4

THE GAMING INDUSTRY STRAINS MENTAL HEALTH

[Content warning: this chapter includes mentions of self-harm and suicide.]

THE MENTAL IMAGE VIDEO GAMES OFTEN CONJURE IS that of a person playing games, perhaps in their living room or on their phone. But there is so much more to gaming, including the immense effort of producing games and creating online gaming content. The previous chapter began to address how ability machines operate outside of gameplay, specifically through the work of live streaming of games and how that work changes what it means to be a gamer and a disabled person. I want to continue this focus on how gaming interacts with ability through the making of games and online content, and I will extend that focus to include the mental health ramifications of this type of game work.

There is a mental health problem hiding behind the scenes in gaming culture. This problem remains mostly undetected in spite of some journalists, other advocates, and even people stuck in the middle of it trying to raise their voices in warning. I have already established that playing games is an act of engaging with ability machines: games demand a lot from our mental and physical abilities. But what about the industry that makes those games? What about the thousands of online content creators who stream games? The gaming industry exerts a tremendous amount of effort into making games and producing gaming content online. And it takes advantage of the appeal of working in the gaming industry. If you work for a game development company, or if your full-time job is a game streamer, your family and friends would certainly think it is a dream job: Who wouldn’t want to make a career out of gaming? “You get to play games all day? You’re so lucky!” I can imagine a friend saying to a professional game streamer. This friend cannot fathom the toll it takes on the streamer’s mental health, because they associate gaming with leisure. The same goes for working in game development. “Wow! You helped make that game! That is amazing! I just played that game! So fun!” a family member might exclaim. They do not see the work conditions, the mandatory overtime, the lost weekends, the overnighters, and the threat of lost employment at a moment’s notice. And this industry uses that prestige associated with working in gaming to create unhealthy work environments for developers and unfeeling algorithms for streamers, all in the pursuit of extracting the most labor for the cheapest cost regardless of the toll it takes on people’s mental health, or even the lives lost, in the process.

Ability machines absorb the labor required to produce them, and the current state of the gaming industry often sucks people dry with its unseemly high demands on labor, insecure employment, and extortion relying on the public-facing prestige of working with games. This chapter examines how mental health suffers in these environments. I first discuss game streaming and the emotional labor it demands, often to the detriment of streamers’ mental health. I then describe how gaming culture creates a disconnect between poor working conditions in game development companies and the consequences of those conditions on mental health.

Game Streaming and Emotional Labor

Gaming already demands a lot from us physically and mentally. Add the additional mental and physical exertion of live streaming, and the result is almost overwhelming. Game streamers not only play games at relatively high levels of ability, they also must follow the chat, answer questions, talk, perform, and react to their own gameplay, oftentimes for many hours at a time. I invite anybody who doubts the intensity of this performance to try it for themselves: if they are anything like me, it only takes a few minutes to become exhausted from simply trying to be entertaining on camera, much less playing a game well enough to be interesting for viewers. Combine that exertion with the isolation so commonly felt by players, or even with diagnosed or undiagnosed mental illnesses, and there is an unfortunate probability that streamers will suffer psychologically. And unhelpful advice, with words such as “well, just stop streaming if it is too hard for you,” does nothing to solve the issue. For many, streaming is a valuable, even exclusive, source of income. The gaming industry has a problem with mental health. But so does this other production-oriented part of gaming culture. And while large game development companies seem impenetrable in terms of effecting actual change, improving streaming culture seems so much more attainable. Why relegate streaming to a needlessly toxic environment? Why not take a closer look at how the current streaming landscape may be hurting people and address those issues instead?

Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon, said of Amazon’s acquisition of the game streaming service Twitch.tv: “Broadcasting and watching gameplay is a global phenomenon, and Twitch.tv has built a platform that brings together tens of millions of people who watch billions of minutes of games each month.”¹ He made this statement in 2014, and the years since have only further proven his point. Twitch launched in 2011, and its initial focus on streaming video games helped propel the service into a relatively untapped market. The site now hosts streaming content of all types, including lifestyle, influencer, and educational streams. However, what distinguishes Twitch from other live broadcast platforms continues to be the large amount of video game content streamed and consumed by millions of viewers daily.

