Mental Health in Games: An Early Career Primer
Check out TakeThis.org for more resources!
One of our favorite annual Rad Studio workshops was a primer on Mental Health in Games by the phenomenal Eve Crevoshay. Eve is the Executive Director of Take This, a nonprofit dedicated to decreasing the stigma, and increasing the support for, mental health in the game enthusiast community and inside the game industry. When we approached Eve to discuss translating her workshop into a blog post, she came back to us with the article you’re about to read. Enjoy!
In 2019, Take This released a white paper on the state of mental health among people who make games. The three key areas of concern we identified were job stress and uncertainty, community interaction and harassment, and the impacts of discrimination and marginalization. A review of the existing literature and correlated data about games indicated that better mental health breeds performance improvements, stability, and resilience. This in turn creates a better workforce — and we already know what practices, policies, and norms create the conditions for better mental health.
Since the release of the paper, Take This has worked with leaders and other organizations across the industry to identify practical solutions to these challenges — and we’ve learned a great deal by working with studios of all sizes, and people in a variety of roles across the industry. This article outlines what we’ve learned, where we are, and how to identify a positive workplace culture.
what are we up against?
Cultural Myths in Games
The myths about how games must and should be made have emerged organically out of an industry that has experienced exponential growth while also facing consistent moral panic and criticism from mainstream cultural and political forces for decades. In response to this dynamic, the industry itself perpetuated stereotypes about who makes and plays games for decades, reinforcing the stereotype of the young, white male playing in isolation. These dual forces have placed video games and gamers in opposition to mainstream culture— even as the video game industry revenue has outgrown all other entertainment industries combined.
These myths are norms that emerge from industry leaders and veterans, shaping the work and creative experiences for people across the industry in very specific ways. While there are many people very deliberately creating studios with different cultures and norms, these largely still exist on the periphery of the industry. It remains for the rest of us to push back against these myths in order to build better versions of what game studios can be.
The two most pernicious myths are ones that harm employees: passion and the lionization of auteurs. The wonderful excitement and love of games that so many people bring to their jobs in games is often weaponized by unethical managers and companies. Workers are pressured— either explicitly or implicitly— into working long hours, violating vital personal boundaries, accepting low pay, and enduring inappropriate conduct on the part of superiors. Further exacerbating this dynamic is a related issue: the identification of successful game designers, creative leads, or directors who are too valuable, too successful to be held to account for their behavior towards other members of the workplace. These two dynamics repeatedly impact the most marginalized individuals working in games and effectively silence important voices and limit the decision making process that could make games even more vital, representative, and attractive to a wider audience. This reduction of innovation and creativity represents a huge loss to the industry, both in human costs and financial costs.
Structural Challenges in Games
In addition to these cultural myths, the game industry also faces certain challenges related to the way games are made, played, and distributed. These realities add stressors at both an individual and macro level. A persistent challenge since early in the history of games is the challenge of managing development cycles, especially ahead of game launches, to the detriment of employees’ wellbeing and work-life separation.
As live services and game updates have become an increasingly significant part of game releases, these issues have become ongoing challenges that require significant shifts in planning, staffing, work culture, and work practices. In more recent years, online harassment of people involved in making games has emerged as a significant mental health issue, especially since 2014’s Gamergate affirmed the effectiveness of online harassment tactics at scale. Harassment overall is endemic to the game industry, with major studios being taken to task for their treatment of employees of marginalized identities. In response, we are seeing two promising trends take shape: the creation of equity and inclusion functions and positions, and unionization and other organizing efforts. These efforts have been slowly emerging as employees across the industry have begun to more forcefully assert their needs in game industry workplaces.
Finally, as I write this in 2022 we are at the end of a period of significant consolidation across the industry, with large holding companies and venture funds buying smaller studios and building portfolios internationally, leading to significant changes in employment status, work environments, flexibility, and compensation in both positive and negative ways for people who make games.
Burnout
Essential to the conversation about workplace wellbeing is an understanding of burnout. Burnout isn’t generally considered a mental health diagnosis, but it is a well-understood, well-studied occupational syndrome. Essentially, burnout is the result of chronic stress in the workplace from a lack of autonomy, too much work (e.g., crunch), inadequate compensation (both monetary and in recognition), a lack of connection to co-workers, unfairness in the application of policies, and inconsistencies in companies publicly stated values versus their enacted policies. Over time, this results in exhaustion, ineffectiveness, and personal detachment and cynicism that can take both significant time away from work and major changes to studio dynamics to address. In other words, burnout is not just a personal mental health problem— it is a problem largely caused by a mismatch between an employees’ needs and values and those of their employer, and is usually a signal of dysfunction in a workplace.
