Reality Hacks: Why VR Developers Do Some Of Their Best Work When The Sun Goes Down
To follow their dreams VR developers hack the world around them. The most common way I’ve found in my reporting is to pull an all nighter.
VR developers often learn naturally with the passage of time that working at night offers them a number of benefits. Night, it turns out, actually shares a lot in common with VR itself. There are fewer distractions at night and more focus to draw from those hours. As one developer pointed out to me, breakfast, lunch and dinner are actually close together, but if you pull an all-nighter that’s as much as 14 hours of complete focus to execute on ideas.
If you have a global team working with you, working at night means being awake and ready to answer questions or help when someone else sharing the effort is in the middle of their day building toward the same goal. I have previously chronicled the effort at Camouflaj, for instance, where the developers making Batman: Arkham Shadow spanned several physical locations around the world with meetings about updates for the head of the team spanning his day from dawn to well past dusk.
Most VR developers, however, work on their own given the small size of the market and they still find themselves hacking reality this way. There are no deliveries to the door, fewer phone calls and text messages, and family is asleep as well as anyone else sharing the same time zone. Working at night carries fewer distractions overall and that has dramatic time savings when you constantly need to be taking a headset off your head to make a change in code and then put it back on to test something.
The advantages of night development aren’t limited to headsets. Working when everyone local to you is asleep allows people to maintain a consistent train of thought by taking the time and space from a focused reality to maximize every last moment of work. Taking sleep during the day, meanwhile, can mean true rest missing push notifications of dramatic news headlines and all the other local events that might derail a person.
Prioritizing the creation of VR over your local environment is a statement of principles. It is saying: “The world’s shape is not one I recognize and so I will flip the way it sets priorities in my life to reclaim time so I can focus on the job of making spaces I want to visit.”
I’d be interested to hear anecdotes from any people in the VR community who relate to this article. Email ianontherecord@gmail.com with details of how you manage your schedule and handle problems introduced by your reality hacking.