Streaming’s emphasis on participation by viewers, and the active responses by streamers, is central to its appeal.² It is common, even expected, for streams to feature an audio feed of the streamer, and a video feed of the streamer’s body is common as well. The chat box occupies a large portion of the screen, and it is constantly updated with messages from viewers. While many may consider Twitch.tv a place to watch gameplay, the service places the human element in the foreground. I made this argument in one of my earliest published works, and I will repeat it here: people go to streaming sites like Twitch.tv to watch people, not games.³

Streaming quickly becomes a sticky situation. Consider the following hypothetical example. An avid game player figures it would be fun to stream their gameplay on Twitch.tv. After a bit of an investment in a good camera and lighting setup, and armed with some skill or other trait that distinguishes them from the thousands of other streamers—like speedrunning games or offering a unique perspective on gameplay—they begin streaming. Knowing that only those streamers who stream regularly will gain an audience, they set a streaming schedule of three times per week and make sure to dedicate several hours to each stream. For the first few months, they only attract a few viewers, but they push past the disappointment regardless of the many hours of work they must put in to streaming every week. They slowly grow their audience, improve their viewer-streamer interactions, learn confidence and dynamism, and bit by bit they gain a regular streaming viewership of over one hundred people per stream. They even make a few dollars here or there, although certainly not enough to fairly compensate their labor. Throughout this entire experience, they have learned that while they must play video games well, most of the work of streaming comes from talking, performing, and interacting with viewers. These personal interactions require a significant amount of energy in order to turn “on” the high-energy version of their personality for several hours at a time. They often find themselves not in the mood to play games, much less stream. Yet they press on, knowing that missing a scheduled stream can cost them viewers. They cannot simply pretend to feel great and perform with high charisma. It just does not work that way, as it would come across to viewers as fake. Instead they must force their emotions to get to that happy, high-energy, and ready-to-entertain place. They keep those emotions up for several hours for their stream and then emotionally crash afterward. The cognitive dissonance they experience while they force these emotions in themselves slowly tears away at their psyche. And after a particularly tough day, and even tougher stream, they fall into a depression for a week. They feel burned out. Playing video games was not the hard part of streaming. The interpersonal and emotional tolls were unexpected and overwhelming.

This hypothetical example exhibits how streaming may become emotional labor. Lindsay Ellis, novelist and former YouTuber, has spoken at length about emotional labor as it relates to being an online content creator. I simply cannot beat her summary of the concept. I quote her here:

The term “emotional labor” comes from Arlie Hochschild in her book, The Managed Heart, and was her contribution to discussions of affective and immaterial labor. According to Hochschild, emotional labor requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others. Her research found that . . . managing one’s emotions can be physically tiring in the same way that manual labor is, and that the commodification of emotion estranges workers from their own feelings. More attention has been paid in recent years to emotional labor in a context of intimate relationships . . . But Hochschild was more interested in emotional labor as it pertains to a capitalist commodity. In Hochschild’s analysis, not only is seeming to love the job part of the job, but actually trying to love it, and to enjoy the customers, helps the worker in this effort as they are not simply faking it, but they come to believe and internalize what they are doing for the job.⁴

The last point in this quote is essential to understanding the weight of emotional labor: it is not just pretending to enjoy the work; it is the actual trying to love it. Emotional labor internalizes these emotions for the sake of performing their work. It is akin to not only putting on a happy face when an aggressive family member is in a bad mood; it is also the fostering of happiness and interpersonal enjoyment even when all evidence points to why the person performing the emotional labor should be upset at their family member’s behaviors. Emotional labor is draining and even psychologically damaging in extreme circumstances.

