The Patriarchy Hurts Gamer Guys Too: The Rockstar Labor Controversy, Game Developer Wives and Work/Life Balance

A screen shot from the Rockstar game, State of Emergency. In a city street, a short-haired Asian woman striding purposefully towards the viewer. She holds a bazooka over one shoulder.

[By guest contributor, Latoya Peterson]

Latoya Peterson provides a hip-hop feminist and anti-racist view on pop culture with a special focus on video games, anime, American comics, manga, magazines, film, television, and music. She is the Editor at Racialicious, is a Contributor at Jezebel, and has written for The American Prospect, Bitch Magazine, Clutch Magazine, the Women’s Review of Books, Slate’s Double X, and the Guardian.

On January 7th, the wives of Rockstar San Diego employees went straight Martin Luther and tacked a list of grievances to the virtual walls of industry watering hole Gamasutra, reigniting a long-standing debate about family-unfriendly working conditions in the gaming industry.

The Situation

A user named Rockstar Spouse posted the collected concerns of the wives of men who work for Rockstar San Diego. She begins the letter with:

To whomever it may concern,

In response to the unfortunate circumstances, some wives of Rockstar San Diego employees have collected themselves to assert their concerns and announce a necessary rejoinder, in the form of an immediate action to ameliorate conditions of employees.

The turning for the worse came approximately in the month of March of 2009. Till present, the working conditions persists to deteriorate as employees are manipulated by certain hands that wield the reigns of power in Rockstar San Diego. Furthermore, the extent of degradation employees have suffered extends to their quality of life and their family members. Though it is presumed, this unfortunate circumstance is due largely to ignorance and unawareness of most, with enlightened knowledge, action must be taken to protect the rights of employees and those who depend on them. Realizing that such broad claims could hardly spark any interest to take a stand, a better illustration of the wrongs made unto Rockstar San Diego workers is necessary. Futhermore, the detailed descriptions about to be given can serve as a starting point as it will provide a clearer direction for change.

The letter goes on to explain that Rockstar San Diego employees are suffering from unfair working conditions, and the stress is starting to take a physical toll on the designers, who have been stuck in endless “crunch time.” While the idea of crunch time (working overtime, almost double time to complete a deadline) is not a new concept in the industry, the wives assert that the crunch time never ends – instead, the goalposts are simply moved, or work begins on a new project, without giving the designers and developers a chance to recuperate. In addition, there have been benefit cuts, and wages have remained stagnant while the products of the labor of the employees goes on to break sales records.

They conclude:

Conclusively, if these working conditions stay unchanged in the upcoming weeks, preparation will be made to take legal action against Rockstar San Diego. This is the course that naturally presents itself, as either these conditions were manufactured from unawareness and actions to improve conditions will prove such innocence. Or if no action is seen after this letter, it clear that other aspects are the cause of the deteriorated conditions of Rockstar San Diego employees and must be further addressed. Rest assure, all that is desired is compensation for health, mental, financial, and damages done to families of employees.

With all due respect,

Determined Devoted Wives of Rockstar San Diego employees.

The letter is a throwback to another blog post that rocked the industry. In 2004, a Live Journal blog by EA Spouse (later revealed to be Erin Hoffman, who is participating on the current Gamasutra thread) shed light on the deplorable conditions at EA Games. Hoffman’s post eventually lead to a class action suit filed by the engineers working for EA, and the company was forced to pay $14.9 million to their wronged employees.

While EA dramatically changed their practices in the wake of the lawsuit, as time passes, many other studios are embracing the same kind of practices that got EA in hot water. Once again, hours are creeping up, benefits are being cut, and the spouses are taking action in hopes that Rockstar San Diego will wake up before this heads to court.

Unfortunately, even if Rockstar San Diego changes its ways, it is only a matter of time before this controversy resurfaces. However, the overtime situation has been the topic of conversation among female gamers for a long time – it’s one of the largest barriers to recruiting and keeping female talent in the industry. So, if we look at the solutions presented by those in the gaming industry and academia on how to recruit more women to the field, we can start to see a path for resolution of the work/life balance issue in the gaming industry.

