"I just cried": Canadian video game creators face grueling hours of crunch

It was Osama Dorias' first job in the video game industry.

He was delighted to work as a designer at a company in Montreal.

He then got his first real insight into what is known in the trade as "the crunch" – when a team trains for weeks, if not months, to complete a game in time for its scheduled release.

"Seven days a week, 14 to 16 hours a day," he told CBC News about the experience in 2008.

The painful schedule lasted three months.

The first son of Dorias had just been born, but he worked every day from 8 am until the time of the last metro ride.

Watch: Video game designer Oussama Dorias describes how difficult it is to work 16 hours a day to finish a game on schedule.

One day, while he was wearing a diaper, he broke down in a pharmacy. In tears, he called his friend.

"My mind was in full swing and I did not know what to do, I did not know how to live and I did not know how to tell him that I had left the house without asking myself what size wore the diapers that my son wore . "

Dorias had no idea of ​​the proper size as he was rarely at home.

When the game was finally over, he had a few days off and a thank you note, but no pay for overtime. Welcome to the video game industry. This is a longstanding feature of the workplace culture of the sector, but the calls for change are getting stronger and stronger.

Big business, bad habits

A long time ago, the video game industry went from basement workshops to big business. The multiplayer game Fortnite now competes with Netflix for the number of eyeballs they attract. In 2018, the US gaming industry's turnover reached a new record of $ 43.4 billion, far exceeding the film industry.

With leading companies such as Ubisoft and BioWare, Canada is a major player – the world's third largest producer of video games, behind the United States and Japan.

But as the sector grows, tightening seems to be a bad habit that some companies still have to overcome.

Part of the problem is that the practice of organizing coding sessions all night is part of the DNA of video game creation.

A survey conducted in 2017 by the International Game Developers Association revealed that 53% of employees said they feared difficulties in their workplace.

Recent information also suggests that tightening is still common. Earlier this week, the Polygon Games website announced that Epic Games employees in Cary, NC, would work long hours on the hit game. Fortnite.

In this piece, the company says its success has created additional requirements for its team, but it is recruiting more staff and improving its planning process to reduce the workload.

Allegations of crisis are also part of the story of what's wrong with the new BioWare game Anthem. After the long – awaited title debuted at low ratings, the Kotaku game information website published an article describing what appeared to be a disrupted development process. Citing many anonymous sources, Kotaku reported cases of crisis and how some employees were put on stress leave prescribed by a doctor.

The Edmonton-based company quickly responded to the story in a blog post. "We put a lot of emphasis on better planning to avoid" critical times, "the statement said.

"We take the health and well-being of our team members very seriously."

Crunch culture takes a toll

Dave Chan, an audio designer who worked with BioWare from the late 1990s, said the industry had a big problem: "wear fatigue and burnout like an honor badge".

He remembers having endured months of what he called the "death crisis", consisting of days from 12 to 16 hours, seven days a week.

He said at one point that a leader had asked him how he was going. "I told him that I was on the brink of a nervous breakdown and that I almost lost my marriage."

Chan said that he was still running empty, and that this crisis was one of the reasons he had left the company in 2004.

But some managers see a place for tightening.

The former co-founder of BioWare, Trent Oster, who spent 15 years in the company, remembers having worked 212 hours in the last two weeks leading up to the game. Neverwinter Nights Shipped.

He says that tightening can be helpful in small outbreaks.

"When it happens for the first time, it's really exciting because you're letting go of all the excessive detail in your professional life and focusing on the fundamental issues."

But when weeks become months, the value of the crunch will collapse.

"You sit in your office 12 hours a day, but you do eight hours of work," he said. "Then you sit 14 hours a day to do eight hours of work."

Oster says that while he was working at BioWare, they actively tried to avoid problems. If tightening is necessary, he says, it's because something has gone wrong.

"Crunch is a strategy for mitigating the effects of disasters." When things have become so lateral, it's like: "Oh my God, it's at the edge of the world." failure."

Watch: Trent Oster breaks down the pros and cons of the crisis.

According to Oster, another part of the problem is the pressure exerted by the shareholders who want to know if the company can keep its promises.

"They're publicly traded companies, they have performance obligations, they put the products in a sort of schedule and they're under a lot of pressure to meet those deadlines."

Oster left BioWare in 2009, well before Anthem has been freed.

• Do you work in the video game industry and do you have experience with crunch? Contact Eli Glasner at [email protected]

In his new venture, Beamdog, they work a minimum of a few weeks and the staff is paid for overtime.

CBC News has contacted BioWare and many of the largest gaming companies in Canada to share their thoughts on the crisis. Nobody would talk to us.

Among the gaming industry employees who spoke to CBC News and shared their concerns about their working conditions, they feared being made public for fear of being fired or blacklisted by their employers.

The crisis begins

But some creators trapped take position.

At the game developer conference held last month in San Francisco, discussions on the crisis took center stage.

Narrative creator Meg Jayanth, one of the facilitators, spoke passionately about the suffering she suffered as a result of her crisis.

In the conference room, the pro-union movement Game Workers Unite organized a panel touting the benefits of collective bargaining.

GWU Chapters win new members in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Once again, fans who shared their experiences with CBC News said they were afraid to speak in public.

Daniel Joseph, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and working with GWU, says he is interested in unionization grows as crisis culture forces more and more people to leave the sector they love

"When people reach the age of 35, they leave the industry because they can not cope with the amount of work needed, so [companies] exploit the passion of young workers who have always wanted to play games ".

Today, Dave Chan of Edmonton shares his passion for the game in his column on CBC Radio. He thinks unionization will occur "when the development grinder ceases to be fueled by college graduates or that it will become economically viable to manage things in this way".

In Montreal, Osama Dorias is now the lead designer of Warner Brothers Games, where he states that there is an anti-crisis policy.

Dorias believes that the anti-crisis conversation is getting stronger – and he hopes more companies listen to him.

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From the way we think about our jobs to where and when we do them, the stress of modern work affects Canadians in many ways and in all sectors.

This week, CBC News – led by The National – examines the forces behind this stress and ways to avoid burnout. We will examine new approaches to productivity and creativity, how we structure shiftwork, the effects of teleworking on mental health, and what Canada can learn from other countries.

To learn more about our "Burnout: Stress at Work" series, watch The National or read more on CBCNews.ca.