Streaming is an explicit act of emotional labor. The performance, outward appeal, energy, and enjoyment of the game, as well as its interactions with viewers, require that streamers engage in emotional labor. This labor, while not the sole cause of the mental health challenges associated with streaming, certainly does not help the matter. Several prominent streamers have suffered in ways that were not helped by the immense physical and emotional pressure they faced as online content creators. These tragedies seem to continue, one after the other. Desmond Amofah, known by his username Etika, was a popular gaming influencer and streamer. After several major mental health events, including YouTube channel deletions, social media outbursts, self-harm attempts, and medical interventions—all publicly documented on social media and gaming news sites—he disappeared in June 2019. His body was found several days later after he died from jumping off the Manhattan Bridge. Another streamer and e-sports competitor, Byron Bernstein, known as Reckful online, also suffered publicly from mental health challenges. In July 2020 he published a series of alarming tweets, and then later died by suicide. Also in July 2020, the Twitch streamer known as Ohlana posted a series of alarming Instagram stories and tweets before she died by suicide. In October 2021, the Twitch streamer and gaming YouTuber Kristina Dukic, known as Kika online, died from injuries sustained by a suicide attempt. In February 2022, the game streamer Cho Jang-mi, known as BJ Jammi, was found dead after an apparent suicide, with many close to her claiming her depression was exacerbated by online harassment.

Streaming is tough, and it appears tougher for people who struggle with mental health. The oppressive schedules, isolation, online harassment, and other factors certainly do not help people with mental illnesses. However, things do not need to remain like this. These streamers are not streaming for six or eight or ten hours per day because they enjoy it: the algorithms that support their streaming careers, through promotion on streaming platforms, incentivize these behaviors. Streamers do not enjoy the near-constant harassment they receive on their streams or on social media. Streamers do not enjoy losing out on personal time, exercise, and socializing with friends and family. Things can change. I return to concrete recommendations at the end of this chapter, recommendations that align with my discussion of burnout and crunch time in the game development industry.

Crunch Time and Burnout

The market economy puts pressure on the mental health of workers, driving an increase in work-related mental disorders globally.⁵ Specific careers are more vulnerable to these pressures, such as jobs that rely on mental or creative performance, which invites mental health issues with unsurprisingly few ways to mitigate those pressures. Businesses “continue to isolate illness from the realms of work and life,” one study claims, leading to numerous articles suggesting that workers maintain better work-life balances instead of advocating for improved working conditions that lead to the mental health challenges in the first place.⁶ Of course, other factors may influence mental health more than work: the strength of your social support network through family and friends as well as which neighborhood you live both impact mental well-being more than work conditions.⁷ But the underlying issue nevertheless stays the same. The fact remains that certain jobs, such as many jobs in the games industry, negatively affect mental health. Factors such as a job’s physical and psychological demands, workplace harassment including from superiors, and irregular schedules all negatively impact mental health.⁸ And those factors sound an awful lot like crunch time.

The games industry is plagued by crunch time. Crunch time, or the weeks leading up to the release of a product, often leads to the intense psychological demands and irregular schedules associated with poor mental health environments in the workplace. Even the physical demands of crunch time come into play here, as the period before a product launch is often filled with unusually long work hours over a period of weeks, or even months. And while one study suggests that unemployment, as well as the upsetting nature of social isolation and being financially dependent on others, outweighs the mental health challenges associated with work, one cannot deny the negative impact of unhealthy work environments on mental health, often resulting in depression or anxiety.⁹ In other words, just because other situations may produce worse mental health does not mean that we are not allowed to critically examine issues with unhealthy work environments.

Crunch time is this informally codified thing, meaning that it came about unintentionally, but now that it is here, it is here to stay.¹⁰ The expectation to work significantly longer hours and to forgo days off seems like a foregone conclusion at this point, as if maintaining a healthy work environment is just a ridiculous idea that workers need to move past. Employees of a game development company are often expected to work more than twelve hours per day, six to seven days per week, with few to no days off.¹¹ These extra hours and days expected of employees often go uncompensated. My wife is a nurse, and she has often worked twelve-hour shifts in intense work environments. But even she would not be expected to work six days per week like that, and you better believe that every single extra hour is paid. In other words, the busy life of a nurse pales in comparison to the expectations of crunch time in creative industries. This unsustainable schedule during crunch time leads to employees living with a constant feeling of stress as they attempt to finish work that they simply cannot do in the allotted period. These time pressures have concrete mental health consequences, documented by research.¹² One set of researchers also points out that these game development companies use an informal system of punishments and rewards to compel their workers to comply with these unreasonable expectations.¹³ The fact of the matter is that working in the games industry is a rather well-respected and exclusive career. And losing that job is not only easy but also common. There are always talented folks willing to do your job, regardless of the terrible work environment, and fluctuating budgets and project scopes can lead to unpredictable and unreliable employment. These game companies expect their employees’ passion for games, and assumed desire to remain in the games industry, to justify continued exploitative labor practices such as crunch time.¹⁴

