![]() I’ve burned out multiple times because of overworking and had one instance so bad that I wasn’t able to do much of anything for a whole year.Ĭompany owners and executives often encourage workers with words like “passion”, “family”, and “in it together” to work those extra hours, but who really benefits the most if the games and companies do well? Who gets rich if a company is sold and who gets let go if a game doesn’t succeed? Who is able to cope with these kinds of working conditions and who is pushed out? It causes physical and psychological issues like Trauma Bonding that can take months if not years to recover from. When taken to the extreme, constant overtime causes burnout, which is incredibly detrimental to peoples’ lives. When employers force overtime or create a culture in which people feel the need to work extra hours, they rob people of their free time to do whatever they wish. Taking care of family, working on a side project, reading, fighting for justice, or doing nothing at all are only possible if people aren’t working. One of the biggest reasons to end all overtime is so that workers can have lives outside of work. Over two hundred years later, we still don’t have that in the games industry. ![]() In 1817, Robert Owen coined the phrase, “Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest”. Once we have that framework of understanding, I’ll then talk about concrete steps that people can take to eliminate crunch and overtime from our industry. ![]() However, before we can talk about steps to end overtime, we have to talk about why we want to abolish it, understand the incentives that exist to push people to work extra hours, and how it’s a systemic issue that affects the entire industry. While it may seem impossible, I think it’s well within our power to do it. So to end all overtime, we have to get to a place where no one works above 40 hours a week. Overtime is typically defined as any work done outside of the standard work week, which for most people in the games industry is anything above 35-40 hours a week depending on the contract. Instead of talking about how we can end crunch, I’m going to chart a path for how we end all overtime, which in turn will also get rid of crunch in our industry. I believe crunch is a weasel word used in place of ‘overtime’ to hide the true nature of what’s happening. So from now on, I’m going to refrain from using the word crunch due to its ambiguity. I don’t think there’s a standard definition of crunch because the meaning of the word is unique to each person’s perception of how bad their working conditions have become.īecause crunch has no agreed upon definition, when people talk about eliminating it we often get stuck on trying to define what crunch is and never get to the part where we decide on concrete actions to stop it! It can also pertain to the intensity of the work due to stress or deadlines. What is Crunch?Ĭrunch is usually used to indicate a prolonged period of overtime measured in weeks, months, or sometimes even years. I don’t have all the answers, but I hope this essay is a launching pad that takes us one big step closer to understanding how we can eliminate it from the games industry. In this essay, I’m going to dig into the incentives for why we crunch and then propose concrete steps for the industry to move away from it. After all those years, I believe that we would make better games and lead happier lives if none of us had to crunch and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can make that a reality. I’ve experienced the 80+ hour weeks for months on end, I’ve voluntarily worked extra hours because I felt like it, and I’ve refused to work overtime at different points of the 13 years I’ve been in this industry. People are still regularly working over 60 hours a week and are often unpaid for doing so. Notes from Below has republished the following piece, originally featured here.Ĭontent warnings: excessive overtime, systemic racism and sexismĮvery couple of months the games industry has conversations about crunch and how it impacts us, yet it feels like we aren’t much closer to ending the practice than we were 20 years ago.
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