SOLUTIONS
(or, what to look for in a good workplace)
So, what are the positive features of good workplaces? Briefly, they include good leadership, transparency, proactive employee support, good game design, and accountability.
Leadership has an absolutely outsize impact on studio culture.
Good leadership is the consistent modeling of good practices, the reinforcement of good policy, and the vulnerability to admit when you have made a mistake.
Transparency facilitates understanding, buy-in, and a sense of ownership and control among staff.
Levels of transparency can differ, but good culture requires at least moderate levels of transparency with all staff about major decision-making processes, studio status, and some financial elements. Transparency can be wielded irresponsibly, however, and create higher levels of uncertainty and stress than may be warranted. Structured modes of communication (see item #3) often facilitate effective transparency.
Good planning and communication facilitate each other, by creating an environment where employees have the information they need to make effective decisions and are involved in a meaningful way in planning and decision making.
In some environments this may look like devolved or more democratic or collective organizational designs, and in others it may remain hierarchical, but also intentional and structured.
Good Policy and Practice, including, but not limited to:
Social media and harassment policies that include explicit planning and support for employees during work-related harassment campaigns
Good work/life separation practices, including flexible and generous PTO
Good mental health benefits with low barriers to access
Adequate compensation and measurable fairness in promotions
Ethical game design practices that address representation, cultural appropriation, and the impact of narrative content, game mechanics, and other game elements on both game makers and players.
For example, does the studio make games that incorporate “pay to win” mechanics or use loot boxes in predatory ways?
Mental health literacy and skill-building and allyship & bias training and skill-building are both essential elements of building a healthy workplace culture.
Armed with the tools — and the understanding of the structures necessary to support those tools — a studio can develop a strong, validating culture that addresses small problems quickly and addresses the needs for both healing and accountability in effective, meaningful ways (see #5, below).
Accountability practices and systems are essential to maintaining a healthy and thriving workplace that is safe and affirming for ALL employees.
They also reduce occupational burnout and employee turnover. However, they are neither common nor easily transferable to existing employment practices and legal frameworks. I am including this feature here in the hopes that we can begin to reframe the conversation about how harm is handled in the workplace.
Before doing so, I wish to acknowledge the debt I have to two folks in particular as my own understanding of these concepts has grown. Over the past three years, I have been learning from the team at Feminist Frequency & their Games and Online Harassment Hotline — especially Jae Lin, and from Cassie Walker, on the Take This team. As part of my own accountability, I would like to acknowledge the education I am receiving from these folks, who are both from marginalized communities, and express my gratitude for their willingness to share their wisdom with me.
Accountability is an ongoing practice that, as opposed to punishment, is voluntarily undertaken by a person who has caused harm. It is ongoing, active, and specific. Accountability and repair (which may be familiar to some as transformative, reparative, or restorative justice frameworks) are predicated on the ideas that:
Survivors deserve to be seen, believed, and offered healing from all of us.
People who cause harm deserve the opportunity to learn and grow, and to face real, ongoing accountability for the harm they have caused.
Bystanders deserve the opportunity for clarity, for learning, and for feeling like the system won’t harm them next time
Finally, a note on unionization. In some parts of the industry and world, this is more common than others. While it is most definitely an effective tool to support employee needs, unions don’t guarantee that a workplace is otherwise healthy. Make sure you do your due diligence about any workplace, regardless of unionization status.
THE TAKEAWAY
So, what does one do with all this information? For starters, use it as a tool for asking questions during your interview process - or for identifying the opportunities for improvement in your current workplace - whether you are an employee or are starting up your own studio. You can also use this to assess whether you might be experiencing elements of workplace burnout that can be attributed to dysfunction in your work environment.
In a passion-driven industry like games, the most important thing to always remember is that:
No job is ever worth your mental or physical health and wellbeing.
If you love games, but your job is making you hate them, get out. Your long-term health must always be the highest priority— even if it feels like you might be throwing away your only, or your best, chance. Your career will be long, and will include all kinds of unexpected twists and turns— remember that even your dream job is just a job, and not your life.