Gamedev Burnout and Weightlifting
The last step in recovery.
It’s been three and a half years since I wrote my now-infamous “How The Games Industry Hurts People” article. A lot of the inspiration came from my time working on Dauntless at Phoenix Labs. It is the worst job I’ve ever had, and one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me.
I will not regale you with tales I couldn’t prove in a courtroom, but I will say that I quit very soon after getting my permanent residence in Canada. I’m sure you can imagine how being an immigrant on a work permit might be a source of vulnerability in an employment conflict.
This time, I’m here to talk to you about recovery, and in order to do that I need to tell my own story of the hole I found myself buried in, and how I dug myself out.
Last time, on LBT
The original article went through all the different ways in which stress, trauma, conflict, thrash, crunch, nervous system activation, lack of psychological safety, and other byproducts of bad leadership take their toll on the body, the mind, and the emotions. A lot of people reached out to me to thank me or vent the flood of emotions they’d been hit with from finally having words to describe what they were experiencing. This felt like success to me since the point of the article was to help people understand what was happening to them, but it received criticism from some — including Dr. Alok Kanojia aka “Dr K” of HealthyGamer.GG — that it really didn’t really offer any solutions.
In truth, I didn’t cover the solution space because I don’t believe there is an effective universal approach to fixing the kind of damage you get when a game studio fucks you up. I still felt broken by my experiences so how could I help anyone fix themselves when I couldn’t fix myself? We know there are things that help in general, and you’ve all heard those a thousand times. Eat healthy, rest, exercise, blah blah blah. And yeah, those things are never going to hurt, but they can’t actually do anything on their own. Rest isn’t relaxing when you’re in a C-PTSD hole and can’t stop bouncing your legs on the balls of your feet. Exercise can technically help the body but even getting to exercise in the first place may be impossible, and it might not even help if you just spend the whole time thinking about work.
At the end of the article, I offered hope and posited that if there was a key to healing, it depended on redefining your relationship with the things that hurt you. And god damn, do I hate being right.
Who hurt you?
Effort. What hurt me was the concept of willpower itself, and the application of such as a means of solving my problems.
The launch of Dauntless in 2019 tore me to pieces over a month of 15-20 hour days, 7 days a week. We crunched through over 1700 deployments in that time. They wrote whitepapers about what we achieved, and they were right to, because what we did and what it cost us was beyond human capacity. It has taken me the last six years to recover what I lost in that room.
If we did not succeed, none of us would have jobs because the studio would close. And if I did not succeed to the arbitrary satisfaction of my employer, I would be fired and forced to leave the country. The pressure was unfathomable, and my life as I knew it hung in the balance of my capacity to perform.
I had already uprooted my life the year before to escape the Trump administration’s destruction of the visa program, and staring down the barrel of being forced to move back to Australia, I decided that I would do whatever I had to to succeed to the arbitrary satisfaction of my employer. It pushed me so far beyond the physical limits of my body that by the end of the second week I was throwing up several times a day, shitting my guts out, unable to sleep without whiskey, and unable to wake without a carton of Red Bull. I survived off fast food, granola, and soda, because it was what I could consume quickly and get back to work. I took Advil for the muscle spasms, Tylenol for the headaches, and Valium for the brain zaps. I stole swag from marketing because I didn’t have clean clothes. A friend flew in from the US to take care of me, who said I was, and I quote “not a person”.
Seems bad
I pushed myself beyond the limits of human endurance, physically and mentally. Every time my mind or body attempted to enforce a limit, I found a way to overcome that limit thanks to my seemingly-endless resolve and deep pit of rage built up over decades of a life I never should have been subjected to. Withholding details to maintain my G-rating, it is possible to force a person’s sympathetic nervous system into Fight or Flight and dump all the adrenaline it has into your body. I did this on purpose, multiple times a day, every day, for a month. That had a cost which I inevitably paid, and a limit which I inevitably hit. When the juice ran out, I hit a wall like a Toyota Tercel leaving the highway hits a pine tree.
When it was over, I couldn’t get out of bed. I tried. It didn’t work. I physically could not force the muscles to carry me. Later, doctors would theorize a number of reasons why this happened, all of them terrifying. I asked to take short term disability leave but was told to take PTO instead. I wasn’t functional enough to argue.
