marcushast

Interesting listen, and a subject I can relate to as life keeps me from playing these games as much as I used to. And frankly, the "board game length" games feels a bit more satisfying in being efficient with my time. Regarding short Civilization games I did try Polytopia a while back on phones, and that did scratch that itch a bit. Apparently it's now also on PC: https://store.steampowered.com/app/874390/The_Battle_of_Polytopia/

Very true. And let's not forget that financing a triple-A game is something that takes somebody that is borderline insane to begin with. It's an extremely competitive field and extremely difficult to recoup losses from a bad bet. (Contrast to eg movies where you can at least sell it on DVD, Netflix and stuff like that. Even a bad movie is likely going to have a long tail.) Putting money into game development is not something you do if you want to get rich, it's something you do if you want to make games.

Regarding your talk about crunch. The data on that has been clear for a long time. Overtime is counter productive. (https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-backfire-for-people-and-for-companies) You can crunch for a short time (one or two weeks) with increased productivity, but after that it goes off a cliff. And really, if you do crunch you need to spend LESS TIME working afterwards to get back to your baseline productivity. For anyone that's interested in the myths and mistakes about "knowledge workers" I highly recommend the book "People ware" which demonstrates (by citing scientific research) that much of industry standard is in fact "worst practices". (Such as open landscape working environments.) (Here's a blog that goes through some of the points in the book: http://hotcashew.com/2014/02/lessons-peopleware/) The reason so many companies do this is (and this is my guess) that you can put number of people and floor space in an Excel sheet to calculate how much money you "save" by cramming people together. It is very difficult to do the same to show the decreased productivity. Hanlon's razor applies: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

I recently saw this on Facebook and felt it was relevant to your discussion of "creepy guys" in the movie Say anything. It's an article on Cracked (http://www.cracked.com/blog/how-men-are-trained-to-think-sexual-assault-no-big-deal/) about how Han Solo, Indiana Jones and James Bond taught you how to commit sexual assault. It's kind of fascinating how the meaning of media can change as societely changes around it. A different variant is consider how the first Ace Ventura movie ends, and how completely impossible it would be to make that same end today. (I think the original Idle Thumbs crew brought that up some time ago.)