Kind of off-topic, but I read this article on Yahoo! about how Americans are working more but accomplishing less. Here’s an excerpt:

Workers completed two-thirds of their work in an average day last year, down from about three-quarters in a 1994 study, according to research conducted for Day-Timers Inc., an East Texas, Pennsylvania-based maker of organizational products.

The biggest culprit is the technology that was supposed to make work quicker and easier, experts say.

It kind of goes along with my earlier post about how we are constantly inundated with streams of information, and how can one person have the capability to process each and every one. But it’s also something I’ve thought about in my professional career. Emails, instant messages, information readily available, tools for making specific tasks “easier”. It’s no doubt that we as professionals are dealing with much more than our counterparts twenty years ago.

The bottleneck is simply, us, and is the nature of humans. We may or may not have the capacity to process all the information presented to us on a daily basis, that I think cannot yet be determined. What I do believe is as a society, we have not been trained properly to process these multiple streams. It’s a completely different way of operating with which we do not have much experience. The problem becomes, can we keep up with the trend, or will there be a point where a) humans are replaced with automated, more efficient machines in the workforce; or b) where technology is forced to slow down to keep up with human capacity?

Just a thought.

My hobbies are in entertainment and media – it’s no surprise, obviously. I watch movies, anime, and television, immerse myself in technology, and play a lot of games. But probably just as much as doing those things, I’m also constantly educating myself about doing those things, via websites, magazines and podcasts.

But more importantly, one has to realize these are just hobbies. I also have a “regular” life – a family, a career outside of the industry – that sometimes support, but mostly conflict with, these hobbies. So as I read websites, or listen to podcasts, I’ve come to the understanding that sooner or later, one has to decide to turn their hobbies into their regular life, or to disband them entirely.

Let me tell you what brought this on. I’ve been listening to several podcasts, and have been interjecting my comments and rebuttals on more than one occasion. For example, in gaming I realize that I am nearly as well-versed in the daily news as the “experts”. And it amazes me that someone who treats it as their hobby can enter a debate with those who make it their career. But where I am lacking is the breadth of exposure to the industry, such as hands-on experience with a wide array of games. See, my carreer helps support my hobby, but only to a limit, which is why I have an Xbox but not a PS2. I’ve never played Dragon Quest VIII or Guitar Heroes or Shadow of the Colossus, although I really would like to. And although I only have an Xbox, I still don’t have the ability to play every game available, due to both cost and time constraints because of my other regular life commitments. Looking at my forums, I finished 13 games in 2005. That’s just over a game a month. The average time to complete a game is 10-20 hours, so for argument’s sake I’ll say 15 hours.

15 * 13 = 195 hours

Then there are my regular commitments. A regular work day is 13 hours. That factors in getting ready in the morning, my commute to and from work, the lunch hour away from home, and dinner. So for an average work week, that’s 65 hours. For an average of 50 weeks a year, that’s:

65 * 50 = 3250 hours

On average, I sleep around eight hours a night.

8 * 365 = 2920

There are total 8760 hours in a year. 3250 + 2920 = 6170 hours already spent on just functioning. 8760 – 6170 = 2590 “free” hours in a year. Or an average of seven hours a day.

Now let’s take my gaming hours out of the total. 2590 – 195 = 2395. That reduces the average to 6.5 hours available a day. That’s based on a 365 day average, so weekends skew that number higher a bit. That means I have 6.5 hours a day to:

Spend time with family
Shop for groceries or necessary household items
Household chores such as cleaning, maintenance, etc.
Watch network television
Watch anime
Read (constitutes the internet, books, magazines, etc.)
Provide internet content (writing internet blogs, creating podcasts, forums, etc.)

I’m sure I’m leaving some things out here, but basically that would be less than one hour a day for the tasks mentioned above, give or take. And that’s 100% efficiency, which never happens unless you are a robot.

Now if I turned my hobbies into a career, I could free up some of that time in the average work day. Before I said 13 hours a day during the week, so effectively I could allocate 40% of that time toward my hobby, or about 5.2 hours a day. That would be about 26 hours a week I could spend toward my hobby. Over a year (50 weeks), that is 1300 hours I could allocate, meaning I only would spend 1950 hours a year for regular daily commitments.

Now, my available free time per day does not change, but that means I now have seven hours per day to allocate on non-hobby tasks. Or nearly double the time available for each task.