Crunch time is now thought of as a normal part of working in the games industry.¹⁵ Of course, game development is not the only industry that relies on unhealthy, unsustainable work environments: crunch time pops up in industries that rely on mental or creative performance.¹⁶ But just because it is common does not mean it is not detrimental to human health and ultimately an unethical, even morally abhorrent, practice. Crunch time negatively affects work-life balance and increases instances of depression.¹⁷ It most greatly affects workers in precarious employment situations, such as game testers and other contract workers in the games industry who often do not have permanent positions in a company.¹⁸ It also disproportionately affects women more than men.¹⁹ There should be no doubt left in your mind about the nature of crunch time. It is pernicious. It is a common occurrence, and it is mentally damaging.

High job strain, undoubtedly intensified during crunch time, worsens mental health. One team of researchers explains job strain as the “combination of high demands and low control,” which are associated with “serious health consequences.”²⁰ High job strain is harmful to mental health, and the games industry is replete with job strain. Games culture, and especially the games industry, will often try to cover up mental health challenges caused by high job strain by using the term “burnout.” Burnout is a “state of exhaustion combined with doubts about the value of one’s own work and competence.”²¹ I imagine that using the phrases “mental health” or “mental illness” would implicate the industry’s unhealthy practices, at least to some degree. But the word “burnout” solves that problem: if an employee is feeling “burned out,” then they just need some good old-fashioned rest and relaxation. “Just go on a vacation after crunch time and you’ll feel better!” I imagine supervisors saying. Describing the uncomfortable reality with language such as “mental illness” makes the situation appear dire—which it is—and the games industry would essentially be admitting fault to causing severe depression or other mental illnesses. The term “burnout” keeps members of the games industry from describing symptoms of mental illness.

Games Culture, Discourse, and Mental Health

I once again turn to discourse, that maker and breaker of cultures, to examine the associations between burnout, crunch time, and mental health. I wanted to find out if gaming journalism—as both a reflection of games culture in general as well as a thought leader in that culture—described burnout and crunch time as issues related to mental health, or if it followed the trend I saw in the games industry of using those terms instead of addressing mental health directly.

The broad approach of the project was to search for gaming articles about mental health and see if they made any connection to the prevalence of burnout and crunch time in the games industry. I, along with fellow researcher Dr. Stephanie Orme, searched for articles about mental health and illness posted on the gaming news sites Kotaku.com, Polygon.com, PCGamer.com, and IGN.com.²²

Table 5.1. Categories of article topics regarding mental health and mental illness

The articles and their subject matter reveal a variety of approaches to discussing mental health in gaming culture, and burnout and crunch time make up a disappointingly small minority of those discussions (see table 5.1). The variety of the subject matter in these articles is evident in the number of articles in each category. There is an obvious winner if this were a contest. Articles about how games portray mental illness, and critiques of those portrayals, make up more than half of the total number of articles, forty-four out of eighty-three to be precise. The remaining five categories, ranging from articles about gaming influencers to mental health activism, all include ten articles or fewer per category. Regarding the subject at hand, a mere eight articles directly addressed burnout and crunch time as relating to mental health or illness, a surprising finding considering the many articles about burnout and crunch time more generally. A complete list of the articles studied in this analysis can be found at https://pastebin.com/zqCJ67xv.

