I think about office chairs a lot.
The rise of “racing seat” gaming chairs washed a wave of flamboyance over our homes as desks became battle-stations. We measured, customised, and tailored them to our favourite colour combinations and to our bodies, just right for a gaming session or a stream. But as work from home became the norm, these neon bucketed thrones revealed their weakness - longevity. Our bodies ached in places they did not ache before, because we never sat in these chairs that long, or that frequently. They were simply not very good for extended continuous usage. And so, since the pandemic, we’ve seen a renewed interest in office chairs, because office chairs are designed with one very simple purpose in mind.
To keep you working for as long as possible.
They are not designed to look nice, or to feel nice. They are designed to keep you productive for extended periods of time by ensuring that sitting down for a long time harms your body as little as possible.
The thing is, there is a meaningful difference between not harming your body and having a healthy body. Setting yourself up for a healthy, happy life in which your body is not in pain requires a lot of work (and it may not even be possible if you have a disability). It requires routine, and exercise, and habit, and movement, and standing, and walking, and all sorts of things. Those things and how we engage in them largely dictate our starting state — how much health we have to burn sitting in a chair. How long we can assume the position. And so we must interrogate the difference between getting and keeping a healthy body, and merely lowering how much you’re harming your body. One of them is about taking actions that make things better. The other seeks to not make things worse.
And yet, the majority of our discussion and discourse around bodily health as it relates to working is not about that health. We mostly just talk about the chair.
It is little wonder then that when we talk about burnout and crunch, we talk about about minimising damage. We talk about the reduction of pain and reduction of the impacts of pain. We don’t talk about people’s trajectory through the gaming industries and their career paths through game development, or esports. We, like with the chair, focus on the thing causing the most visible loss of health instead of focusing on the work required to create a good life and a good career for workers as they transit in, through, and out of our industries.
Look at esports. Young people burn themselves out training, over-practising, over-playing, their bodies and minds laid waste. And so we hire performance coaches and trainers and mental coaches to help them devote themselves to their singular cause of performing. They take planned breaks with regimented recovery times to manage the burnout and plan their downtime for optimized efficiency to maximize their effectiveness for their singular focus of the game. Of output. Of productivity.
Just like the office chair.
And yet, in three to five years, they will quit. This will occur with such regularity that 23 year olds are considered “veterans”. Most will leave the gaming industry forever. Even if they don’t burn out, or become injured, they will leave. On the weight of averages, most will quit in, or before that time period. They are often damaged by their experiences here, set behind their peers, with an adjustment ahead of them to return to the regular world. They quit because the trajectory of their experience is not leading them anywhere good.
Just like game development, where most people leave in three to five years.
If you squint, it might look like your goals are aligned with executive management’s goals when they spend money on office chairs for our homes. They are looking after us, we tell ourselves. They are making sure we are healthy. But they are not. The company’s goal is to keep you as effective and productive as possible for the maximum amount of time, on a reasonable budget. The company’s responsibility under OSHA is to ensure you do not harm yourself by sitting whilst doing that.
It is on us then, to ensure that our workplace cultures are creating standards of normal that go further than simply ensuring we are not harmed by working. We — you and I — must both live by example and talk about how we live and talk about how we live by example, so that others can repeat it. So we can build places where people don’t just survive, but thrive. As game developers, our job is to create joy. If we wish to do that well, the experience of that work must also be one of joy.
We must take time off, and we must be seen to be taking time off. We must maintain healthy relationships with our workplace and our work and our productivity. We must identify first as a creator on our own terms, rather than an employee, a “rioter”, a “twitch staff”, or any of the failed spin-off monkers that imitators have attempted to have their workers identify as. We must be insistent on addressing the project management failures (and it is always failures) that cause crunch. We must be diligent in addressing the management failures that cause thrash, remove psychological safety, and fail to understand the needs and experiences of workers. We must stand up for people who feel they are “not established enough” to safely stand up for themselves. We must say the things that the juniors in our teams would not feel comfortable saying.
It will be unpleasant. It will be scary. You will be afraid. But in a few short years we have gone from a place where CEOs were praised for talking about how hard people crunched, to being eviscerated by thousands of developers and the media for insisting that people working 12 - 15 hour days, 6 - 7 days a week, “luv” it, and do it because they’re passionate. The world has changed. You and I can continue to change it.
If we do not, we are not looking after people. We are merely pumping farm animals full of antibiotics, instead of giving them an environment where they do not get infected.
Much of the advice we prescribe to others is an office chair. It helps them reduce the harm they experience. And that’s good, of course that’s good. But it’s not creating joy, it’s not creating spaces where we thrive. It’s not helping people grow through their careers.
Let us think further than harm reduction.
Let us imagine of a world where we are not within striking distance of being undone by furniture.
Let us create that world.
for those we have lost
for those we can yet save