Just a short one, but I went down to my faculty mailbox today and picked up the latest Communications of the ACM. For those not in higher ed, or in the sciences, CACM is the communications bulliten for the Association of Computing Machinery, one of the two main professional societies for the study of computing (the other being the IEEE).

Now, the ACM doesn’t often cover things in the games related space - they have only recently begun a journal on Computers in Entertainment, but for the years that I (and every other) academic in computing have been subscribed, we hardly ever hear about gaming. So I was excited to see games related coverage in CACM! Go Gaming Industy! Then I read it…

…it is yet more coverage of the working conditions and programmer exploitation by the industry, the 80 hour work weeks and no overtime / reward. Hardly the kind of thing that presents to the academic community that this is an industry of professional colleagues. I am growing increasingly weary of seeing this (and only this) mentioned lately. Surely, somewhere, there are examples of games companies that have good work practices, build software on time yet don’t burn out all their dev teams, and still have fun at the end of the day?

Anyone?