1.Portraying Mental Illness and Critiquing Those Portrayals. While the categories remain distinct in the original study, here I combine my summary of these two article themes simply because they emphasize the same phenomenon, namely an interest in how games include characters with mental illnesses. The first set of articles, the thirty that focus on games depicting mental illness, all justify the subject matter by implying that these depictions are newsworthy in and of themselves. In other words, the number of articles here denote an assumption that depictions of mental illness in games are rare enough that its appearance in a game is worth mentioning in an article. The articles are essentially feature stories. Games such as Moons of Madness (Rock Pocket Games, 2019) or Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice are touted as important entries in the gaming canon for their bravery in tackling this subject matter. While some articles reported on production processes, such as in the article “Hellblade Is an Audio Nightmare,” other articles address the creative process that led to making a game featuring mental illness as a theme, such as the piece titled “Interview: Infliction’s Creator Talks Personal Horror and the Power of Kickstarter.” Many of the thirty articles about games portraying mental illness followed this format of interviewing game creators, many of whom had experience with mental health challenges. In terms of tone, these articles are saturated with praise for these games, often implying but sometimes outright claiming that featuring mental illness in games is a prosocial and innovative endeavor.

Another fourteen articles in the study provide a bit of balance to the praise found in the abovementioned thirty articles. Articles in the “Critiques of Mental Illness Portrayals” did just that: criticize games, and games culture in general, for how mental illness has been depicted. These articles often use individual games as case studies, while others look at genres of games. As examples of the latter, some articles pointed out how horror games use mental illness as a tired trope for easy—yet reductive and harmful—scares. “Nobody Wins When Horror Games Stigmatize Mental Illness” one article’s title reads. “How the Asylum Jam Is Giving Horror a Much Needed Shock to the Heart” reads another article title. Particular games also receive critical examination for their hurtful depictions of mental illness tropes, such as in the article titled “The Sims’ Insane Trait Sucks.” These articles generally demonstrate a desire to leave entertainment media’s messy and inaccurate takes on mental illness, and they point to how games often do not innovate with regard to their depictions.

With a combined forty-four articles, these two themes dominate the conversation about mental health in gaming. That number represents 53 percent of all of the articles in the study’s corpus. Compare that percentage to my previous study on disability and games journalism (discussed in a previous chapter), and you would find that a mere 8.3 percent of articles in that study addressed disability portrayals in games. While disability as a subject tends to invite discourse about players, mental health seems to invite discourse about characters. And as an aside, this emphasis on characters with mental illnesses stands in contrast to the number of games that actually include playable characters with mental illnesses codified into game mechanics: for the chapter in this book on how games interactively portray mental illness, it was difficult to find case studies. Yet it was relatively easy to find games that depict physical disabilities.

2.Mental Health Activism. Some articles covered mental health activism in gaming culture, specifically at live gaming events such as conventions. Several of these articles feature stories about a mental health advocacy organization participating in game conventions to both raise awareness about mental health as well as to directly help convention participants during the cacophonous events. For instance, one article reported on a panel about depression and anxiety at the gaming convention PAX, and another article described a dedicated room at QuakeCon for convention participants to get away from the overstimulating and sometimes stressful environment. Other articles continue the theme of mental health activism by featuring stories about how proceeds from game sales or other income would be donated to mental health charities. For example, there were articles such as “Devolver Digital Unveils New SNES Game with Profits Going to Charity” and “All Hellblade Profits Go Toward Charity Today for World Mental Health Day.” The remaining articles in this category covered games as their own form of mental health activism, such as games created specifically to help educate players regarding mental illness.

3.Gaming’s Association with Mental Illness. Given the history of hysteria about gaming causing violent behavior or addictive tendencies—which, by the way, is universally debunked by research spanning several decades by now—it is unsurprising to still see articles that cover how gaming is associated with mental illness. Some articles reported on common public discourse about gaming and social ills, such as an article on the history of blaming games for causing violence or another article reporting on a public official’s statement about games causing mass shootings. However, most of the articles with this theme speak to how medical experts have generally denounced such associations. For example, several articles report on how different game organizations reacted to news of the World Health Organization creating a diagnosis classification called “internet gaming disorder.” “Gaming Organizations React to World Health Organization’s ‘Gaming Disorder’ Classification,” one article reads. Another article was titled “ESA Sides with ‘Internationally Renowned’ Mental Health Professionals to Oppose WHO’s Gaming Disorder Proposal.” Articles about how society continues to struggle with blaming games for general social issues related to mental health is not surprising, and therefore not much can be gleaned from this category. In other words, this is expected and boring, so let’s move on.

