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Thread: I worked at a AAA company once. When I started everyone looked so miserable after literally years of hard work & crunch. So late one night after work I baked 2 cakes for the office. I sent out a mass email & we all took 30 minutes to eat cake and talk.
It became a regular thing once a week which aptly was called “Cake Day”. For a newcomer to the company, this helped me immensely to meet people in different departments. When I got bugs about audio or lighting, I knew who to contact because I’d chatted to them over cake.
We were expected to work late & on weekends VERY regularly. In my own time I made cakes & it was something many looked forward to once a week for a short 30 minutes. It helped moral significantly. A mini non-scientific study I did showed more bugs were fixed on Cake Day!
After quite a few months of this, I got pulled aside by my boss. Apparently the higher ups thought our entire office slacked off ALL the time because we had cake once a week. I was told that I was jeopardising my career by continuing to make cakes for the office.
I was told that we could do cake day, but only during lunch hour - when people are eating lunch and don’t really need that essential afternoon tea break with lots of sugar. I tried to push back.
The day I was told not to do Cake Day I had already baked a cake. I was so scared I decided not to announce anything. I never ate that cake. It was a Portal cake. That’s what voluntary crunch pressure does: it scares people into believing there's no other choice.pic.twitter.com/tabovChDI4
Today, I've sworn I'll never work anywhere that doesn’t allow employees 30 minutes once a week to do something like Cake Day. Lucky for me, I now HAVE to make cake as part of my #edibleGames job! If you enjoy crunch, fine, but recognise how it affects others around you.
Since it's relevant to this week's conversations & for those that don't know me, the AAA company was Team Bondi. The publisher pressuring my boss to tell me off for Cake Day was Rockstar.
First of all, I wish you are in good health now, and I hope other working with you are too. And, thank you for sharing your experience, the cake idea is really good.
I'm in excellent health! I'm working on a game about actually making cake in the real world right now. Very happy about my place in the games industry.
When I started there about 10 months before we shipped, R* was around and there was crunch - sure, it wasn't as bad as it had been according to the stories I heard. That doesn't stop my story from being valid. The pressure to stop cake day definitely came from R*.
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