When I eventually returned to work, the person I had been before was gone. I felt nothing, I enjoyed nothing, and I did little outside of work except drink and talk to people I wished lived closer. Unable to quit because of my work permit, I stayed at PHX and tried to make the best of a bad situation for a further two years until my Permanent Residence application was approved and the situation at work, once again, deteriorated. I quit on the spot and took a job on Call of Duty with the intention of transitioning back into big tech and leaving game development forever. But then the strangest thing happened.
Things got better
It turns out, when a studio releases one game a year for basically fifteen years straight, they get pretty good at doing it sustainably. Working on COD was easily the best gamedev job I’d ever had. The values of the studio were codified in their practices, which reinforced all the things I’d theorized might be possible with competent leadership. It was organized, competent, management was aware of their responsibilities and worked with their team to create effective work environments.
Experiencing this and breathing a sigh of relief, I wrote the article you know and love after about six months there, having studied how Demonware worked with Treyarch, Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer, Raven, and High Moon in detail with people from every level of the orgs. I spent time with every level of leadership unpacking the structure, operation, and ideals behind all of it, and I’m being deadly serious when I say every single day was good. I did not have a single bad day at work in two years, including the launches. We released Vanguard, Modern Warfare 2, and Warzone 2.0, all the while doing maintenance work on Cold War, Black Ops 4, MW2019 and COD Mobile. The work was complex, and difficult but achievable, and there was always support from the team. It was truly one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.
After a couple of years I left to help Jules, Kait, and Joel start Soft Rains, a new indie studio making Ambrosia Sky. We got to build the studio we’d always talked about and I think we’ve been very successful. Every day I wake up happy to work with my friends on a game I believe in and you should wishlist it.
It’s a high pressure environment that I genuinely care about, but unfortunately, that revealed damage that had so far remained hidden.
Oops! All trauma
Working in a large AAA team, there’s a high degree of specialization and a high degree of redundancy. Working on a small indie team, there’s a high degree of generalization and almost no redundancy. Task domain changes constantly, and your colleagues are depending on you doing your work so they can do theirs. And because you have fewer colleagues and fewer teams, you spend less time on coordination and communication and more hours every day on the tools. Since no-one can possibly know every part of the engine, you constantly know less than you need to, and almost every task requires research into how to actually do it.
That is a lot of words to say that it was challenging, and it required me to, you know, try. Normal, right?
I didn’t know how to anymore. When I’d hit a wall and not know what to do, my brain began to lock up. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t think, couldn’t work. I’d stare at the IDE for hours, unable to even begin attacking the problems I was working on. It’s Unreal Engine, so the answer to every problem was in the source code somewhere, but past a certain point I couldn’t force myself to keep looking for them. No matter what, I couldn’t force myself to apply willpower, because last time I did that it broke me as a person and nearly killed me. It became a severely limiting factor in what I could do, because the only other time in my career I needed to spend this much of my time programming was the original Dauntless launch. I couldn’t write the amount of code that I needed to, and the answer I turned to last time scared me.
I feared that pushing the button in my head marked “generate willpower” might trigger the fight or flight that broke me, but more than that, I feared a much worse scenario: if in a moment of desperation, I reached for that old, dangerous button as a last resort, and it didn’t work. Knowing that I’d been pushed so far as to reach for my secret weapon, only to find that I didn’t have one? I knew that’d break me, so I stayed well away from anything that even felt like effort.
Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, they did.
Death of a friend
A friend from my home town died. His name was Paul Wankadia, and when I was a kid he was the first person I knew who also Liked Computer. You might have known him as Junyer from his contributions to RE2. He had a heart attack at work and later died recovering at home. Our lives didn’t look so different, and his killed him. Not too long after, a doctor would tell me that mine was going to kill me for the same reasons, and I needed to fix my shit. But with what? I was still cooked, I had no juice to spend on such a thing.
This put me in a bind. Before, I couldn’t apply effort because last time I did it nearly killed me. Now I was being told if I didn’t apply effort to change my life, it would definitely kill me.
It simplified the choice quite a bit. If death is likely either way, pick the one that’s least likely. So I changed my life, and committed to earning my health back, and that started with exercise. Aware of my propensity to go too hard too quickly and hurt myself, I started with light cardio and light dumbbells at home. When that stopped making me feel ruined for multiple days afterwards, I started going to the gym in my building, with a little more intense cardio. When that started being manageable, I very lightly started lifting, as I had at so many other points in my life. Weeks passed and the weights went up and down, but about a month in, as I began to approach failure, the strangest thing happened.
