“There is no ‘magic patch’…”
One “no prize” to the first person who can not only identify what former guest on the No Prisoners, No Mercy show said those words, but also where the concept of the “no prize” came from.
When you are done pondering the words above, ask yourself the following: What would it be like to have an audience on your job? The first time I heard that suggestion it was being made by George Carlin (God rest his soul). Think about it. If you do the books for any business of any sort what would it be like if every time the debits and the credits balanced (as they always should) there was a thunderous round of applause coming from somewhere nearby? What if every time you made an error of any sort there was a deafening sound of people jeering, booing and general catcalling, quickly followed by random insults?
Let’s take it a step further. What if you where a surgeon, and someone’s life hung in the balance by your very actions? Imagine the same person trying to operate in the middle of a room of crowded people. The doctor, normally completely composed, is performing delicate surgery – a laser scalpel stands poised above someone’s eye. The operating room is so quiet you could literally hear a pin drop when suddenly…
“NO, NO, NO, YOU IMBECILE YOU ARE DOING IT ALL WRONG!”
When the doctor, having climbed back down off the ceiling, turns around she finds it is a plumber giving her advice on how to perform eye surgery.
Now imagine you are a coder. You work for a smaller development company. The bills get paid, but only just. On one side you have the pressures of your supervisor, but that person is busy coping with the pressures from the CEO. The CEO has been given a feather duster and told to fight off the onslaught of the publisher who is peering down from the vantage point of the top of an M-1 Abrams tank.
But that’s just one side that our coder friend has to cope with – and this isn’t a coin. There are many sides to this particular issue. The coder is working on a game, and that game is about a week or so from the launch date. The coder has just about been living at work and hasn’t seen her family except to say “hi” and go to sleep in days (and anyone who has ever been married can tell you just how much stress that heaps on a relationship). Our coder friend is at work, and it is midnight. She is still busy at work on an “emergency maintenance patch”. She has just changed one line in the code, only to find it has a ripple effect that changes 20 other lines of code – 20 lines that she hadn’t intended to change in the first place.
But as she goes to correct her mistake thousands of voices from behind her jeer and start shouting…
“YOU IMBECILE, THE GAME LAUNCHES IN ONE WEEK. LOOK AT THE STATE OF THIS GAME. WORK FASTER!”
Oddly enough, not one of the myriad voices that come magically from behind her come from anyone who works in the same company she does. In fact, they don’t work for a developer at all…they are all gamers. She is tempted to flip the source of the jeers the proverbial “bird” but she doesn’t. She just wonders why the hell she has an audience on her job when the job she is doing just might have the future of her job and everyone else’s in the balance.
The game you see in beta may not see a magic patch that fixes everything at launch – in fact we are sure it won’t. After all, it is quite true that there is no such thing as a “magic patch”. What there really is however are people working there asses off nearly 24/7 as any given game prepares for launch under similar circumstances.
See you online,
The No Prisoners, No Mercy Team
Your analogy is deeply flawed. A more accurate example would go something like this:
The doctor arrives at the operating room. His beard has not been shaven in weeks, he reeks of cheap whiskey and can barely stand. Outside, the men with guns are shouting and trying to ram the doors in. A pool of rainwater is gathering on the corner of the operating room, dripping from the gaping hole in the ceiling. One of the orderlies is holding the doors shut, trying to keep the patient’s family in the cacophonic hallway. The doctor stumbles, leans on the tool table, grabs the first tool that meets his hand without even looking at it and says: “Let’s take care of that wisdom tooth, shall we?”
Wouldn’t you rather have someone, anyone telling him to step away from the patient?-)
We coders are not superhumans. We make mistakes, especially when we are physically and mentally exhausted. One of the traits of a good coder is that he/she knows her limits. Sometimes it’s just better to stand back and either delay the release or release the game with the known bugs.
Of course, it’s not just the coder that deserves to get yelled at. It’s also the salesman that promised the moon to the funders. It’s also the publisher, rushing the development cycle to make this fiscal year look better than it should be. It’s also the project manager, unable to see the forest from the trees until he’s hopelessly lost. It’s also the department manager, who cut the budget for testing to make his performance-based bonus. It’s the CEO, for creating that bonus system in the first place.
Sometimes it is the plumber giving advice to a doctor. But the games business has plenty of people who enjoy both playing and making games, and thus know how things should be done. And can’t help but cringe when they see the disaster forming right before their eyes.
First I kind of doubt there is really a “WE” in there anywhere. Beyond that however, all the professionals that have been guests on the show disagree with you as to the situation that developers often find themselves during beta. And if you think the point was to portray coders as superhuman you have missed the point by a mile.
Beyond that possessing a beta code doesn’t entitle the participant to anything beyond testing the game – a fact that seems to escape most gamers. The dismal view you try to portray of the someone just trying to do their job while the “audience” tells them they don’t know what they are doing smacks of naivete at best, and hubris at worst…perhaps with a bit of jealousy mixed in. As for us here at No Prisoners, No Mercy, you will find us with our feet firmly planted on the side of the fence of someone just trying to do their best in the face of people who always seem to know better.
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