4.Burnout and Crunch Time. Only eight articles make an explicit mention of burnout and crunch time as they relate to mental health and illness. These articles do what many other articles about burnout and crunch time do: introduce readers to dire problems in game development and work culture. But then they go a step further and call out how the gaming industry is supposedly addressing, and primarily ignoring, how burnout and crunch time are contributing to mental health challenges for employees. In other words, a quick internet search will bring up a never-ending number of articles about burnout and crunch time in the games industry. But these eight articles describe these phenomena as problems related to mental health instead of merely management or work-life balance issues. Two of the articles in this category report on how burnout exists among game streamers with articles about a streamer’s exhausting twelve-hour streaming schedule or how Twitch.tv is attempting to help creators cope with burnout. But the remaining articles highlight how the culture among most game development companies causes significant mental health challenges for employees. These are articles such as “Devolver Digital Founder Says ‘Shameful’ Developer Workload Is Industry’s ‘Dirty, Dirty Secret’” and “Report: Namco Ignored Programmer’s Mental Health. Programmer Committed Suicide.” These eight articles are the exceptions that prove the rule: since there are plentiful articles about burnout and crunch time that avoid addressing them as issues related to mental health, the small number of articles that do make this connection only serve to highlight the lack. Simply put, there is a disconnect between talking about crunch time and burnout as harmful to mental health.

5.Other Topics. The remaining twelve articles, separated into two subject categories, are the least representative of how gaming culture discusses mental health. Six articles reported on how popular gaming influencers, such as streamers, YouTubers, and e-sports players, face significant mental health events, some even resulting in death. Burnout is not only salient to the games industry, but it is also an increasing issue among gaming content creators. The last category, also consisting of six articles, describes how care providers have used games as mental health interventions, such as through virtual reality games, tabletop roleplaying games, and therapeutic indie games.

As I have argued previously, games journalism has the unique position of both reflecting games culture—it needs to publish on subjects that gamers will find interesting—and being a thought leader in that culture. Therefore, I find that taking a step back and examining these articles’ subject matter both as a whole and in relation to each other as distinct themes can provide some insights into gaming culture and its attitudes about mental health and illness. First, if there is a “meta-category” of subject matter among the themes already discussed, it is celebration. The articles that describe mental health portrayals, activism, and interventions—three categories representing over 55 percent of all the articles included in the study—all take a tone of celebration and reveal a desire to position games as an overall positive force regarding mental health. This type of self-congratulation, intentionally or not, attempts to publicly position gaming as a forward-thinking, prosocial, and safe space. I tend to take a more critical attitude in this regard. This celebratory tone certainly ignores the toxicity of online game communities, the unethical game design practices, and the bigotry that pervades much of gaming culture. Second, and in contrast to the self-congratulatory articles just described, other articles in this study demonstrate a concern for improving mental health in gaming culture. Three of the article categories, namely “Critiques of Mental Illness Portrayals,” “Burnout and Crunch Time,” and “Gaming Influencers and Mental Health”—representing over 33 percent of the total articles in the study—take a more critical and self-aware approach to reporting on mental health in gaming culture.