Feminism, Work/Life Balance and Game Development

Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat has three different articles discussing the impact of crunch time culture on gender diversity in the workforce. The most damning is Mia Consalvo’s “Crunched by Passion: Women Game Developers and Workplace Challenges.” As she explains:

Game design has changed in major ways from the beginning of the industry in the 1970s and 1980s. During the time of the Atari 2600 console, one person could develop and code an entire game in the period of about six months. Today, production teams for “triple-A” games (which are expected to sell more than 2.5 million units) can run in the triple digits themselves, with development cycles of eighteen to twenty-four months, and budgets between $10 and 50 million. Along with those increases in scale has come a division of labor, with game development being sliced into distinct areas including (at the broadest level) programming, art, animation, audio, production, and design.

Most teams work full-time for game development companies, which may or may not be owned by the company publishing the game. That work is project-based, and most often planned to conclude with the game’s release during the most important buying time for any seller: the fourth-quarter Christmas rush. Game development is then a continual battle between what is (the majority of the time) a hard deadline for launch, and a series of creative, technical, and social challenges to meet in the process of developing a game. The result is an industry that often relies on “crunch time” and “passion” to shape artistic endeavors into business-shaped bottles. (pp. 181-182)

Consalvo points out that crunch time is a part of the job – most individuals “report feeling ‘lucky’ if they only have to work a standard forty- to fifty hour week.” While workers of all genders are subject to crunch time, it tends to have a disproportionate impact on women in the industry, who are expected (in a personal sense and a cultural sense) to balance their jobs with family commitments. It is in this way the industry privileges male employees and young employees – those without commitments or a wife (in the institutional sense of the word) at home find it a lot harder to commit to increasingly inflexible schedules. The women Consalvo interviews noted that male counterparts also felt pressures, but more women were likely to leave their positions to spend more time with family.

Consalvo also brings up something that is lost in many of these conversations – the loss of institutional knowledge due to the work environment. As developers of both genders gain more and more experience, stagnant wages or growing families force them to re-evaluate the feasibility of staying in the industry. While many people work in gaming because of passion (one industry recruiter confides to Consalvo that “the game industry is far more exploitative of its talent than any other entertainment discipline that I’ve ever seen”), the toll is great, and causes many at the top of their game to pursue other career paths in order to have a personal life. And it is costing the game industry dearly:

In the digital game industry, that institutional knowledge is constantly being lost due to the rapid turnover. For example, the IGDA Quality of Life survey found that “fewer than one lead developer in 10 has over ten years of experience.” Furthermore, more than half the respondents (51.2%) expected to leave the game industry within ten years. As the report itself states “for the industry as a whole, such a high turnover rate is nothing short of catastrophic, and it goes a long way toward explaining our difficult in ensuring that our projects run smoothly.”

For this industry, then, there seems to be a greater emphasis on institutional shortsightedness than institutional memory or knowledge. (p. 187)

One of the casualties of industry practices is Brenda Brathwaite, who was in the gaming industry for twenty-five years (Playboy: The Mansion, Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes, Wizardry before decamping for academia. Brathwaite was rocking with gaming since 1982, and deftly handled most of the gender related issues that cropped up (and she has some interesting stories about working on thePlayboy game). But even she had to tap out, primarily because of the work culture in the industry. In an interview with Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat, Brathwaite explains:

When I was thirty-seven-weeks’ pregnant with twins, I was working seventy hours a week because I felt a need to be there as the lead designer. My husband gave up his career as a CEO so that he could become a stay-at-home dad to our three kids. He is very respectful of my career and does everything in his power to support it. So we have been able to have the proverbial best of both worlds by doing the reverse of the 1960s family, with a stay-at-home dad and a working mom. It was a challenge, you know. When I had my twins, the company that I was at didn’t even have in place a maternity-leave policy because it had never needed one. There was only one other woman there when I first started. I was sort of the great pioneer, and we had to do things like find a room where I could nurse my babies and all that. It was kind of awkward at first, but then the guys would make jokes about it, and it became something not quite so terrifying. As our industry is getting older, we are seeing more and more people with families, and so I don’t feel like the only person who has family issues to attend to. Now, I have achieved a good family balance, but only through leaving full-time game development.

So what was it that finally made you leave? Was it the crunch-time tradition?

