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Hey Future Caleb, I know it’s been a long time since we talked, but my silence should be expected. When you agree to go halfsies with your past self on a timeshare, and then refuse to pay up when you realize that a timeshare means we’re splitting the use of a dirty beach condo and it doesn’t mean that we’ll be sharing the same timeline so as to allow you to live once again with arms and legs, you can expect me to be a bit mad. Yes, I agree that considering our impossible dialog we have going here means that time-based term confusion is inevitable, but come on, if humanity really invented a way to exchange lives across time and space, we’d come up with a much better name than timeshare…like, swap, life swap…okay, timeshare is a pretty good name. You’re right to have been confused.

But that’s not why I’m reaching out to you today. I want to talk about why you should feel bad buying a videogame. Okay, not really, that may be an unfortunate side effect. So, I just finished a really great book called Significant Zero: Heroes, Villains, and the fight for Art and Soul in Video Games by Walt Williams, and some interesting ideas came up about the crunch periods in videogame development. Crunch time, or just Crunch, is the period of a game’s development in which staff are working 2-3 times as many hours as normal, usually leading to work-life imbalance at best and severe mental and physical health issues at worst. One surprising tidbit I learned: Crunch is not responsible for the lack of time and attention needed to properly spell videogame, as a compound word. I’ll blame your editor, Walt. Because I don’t want to stop believing in you. And don’t cite Google. Google is wrong, too.

I’m not here to defend or condemn Crunch. For the purposes of this video, I’m just going to say overall the damage caused by Crunch outweighs the good. Lots of articles have been written with whistle-blower sources recently. Crunch is real and it can be damaging. (more…)