourself "I need to do some work" or "I want to go do this" but then say "I'll do it when another staff member gets on", don't do that. If you have the need to go do something else, close the game, spin your chair around, get up and go do fucking do it. Trying to convince fernando.iniguez2011 to stop screaming into his microphone for 45 minutes is possibly one of the most excruciating ways to procrastinate. Go walk your dog. Sweep your house. Do that mountain of homework you've been neglecting for the past 3 weeks because the transition to online schooling has completely ruined any motivation you had to do schoolwork well.

[Jammin]

Good advice for gmod staff too, especially when our living is not made from here.
Don't wanna get on gmod at 12 am to answer a ping?
Don't get on.

E.g. last night: I pinged staff. Midnight est, I'm getting offline, server was popping and a bit out of control. I was getting off in 10 minutes and if someone was free it'd be nice to get someone online.

What happened? No one came online.
What did I do? Left after 10 minutes like planned

Real life always comes first.

[Norm Minder]

As I've always said ,real life comes first  .If you're a staff member ,you don't have to answer every single on call ping.

Seriously though, this is a video game,If you need to sleep ,sleep, sometimes take a break.

[synthray]

Sweep your house

For reasons I cannot explain at all this works wonders.

—
Sometimes people won't appreciate what happens behind the scenes (I'm not as familiar with the process) and that will only expand the disdain. In regard to games, you must know the math, how to interact with the system's API, the graphics API, how to tame the beast of the programming language you're working with, the compiler, networking...

Also "expect crunch from their employer" is something I find tremendously objectionable: it works reasonably well if you're passionate and try to push the line beyond what everyone thought it was possible. You made the decision and you know your limits, which I suppose are somewhat higher. But, on the other hand, if you are being forced to go that way it will only make things 'volatile' in the long run and leave you with some kind of damage you might notice later.

Anyway, if you shine on your usual schedule no one is going to have problems with that. I'm pretty sure.

[David]

mans wrote an essay just to say  learn how to go outside when the game is pissing you off

gg ez

[Deer-ly]

mans wrote an essay just to say  learn how to go outside when the game is pissing you off

gg ez

 what i mean is just dont play the game, take time off. dosent mean go outside and talk to humans fuck that. go read a book or cook a fruit floating island cake just do something thats not whats stressing you out