I find these “shorter work weeks are just as effective” articles to be nonsense, at least for knowledge workers with some tactical discretion.
Why can't these nerds conceive of a world beyond the capitalist grindset?
From his wikipedia page:
As a game developer, Carmack differed from many of his contemporaries by avoiding commitment to a final release date for any game he was developing. Instead, when asked for a release date on a new game, Carmack would usually reply that the game would be released "when it's done".[64] ... In 2019, as a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, Carmack stated that his beliefs have changed over time: "I largely recant from that now." On Rage's 6-year development time he says: "I think we should have done whatever it would have taken to ship it 2 years earlier"
sounds like the longer he's been divorced from development the worse he's gotten
I really wish I could say that during my daily scrum stand-ups. Sick of being psychologically terrorized into justifying every hour.
Is he only saying that because Rage released to middling reviews and it's been completely forgotten? It wasn't a bad game, just kinda bland. The enemy animations were neat, like how they'd jump over stuff to run at you. The cloud effects were cool and the wingsticks felt good, but it was completely eclipsed by other games that came out that year, like Skyrim and Deus Ex or hell, Dark Souls. "We should have worked faster to finish this game that wasn't received well"
Anytime I see footage of Rage it feels like Borderlands was somehow made as a parody/comedic homage to it, like how each expansion of those games tends to be an homage and pastiche of a specific genre or game like western or casino heist.
Which feels particularly surreal now that I google each games release date and find out Rage released two years after the first Borderlands.
They're both emulating those goofy 1970s desert apocalypse movies. There was some kind of Mad Max vibe in the air before and during the 2008 financial crisis, that's what I attribute it to. From 2008 to around 2015 there were a ton of games/movies with that whole theme. There was Fallout 3, Borderlands, Rage, Stalker, Metro 2033, a sequel to to the 1988 game Wasteland somehow. Eventually culminating in an actual Mad Max movie in 2015.
Rage and Borderlands actually started development within a few months of one another, Borderlands in April of 2005 and Rage in June, but Rage took a whole 2 years longer to finish.
I've always though it's kinda neat that they took different inspirations and still ended up with kinda similar vibes. Borderlands was described in Gearbox's internal design documents as "Halo meets Diablo" and Rage was kinda an evolution of Doom 3, but with racing elements taken from Burnout and MotorStorm.
I remember Rage being fun, but also having the most abrupt and unsatisfying ending possible.
I actually liked it too. The environments still look really good. A lot of detail and set dressing. Character animations still look good too.
Who you've guessed 20 years ago that John Romero would be the cooler and more likable one? Probably many, tbh.
The best way to showcase their personalities is that together, they made Doom and Quake. Flawless games. Separately Romero made Daitakana and Carmack made Quake 2. Both horrible games for different reasons. Daitakana has technical issues, a goofy premise, but it's at least unique and was trying to be something special. Some of the environments still look nice and well designed. Romero is a guy who likes games and wants you to enjoy yourself.
Quake 2 is a programming masterpiece. Its story is flat, about an angry space marine man that shoots aliens. The level designs are brown hallways where you walk forward and shoot. Carmack is a guy who likes numbers and wants you to look at the lighting effects he coded.
I hereby announce the Romero-Carmack scale of guy-types. Yes I know other guys worked on those games but the scale isn't ready for American McGee yet.
If that's the scale, then the Dwarf Fortress guy is measured in gigaCarmacks
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone in 1997 calling Quake 2 a "horrible game", but I do understand and agree with your point.
Well luckily we have some boomers (like me) on this site. Quake 2 was not that much a leap and honestly while Doom, Duke Nukem 3d and Quake were nice the real jump in that time was in regards to Unreal / UT, Quake 3 and Half Life.
I had much more fun with Delta Force for example than with Quake 2 as the latter had a few acceptable technical improvements but was really lacking. Also the AI was bad and the enemy scaling wasn't that really interesting.
(Yes the games were a bit later than Quake 2, but they were really big leaps and the games in the two years before Quake 2 there were pretty good alternatives)
Yeah I know, it's more fair to call it a very bland game in retrospect, compared to its peers and considering who worked on it
He's spent like the last decade or something working at oculus, which was started by an insane libertarian fascist thielite so...not surprising really.
The Oculus sucks, so my only take away is that these tech geeks
aren't doing anything of valuesimply haven't put enough hours in.Eight day work week or bust, losers.
Libertarians: Don't tread on me
Also libertarians: Tread on me as much as possible
Carmack got money but no influence outside of work. He wouldn't have to work, but feels compelled to. Why?
I think work weeks should be shorter because people need more free time, not because the human mind operates most effectively at X number of hours per day .
They’re useful idiots, great at solving problems for a system but shit at analyzing why the system wants them to solve it and what it’ll do with the solution. They just see that they get head pats for solving the problem and ergo assume anyone complaining about the system is just making excuses for not problem solving hard enough.
Doing a tangent here. I would like to mention that good companies did actually create standards and tools to interact with what they produce so it was easy to create good content. Others were like: Just use C and ASM to add stuff.
Monkey Island had plenty of tools to make adding stuff easier, so did Star Craft with its level editors, UT, Half Life (somewhat) etc. etc. QuakeEd was not as friendly for complex stuff, it was also near impossible to run it and most resources you needed were missing.
Sometimes creating tools so that people can contribute with less intense knowledge requirements leads to nice stuff. Like the the custom maps scene in Brood War and War Craft 3 which spawned together with HL and UT mods plenty of what we see in the wild.
Edit
On
someone is arguing that Quake2 was the best FPS ever though: https://www.reddit.com/r/quake/comments/x2b07m/comment/ionjcno/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
There's a interesting Portrait of Dorian Grey thing going on with John Carmack and John Romero where the former's grown to be more of a dick and the latter's mellowed out
John Carmack got rid of his pet cat so he could focus on coding DOOM, which says a lot about him. I don't know how anyone is surprised he's sone sort of weird libertarian sociopath
It was interesting to see the clear step function in the leading graph of average annual work hours by country with the US at ~1850 as the highest of the mostly-western countries, but Thailand, Hong Kong, and South Korea in a distinctly different class, topping out at ~2450 for South Korea. That made me smile, because one of the Samsung people we work with referred to us at the Oculus Dallas office as “honorary Koreans” because of how hard we work.
at least for knowledge workers with some tactical discretion
Those are literally the jobs where it is the *most *true though
Forreal. I refuse to believe someone who's worked professionally as a programmer can say that with a straight face since a huge chunk of the workweek is useless meetings.
I already work 4 day weeks, making it official I just wouldn't have to pretend to work for the last one (and I would do 3 days)
be 
