Thread by @Delafina777

So, I have mixed feelings about this article. On one hand, it's pretty carefully researched and thorough. On the other hand, it seems to be treating what happened inside Bioware as sensationalistically bad, rather than kind of the norm. kotaku.com/how-biowares-a…

And on one hand, I'm leery of press naming and blaming individual developers, given that gamers will harass devs at the drop of a hat.

On the other hand, if you're going to name and shame anyone, it should be management, esp white dudes in management, since they are largely oblivious to what lower-level women and POC deal with from gamers, and thus unwilling to do anything to protect the people they manage.

But, like, I keep seeing this article cited as "oh, look at the problems with Bioware."

These aren't Bioware problems. These are industry problems. (Yes, yes, I know, #NotAllGameCompanies)

I mean, this has been the case at every video game company I've worked at, with the exception of Harebrained Schemes and Smith & Tinker (that I know of). A lot of times the company will blame the need for it on stress outside work, like if the person had a death in the family.

At Paizo, the CEO was furious when she learned that people were using meeting rooms on the unused side of the building (where Goblinworks had been) to take naps. She mandated that the window blinds remain open whenever the doors were closed.

And finally I had to go to Mona and say, "look, if she's going to do this, you need to have one meeting room designated as a crying room, with the blinds closed, unless you want people taking up the (single-occupant) restrooms when they need to cry."

And he was astonished that there were that many people crying at work. Which, like, again, management is either oblivious or knows and doesn't care, so you end up with them punishing people for "letting" the company break them.

The crunch isn't as bad in tabletop, generally (although the toxicity is) but it's still bad.

U N I O N I Z E

Also, companies are generally just bad at handling when people come back from stress leave. So, when I was at Microsoft, there was what was essentially a games incubation team. They got to brainstorm new things, basically. Problem was, it was a permanent assignment.

Meanwhile, you had people who'd been crunching on the same product for 2-3 years, were super-burned-out, and usually just got moved onto the next thing on fire when they shipped the current thing on fire.

So burnout and low morale were a big issue. I was talking to a relatively high-level manager and was like, what do you do? give someone an extra month of vacation when they finish a crunch project?

And he was like, No, that's a really bad idea, because if someone's miserable at work, and you give them a long vacation, they spend it thinking about how much better not being at work is than being at work, and a lot of times they quit.

So I was like, right, that makes sense. If someone's burnt out from crunch, helping them without losing them involves making work not feel like work. What if instead of the incubation team being a permanent assignment, it was something people got rotated through?

Like, you get done doing the hard and tedious and soul-killing work of shipping a game, and then you get to spend several months just brainstorming and experimenting, and maybe working 30-hour weeks.

But he said that was impossible because it would offend the people on that team (almost entirely white dudes, as far as I could tell, natch, mostly straight out of college and convinced they deserved to get paid to sit around all day and think Big Thoughts).

I'm still really frustrated about that one. Because it's companies like Microsoft that have the financial leeway to experiment with how to heal burnout, and for the most part, if it involves giving anyone other than a chosen few space to incubate and NOT ship, they won't.

Anyway, I believe that it's possible to make high-quality video games without exploiting, abusing, and ultimately destroying your workforce. Maybe with much smaller profit margins, and maybe not as MANY games, but it's possible.

And if it's NOT possible, then the industry SHOULD collapse, and have to rebuild from the ground up. If the only way to produce a type of entertainment is by killing (sometimes literally) the people who make it, we don't need that type of entertainment.

Either way, employees need the power to ensure that this sort of abusive, ruinous work culture isn't sustainable for companies.