Two good examples are CheapyD from CheapAssGamer.com and Alex Albrecht from Diggnation. CheapyD was able to move to Japan and run his website as his day job, which allows him to become fully immersed in his former hobby. I’m trying to figure out if Alex is a gamer who acts or is an actor who likes games, but either way he was able to leverage gaming and technology as his career, and uses his personal interests to fuel his career choices. In each case, both individuals are able to have normal, uninterrupted “regular” lives because they have integrated what they do for fun into what they do out of necessity (work).

I can’t even get into how much money one could save if they were able to have their career subsidize their personal expendiures on hobbies. But how great would it be to say you would never have to buy another game or DVD again, because you get them free from work? For me, that’s 10% of a paycheck easy, and after house, car, and utilities, 10% is a big deal.

So it all comes down to a) doing what you love for a living; and b) getting your career to pay for what you love. But the whole point to this article was, how can one person who doesn’t have this luxury get by? No wonder video game sales are on a decline. No wonder the anime industry in the US is scaling back. A normal person just does not have the capacity, either time or money, to be able to support such hobbies consistently.

Which argues the point – has the entertainment industry grown too large? Are we on the verge of an imminent crash across the board? As everything is going toward a portable and on-demand model – gaming, video/television, music/radio, books/magazines – would it be safe to say that only those forms of entertainment which people can do anytime, anywhere, namely music/radio, survive such an industry shakeout? For example, companies are pushing video everywhere – through iTunes, the internet, our cellular phones and portable devices – but how likely are we to dedicate attention to these, when our attention is required elsewhere? Music and radio is the easy choice because it is merely background noise or a quick diversion – nothing that might remove us from our primary tasks, such as driving to work, writing a report, etc. And as this same model of pushing content to us, what does that do to conventional means of receiving entertainment? We’ve already started to see the impact on network and cable television. Does this mean that our PSP or DS will eventually replace our Xbox 360 or PS3? Does this mean our iPods will replace our HDTVs? It is an interesting thought. For now, we can only theorize what the future may bring. It isn’t as linear as the manufacturing age, because unlike metal and steel, we are dealing with bits and bandwidth that have no boundaries. They can travel anywhere, anytime, at speeds that make information available globally and real-time.

To bring home the original question, “how can one person do it?”, it is clear that those outside of the entertainment industry simply cannot keep up with the streams of information that is fed to the general public. It used to be that digests were a way of combining and condensing these, but now these same digests are the streams responsible for flooding our attention. Then the simple but unfortunate answer is, either blur the line between hobby and necessity, or make do without.

We rock. Seriously. We are way ahead of the curve. Here are some specific examples:

F.E.A.R. Rumored for Xbox 360. Well, no duh. Even though it was big news this past week, we commented on a rumor mole report from last October stating the same thing. So big news for everyone else was old news for us.

Bio Shock confirmed for Xbox 360. No duh part II. Again, we broke the scoop that was months ahead of Game Informers big cover story. But seriously don’t thank us, thank OXM, because we just stole it from them.

Resident Evil 4 Quick Timer Events != GOTY. I never said it before publicly, but should get credit for it nonetheless. QTEs used in Shenmue and they are criticized. QTEs used in RE4 and it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. Will someone finally give Shenmue credit for a) earliest implementation of the modern sandbox environment; b) inventive use of QTEs in a real-time console title; and c) a freaking awesome franchise that should not die.

Online Gaming is a Networking Tool. I had publicly stated this before, but I’m too ashamed to go find the original post on PSOWorld. But apparently people are just now realizing that MMORPGs such as WoW and online gaming in Halo 2 can be used for more than just de-rez’ing virtual annoyances – they can also be used for team-building and lots of other corporate exercises. Back when I was unemployed, I thought PSO could be a good way for like-minded individuals to network and build professional relationships. In other words, you can’t trust someone who steals all the loot and never heals you. I guess I was just way ahead of my time.

Come back for more “I told ya so”s. And finish your vegetables before you leave the table.

I was listening to The HotSpot this morning, and as they were busy feeding the torrent of diarrhea regarding John Romero, the panel made mention of his latest big-budget bust Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows, and that the only reason anyone cared about his involvement was because Midway made such a big deal about it. In contrast to the attention garnered (and begged for) by Romero, Midway had also at the same time snapped up the talents of Tom Hall, who had co-founded the over-promising, under-delivering Ion Storm development house back in 1996.