A primary takeaway of this analysis is that gaming culture generally ignores how crunch time—and the resulting burnout—in the games industry contributes to mental health issues. The eight articles that critiqued these workplace practices made a valiant effort: they called out crunch time as an unsustainable and immoral practice, and they identified burnout as being a direct consequence of the work culture cultivated in the industry. But, as I stated before, these select few articles that accurately identify the relationship between mental health and abhorrent workplace expectations are simply not enough. The truth is that most articles about burnout and crunch time continue the industry-approved practice of using these terms as euphemisms for workplace abuse that leads to significant mental health events for many employees. Games journalism could lead the charge on this issue by using investigative reporting to change these practices. It could speak truth to power. But that is not happening. Instead, as long as their articles overemphasize the generally impotent portrayals of characters with mental illnesses—a subject I return to later in its own chapter—games journalism is left to underemphasize the documented problems in the games industry. But the games industry is not the only place with problems in this regard. The relatively small category of articles in this study about gaming influencers and their mental health events speaks to how burnout and crunch time have bled into online content creation, leading to several popular gaming influencers losing their lives.

Improving Conditions in Game Streaming and Development

Emotional labor needs to be at the center of conversations about mental health and video game live streaming. As an aside, the online educator and YouTuber Tom Scott published a video in March 2022 in which he pitches several ideas for science fiction stories. In one of his story pitches, he describes a dystopia where young people link up their brains to their favorite influencers to feel what they feel and think what they think. He gives an example of this story being told from the perspective of a live streamer “who has to constantly think the right things and have the right emotions to keep the audience watching. Which, I guess, is kind of already the case for streamers.” You could not pay me enough to come up with a better definition of emotional labor: thinking the right things and having the right emotions for others, such as when working or in relationships. Video game live streamers must constantly muster up the proper emotions to do their work, like some other jobs with intense customer service expectations. Combined with the isolation of being alone in front of a computer all day long while remaining precariously employed in that career—if a channel is not growing, it is shrinking, and nobody is going to sign off on vacation days or provide sick pay leave—and game streaming becomes a hot soup of mental health challenges. While I do not have all of the answers, my first feed-forward suggestion is to centralize emotional labor as a key ingredient of this soup. Changes that mitigate the effects of this emotional labor, or reduce the emotional labor in general, should benefit streamers.

There are systematic changes needed across much of our lives online, and this fact is no less true for streaming. First, I would like to see tighter limits put on the length of streams and the amount of streams allowed in a particular period. At the time of writing, there is no limit on how long a streamer can broadcast on Twitch.tv. A single stream is capped at forty-eight hours, but the streamer can simply begin a new stream immediately. While in practice streamers typically do not stream day and night (even though some do, even when they are sleeping), the most eager streamers broadcast six, eight, or ten hours a day. And this schedule can repeat every day, seven days a week, for weeks on end. While other industries have been forced, through labor activism, to impose health-based limits to work schedules, such as in the transportation or healthcare industries, there is no formal “streaming industry” to lobby against. There exist only streaming platforms, such as Twitch.tv or YouTube. Their functional monopolies and lack of hired streamers do not negate their ethical responsibilities. These platforms must protect the laborers who attract viewers, advertising dollars, and paid subscriptions. These streaming companies are making money from these laborers without fairly compensating them, and they benefit from these streamers engaging in practices that damage their well-being. Twitch could easily implement a limit to streaming broadcasts, such as a limit of six hours in one day, whether in a single stream or made up of several streams. The weekly limit could be set at forty hours, and the monthly limit could be 160 hours, which would leave a few extra days every month as well-earned breaks. The yearly limit could follow this pattern. Without starting a conversation about fair monetary compensation, these limits could be a first step in systematically improving the work conditions for streamers in a way that benefits their mental health.

A second systematic change could alter how streams and streamers are promoted on these platforms. While some viewers follow or subscribe to streaming channels, most viewers find streams through algorithms that promote some streams above others, either from search results or by placing certain streams on home pages. These algorithms are notoriously secret, but some characteristics can be derived from observation: streamers who broadcast regularly, for significant amounts of time each stream, and with the highest viewership tend to do better in the algorithm than other channels. In other words, streamers are incentivized to stream for longer and follow an unchanging schedule. If streamers take a vacation, they can lose viewers and their spot in the algorithm’s promotion. If streamers reduce how many hours per day they stream, their channel also can lose viewers, followers, and subscribers. These algorithms are working the streamers to death with little to no personal oversight. It is dystopian. Simple changes could dramatically improve the working conditions for streamers, such as promoting channels that regularly take vacation breaks from streaming schedules or streamers who cap their streams at four hours per day, under the daily limit if there was one. Incentives drive behaviors, and if the incentives change, in the form of improved promotional algorithms, then the working conditions for streamers may improve.