Lifting the bar
I felt my body weaken, my muscles ask for rest. At any point during the previous the past six years, I’d have listened. But an old, long dormant part of me began to whisper in guttural tones begging me to fight. A muscle memory I thought lost crept into the fibers and demanded I push, and together they spat fire into my lungs. Suddenly, there was one more rep left in me. Then another. Then another. Then ten more. And two more sets. It wasn’t until the end of the night as I sat alone on the floor of the gym, quietly sobbing, that I realized I had found a part of me that I’d thought had died in the fire of 2019. Applying effort to the weights was safe, and good for me, and something that would inherently reward me. Without realizing it, I’d been retraining my brain to remember that effort could lead places that weren’t just pain, disappointment, and burnout. After that day, I began to crave challenge again. I lifted heavier and heavier, and started to play games. I started to write for fun again, I went to the League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational, and started to join people for ARAMs. The days no longer ended with me collapsing in front of TV, ordering a burrito, drinking until it was time to sleep, and passing out, instead punctuated with social activities, exercise, and reading.
It’s been nearly a year since I started trying to fix my life, and I’m still going to the gym four or five days a week, for about an hour and a half per day. I’m regularly lifting three plates (315lb / 145kg) on my heaviest lifts in most of those sessions. I’m eating for the sole purpose of fueling my body for the next lift, and it is working. I am, quite frankly, strong as hell and ripped.
But more than anything, I’m able to work to my fullest capacity again. Before weightlifting, I’d already done the work to change my relationship with employment and game development and I’d learned to trust that my team had my back. Despite that, the damage that prevented me from applying willpower had lurked in the background for years, sucking up my ability to do … well, just about anything. It took me until now to realize it, but that damage had widespread impacts over my life. It’s the reason I’ve barely even been able to play games or during most of this time period, because games are the application of effort towards a challenge and the idea of recreationally applying effort caused the exact same lock up that attempting to push through a problem at work did. I could barely read books because it required me to sit alone with my thoughts, and quite frankly that sounded like hell. It doesn’t, anymore. I’m reading Gideon the 9th right now, and it’s lovely.
A better life
I play games and read most days now. I wake up at 9, start work at 10, work until 6, then gym until 7:30, cook dinner, and spend the rest of the night playing. I eat 140 - 195g of protein a day, and buy a quite frankly unholy amount of chicken breast and eggs every week. I don’t really drink or smoke anymore. Not really intentionally, I just don’t want to. I have other priorities and things in my life that reward me more than they did, so I do not need them.
Even with a dream job, you can still be bleeding from old wounds.
I tell you this story — my story — to illustrate how insidious damage from the worst of our experiences can lurk beneath the surface, and to show how recovery is possible. It also serves to show how the recovery requirements are different for each of us. My damage was specific to the nature of the incidents that broke me, and so the work required to heal me meant addressing that. I was lucky (?) that external circumstances put me in a place where I accidentally discovered what I was stuck on. I hope that you are luckier than me in this regard.
Our brains are neural networks, and neural networks cannot simply be told how to operate. Saying a space is safe doesn’t make it safe, nor does it make you feel safe. We must be shown that things are safe and have it demonstrated repeatedly until the pathways that process that information strengthen and we can trust that what we have seen and are seeing will continue to be seen.
We are players in the game of our own lives and we must train ourselves with input until our natural reactions are the ones we want. We must build the game such that our experiences retrain us simply by living in the core gameplay loops we have set out.
Moving on
On May 29th 2025, Dauntless died an unremarkable death and sank offline into an unmarked grave. A handful of people from the Phoenix Labs Survivor’s Support Group got together in a nearby park to mourn its passing. I was not one of them. It was a bad thing that happened to us, and its memory remains a warning for all that come after.
The last step in healing is saying goodbye to your pain, and moving past it. The people who did these things to us will never see consequences. You will have to make peace with that however you can, because the last step is leaving them behind altogether, and never thinking about them again. They cannot hurt you anymore; once we purge the damage they inflicted, their influence is gone forever.
You can heal from these terrible things. You can build a better life for yourself. You just have to figure out how, and no-one knows you better than you.
Good luck, old friend. I believe in you.
// for those we have lost
// for those we can yet save
If you worked at Phoenix Labs and need someone to talk to about the things you experienced, please reach out to me on any platform that I use. You’re not alone.