This got me thinking. It is obvious Romero’s most significant contribution to the gaming world was Doom II. But when you think about Tom Hall, it his contribution lies a bit deeper under the surface. See, his is more indirect. Although he designed the underrated Anachronox, he is also responsible for harboring the talent necessary to develop one of the most memorable gaming experiences to date.

That experience is called Deus Ex.

It isn’t much of a surprise Deus Ex was so innovative, and in context the Cyberpunk FPS/RPG/Stealth hybrid doesn’t sound that strange. This is wholly due to the involvement of Warren Spector and Harvey Smith, two gaming veterans from development house Looking Glass Studios, which produced FPS/RPG hybrid System Shock and stealth pioneer Thief. In addition, both have a history with developing for pen-and-paper RPGs. So Deus Ex is a virtual stir-fry of their experiences with other projects, and the result is just as tasty.

Released in 2000, Deus Ex seems to have aged like a fine wine. In 2003, it was #40 on IGN’s all-time list; in 2005, it was #21. It is a mainstay on all-time greatest lists from nearly every publication, large or small, independent or corporate. It is a game that appeals to gamers because of its greatness, not because of any commercialism or promotion. The reason for this is because even when gaming platforms have been increasing in ability, there hasn’t been a game to reach that level of immersion and innovation since. System Shock II, maybe, but these two games are head and shoulders above the rest. Yes, even better than Half Life.

I won’t go into the specific gameplay elements or scenarios that made the game so good. Partly because I am playing through it myself, but also because each gameplay experience is unique to the player. Simply put, it is a flawless execution from every aspect. I attribute this primarily to the genius of the developers, but also due to the period and environment in which it was created. Back in the late ’90s the world was different. Independence was contagious and spurred creativity of which the world had not seen. Dot coms were springing up by the minute, and employees were motivated by the thought of actually working for something, that they could get more out of their career than the annual 3% merit increase, and that there was hope that their careers would finally begin to pay them back. Ion Storm was such a startup, driven by the technology boom. Developers were as famous as rock stars, and quite frequently were given the freedom to create the type of game they wanted, the way they wanted.

Eidos Interactive, hot from the success of Tomb Raider, coupled with the high-profile Ion Storm as its publisher and later purchased the company, thereby aquiring the rights to its franchises. Ion Storm tried to take the title in another direction, under the watch of Spector and Smith, in the sequel Deus Ex: Invisible War. It was clear they saw the future of gaming in the hands of home consoles rather than PCs, and as such developed with them, specifically the Xbox, in mind. Fans of the original, primarily PC gamers, felt alienated by the simplified gameplay strategies and technical limitations of developing with the console as the primary development platform. Console gamers, the target audience, voted indifferent with mediocre sales. Critics were subsequently polarized. A third game in the franchise, Deus Ex: Clan Wars, was retitled Project: Snowblind, although it retained many of the similarities and story elements from its predecessors. It was critically well-received but also fell short of sales expectations, and became the nail in the franchise. It also lacked the involvement of Spector and Smith.

But is it the final nail in the coffin for Deus Ex? Eidos has been operating on hard times as of late. Future Deus Ex titles are not scheduled, and its creators have long since moved onto other endeavors outside of the company. But it would be a shame to dismiss the franchise completly. It is a world that is feature-rich as any in sci-fi, and could support many, many future plots and side stories. And advances in gaming platforms are able to support the complex and grand sandbox environments which a Deus Ex title would require. So the foundation is there.

What is not there, aside from Spector and Smith, is the freedom necessary to produce such a game. I blame this on rising development budgets. A game of Deus Ex’s pedigree would command a budget on the high end of current development costs, nearly $20 million. Undoubtedly a quality game could recoup these costs, but such breakout hits, aside from perennial sports titles, are becoming more and more rare. Also, Eidos simply does not have the flexibility to support such an ambitious development project, at least in conjunction with its Tomb Raider comeback waiting in the wings. The next high-profile title met with apathy by consumers would be the last time anyone would hear from Eidos. If Tomb Raider: Legend is successful, it might only be enough to fund the next Tomb Raider project. Eidos is clearly on life support here.

It is a shame that Deus Ex has met such a fate. Hopefully its dedicated fanbase will continue to preserve the franchise, through fan fiction and mods, for the day the world is ready for another Deus Ex title.