I have purposely left out a section describing what streamers can do to improve their mental health and their working conditions. It is immoral to place that responsibility solely on their shoulders while ignoring the systems that benefit from their labor. It is akin to blaming consumers for climate change because they don’t recycle while ignoring the fact that select industries and companies are responsible for practically all of the greenhouse gas emissions globally. If some readers are streamers and are interested in learning how they can be proactive about their mental health, I encourage them to consider the advice given by Kelli Dunlap in her interview preceding this chapter. She provides several fantastic suggestions that would benefit streamers as well as others who work in autonomous or creative industries. She is also a licensed mental health expert, and so I will let her words speak for themselves. She has even researched the mental health of streamers, a work I will cite here for interested readers.²³

The game development industry can benefit from acknowledging that crunch and burnout are mental health issues, not just labor issues. Industry practices prey on the mental well-being of employees for the sake of profit, and money does not justify unethical treatment of human beings. Unlike streaming, there are structures in place for workers in the game development industry to advocate for change, but these efforts are weakened by the appeal and prestige of working in the games industry. While advocacy continues on that front, I can simply reiterate what my study has found, specifically that burnout and crunch are euphemisms for mental health issues at play in the games industry. If I were to gain an audience of game industry executives, I would state simply, but firmly, the following: “Your workers are not burned out, they are having mental health crises, spurred by working conditions in your companies. These working conditions are not just crunch times. Crunch is just a word for unethical, and inhumane, working conditions. You are responsible for making systematic changes to protect the workers who make your companies money.”

The gaming industry is an ability machine that can consume the mental well-being of workers. It is an ugly truth, but one that must be named, called out, discussed, and changed for the sake of people’s lives.

Notes

1. Wingfield, “What’s Twitch?”

2. Gandolfi, “To Watch or to Play, It Is in the Game”; Consalvo, “Player One, Playing with Others Virtually.”

3. Anderson, “Watching People Is Not a Game.”

4. Ellis, “YouTube: Manufacturing Authenticity,” timestamp 23:20.

5. deVries and Wilkerson, “Stress, Work and Mental Health.”

6. deVries and Wilkerson, “Stress, Work and Mental Health,” 45.

7. Marchand and Blanc, “The Contribution of Work and Non-Work.”

8. Marchand, Demers, and Durand, “Does Work Really Cause Distress?”

9. Marrone and Golowka, “If Work Makes People with Mental Illness Sick”; and Virtanen et al., “Contribution of Non-Work and Work-Related Risk Factors.”

10. Legault and Ouellet, “So Into It They Forget What Time It Is?”

11. Petrillo, Pimenta, Trindade, and Dietrich, “Houston, We Have a Problem,” 709.

12. Roxburgh, “‘There Just Aren’t Enough Hours in the Day.’”

13. Legault and Ouellet, “So Into It They Forget What Time It Is?”

14. Consalvo, “Crunched by Passion.”

15. Beaujot and Andersen, “Time Crunch.”

16. Hamermesh and Lee, “Stressed Out on Four Continents.”

17. Consalvo, “Crunched by Passion”; and Hamermesh and Lee, “Stressed Out on Four Continents.”

18. Bulut, “Playboring in the Tester Pit.”

19. Consalvo, “Crunched by Passion”; and Prescott and Bogg, “Segregation in a Male-Dominated Industry.”

20. Ahola, Honkonen, Kivimäki, and Virtanen, “Contribution of Burnout,” 1024.

21. Ahola, Honkonen, Kivimäki, and Virtanen, “Contribution of Burnout,” 1023.

22. Anderson and Orme, “Mental Health, Illness, Crunch, and Burnout.”

23. Dunlap, Shanley, and Wagner, “Mental Health Live.”