Well, it’s not just crunch time. I literally didn’t take a vacation for three years. That’s a big reason that I decided to go into teaching. By going into teaching, I was able to get 22 weeks a year off. Sure, my pay is not what I would make in the industry, by my time with my family more than makes up for that. (p. 342)

The Devaluation of Labor

If game industry workers are going to be able to affect change outside of a legal remedy, they will need the support of consumers. However, reading through some of the comments on Kotaku makes me a bit concerned that most of us on the consumer side don’t understand why this is issue is important. Far too many comments told the designers to suck it up, that gaming is a competitive field, and that there are droves of people lining up to replace the developers and designers that are unhappy. And most people who work in the industry are well aware of that.

Brian at Plenty For All outlines the issues with being actively employed in the digital games industry:

The real danger is that such practices are seen as acceptable when they ought not to be. Such practices are seen as necessary when better planning and management would almost certainly pave the way to a better, smoother, less rigorous development cycle. But we accept it, partly because we do see our jobs as a gift. We’re doing something we love in a field that (while less so every year) is still very exclusive. We work jobs that many think they want (although few of those have either the skill or the dedication) and because of that there is a lot of competition. And this competition and exclusivity is used against us to remind us of how lucky we are to have these jobs and in an economic climate such as this one even more so. Such draconian work ethics will not only harm the individual however, they will harm the industry as a whole.

An unsustainable industry is not a breeding ground for innovation. And, gaming aside, there is a frightening undercurrent of comments suggesting that employees should just be grateful for whatever employers give them. Many of the conventions Americans take for granted today (like a minimum wage, an eight hour work day, mandatory breaks, and paid time off) were all things fought for by individuals and especially by labor movements. Employee rights are a vital part of our working landscape, but with the whole-hearted embrace of the market, workers are becoming willing instruments in their own exploitation. As La Lubu writes for Feministe, the gaming industry’s expectation of crunch time used to be the national standard. Protections (like overtime pay) were designed to protect workers from unscrupulous employers. However, in recent years, as the culture around worker’s rights has weakened, employers have reverted to the old ways:

Overtime pay was designed to penalize employers for not hiring more workers. But as the number of workers organized into labor unions fell, fewer workplaces paid double time-overtime fell back into time-and-a-half. Industries also adopted the practice of reclassifying workers as “associates” or “managers” in order to opt-out of paying overtime. The illegal practice of “working off the clock” (being required to work without pay as a condition of employment) has made a comeback. And the skyrocketing cost of health care benefits (for workplaces that provide them) has made overtime a cheaper alternative to hiring more employees.

Just as 12 hours a day, six days a week became the normal work schedule for many developers, engineers, and designers at top companies, that norm could easily swing to twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Or fourteen to sixteen hours a day. And things will keep tipping in the favor of the companies unless the workers (and consumers of the products) step up and say that crunch time requests have to be exercised in a responsible manner.

The Solution

Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat features a chapter from game design and art collective Ludica, on “the ideal” work environment, which explores how current game companies fall short of these goals – and how they can start to fix these steps. While Ludica (which consists of Tracy Fullerton, Janine Fron, Celia Pearce, and Jacki Morie) doesn’t propose to have all the solutions, their model for the ideal workplace provides a good working guide for game companies looking to attract and retain talent.

And what do they mention?

• “Overtime is kept to a minimum by setting realistic production schedules.”
• “Several excellent child-care and elder-care facilities are located nearby.”
• “Empower people to act on their ideas.”
• “Relieve the creative team from administrative details so they can focus, without locking them out of the decision process.”
• “Build time into the workweek for experimentation and learning.”
• “Focus on quality of work and the workplace as critical elements of quality of life.”

Notice that outside of the child-care/elder care suggestion, all of the ideas require no more than a re-alignment of priorities. The game industry can easily make it a priority to institute these changes – after all, EA was compelled to do so, and did successfully switch change many of their practices. So the only thing left is their motivation.

Here’s to hoping the Rockstar wives succeed with their plan, in the name of improving the industry as a whole.

The Ninety-Five Theses [Wikipedia]
Wives of Rockstar San Diego employees have collected themselves [Gamasutra]
Alleged Unfair Work Conditions At Rockstar San Diego [Kotaku]
EA Spouse [Wikipedia]
The Red Dead Dilemma [The Escapist]
EA: The Human Story [EA Spouse]
Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat [MIT Press]
Quality of Life [Plenty for All]
Eight Hours for Work, Eight Hours for Rest, Eight Hours for What We Will! [Feministe]
Official Site [Ludica]

Earlier: How Do We Determine “Female Power?” The Economist Explores Women And The Workplace

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