This post started as a draft that contained five lines.
being locked in a bad work environment
is not like being chased by a tiger
that destroyed his cage
i have long forgotten the number of times ive been hurt or nearly killed at work
but i remember the ones that hurt my soul
I know, I usually cover deep technical dives into how games operate, but in a world where every major studio gets The Article’d, it would be remiss of me to not talk about the fact that studios are run by people, and that how those people operate is every bit as important as how their software operates.
To do that, we have to talk about biology.
The human body is a marvelous, resilient thing, capable of both incredible feats, and the ability to change in order to become capable of incredible feats. But evolutionarily speaking, it was built for survival. And to survive, it relies on the sympathetic nervous system.
Fight or Flight
When activated, the sympathetic nervous system increases your blood pressure and heart rate, dilates the pupils, dumps adrenaline, and ups the oxygen supply to your vital organs, readying you to fight for your life or run screaming into the woods. Fight moves you towards a problem. Flight moves you away from it. At its core, the sympathetic nervous system says “I CAN”.
The human body evolved and built itself specifically to do this, because most of the threats that governed whether we would live to reproduce had to be either killed, or escaped from.
But what if you can’t fight or flee?
For better or worse, the human body also built itself another survival mechanism that’s suspiciously suited to sitting in a design meeting with someone who gaslights you and seeks to undermine you at every turn, or to quietly attend class with someone who beats you. It’s not what it evolved for, but our biology has a nervous system behavior that happens when you must politely repeatedly comply with the social rules of interaction with someone who is actively harming you. We’ve all heard of the fight or flight nervous system activation — it’s what tells you “SHIT IS GOING DOWN. DO SOMETHING”. Fight or flight is a call to action; a gas pedal.
But in a workplace, you can’t use that gas pedal the way nature intended. You can’t upend the chairs of a meeting and barricade yourself with furniture, safe from your attacker. You certainly can’t leap over the table and choke them until the threat subsides.
So you slam on the brakes, despite what your body is telling you. What happens after that, is one of the lesser-known “F”s.
Freeze
If you’ve ever held the gas and the brake down at the same time on a car, you know what happens: smoke, lots of it. Do it long enough, and you get fire. First the parts start failing, and the vehicle itself fails.
Note: Before we go into the chart, it’s important to note that polyvagal theory is a simplification of the numerous complex physiological processes; it’s less a strict analysis of the operation of the body, and more a lens through which we can generalize and talk about the things we experience.
When you’re in a safe and healthy state, the parasympathetic nervous system is in charge, maximizing all the things you need to be a healthy, effective, social creature. When you’re not safe, the sympathetic nervous system takes over, arming you to deal with the threat.
But when the sympathetic nervous system fails to deal with that threat, things start to go wrong. When in sympathetic activation, the adrenal glands produce cortisol, which is basically your body’s alarm system. It sets you up to react to threats by increasing blood pressure, heart rate, blood sugar, clotting ability, as well as a bunch of other things. That’s great for outrunning a predator, or hunting your prey, but what happens if you don’t do either of those things? And if you end up just staying in that state of activation for extended periods of time?
The effects of long-term elevated cortisol levels are well-documented and too complex to go into, but let me know if this sounds familiar:
You’re tired, no matter how much sleep you get. Your pain tolerance goes up. You put on weight more easily. Unnecessary movement, like exercise, feels bad. You become less social. Your memory suffers. You have trouble expressing emotion. Your libido tanks. You get sick more easily. Almost like your body is trying to give you the best chance to survive something you can’t escape from.
You are in freeze.
Anyone who has worked in game development knows this state, regardless of the name they use for it.
This Is Not Burnout Discourse
What I’m trying to get at here is that there are very specific things that happen to the body when you are trapped in a situation that’s hurting you. It is a physiological state, not just a mental one. Here’s a different interpretation of the same chart.
In a healthy, normal state, you’re frequently flitting in and out of mild levels of sympathetic nervous system activation. When it’s short periods of exercise, intense gaming, or things that challenge you, the pattern of entering and exiting fight-or-flight is completely sustainable.
But when you’re constantly in fight or flight, your system is flooded with cortisol, and that has flow-on effects. And if you stay there long enough, you freeze completely.
In order to enter the Freeze state, you need to:
Encounter a threat your body tells you to kill or run from, and then;
Not kill it or run from it, and;
This state needs to either not be resolved, or continually re-entered.
In other words — you must be trapped, and unable to do anything about it.
In previous, non-games-industry jobs, I was almost killed twice, and was nearly (or actually) seriously injured plenty more — yet I suffered zero psychological damage from those experiences. Why? Because the sympathetic nervous system did what it was supposed to do, and got me out.
My body prepared itself to take action, I took action, and the problem was solved. My sympathetic nervous system screamed “DO SOMETHING”, and I did something. Pain is most likely to become trauma when we do not or cannot heed that request. And the reason that we sometimes don’t, is that we’re trapped in social situations where social order tells us we cannot simply sprint into the woods with no intention of returning, or hit someone with a piece of furniture.
To be clear — I am not advocating for fleeing into the forest or hurling the nearest ergonomic chair at your crunch-loving boss. But with the concept of how we end up in freeze in mind, what else can you learn from the chart?
Deactivation
The body is constantly attempting to normalize itself, and return to a state of equilibrium. It continuously breaks down things it doesn’t need, which is why you don’t stay drunk forever after you drink alcohol. But when the effects of activation outpace the normalization process, things get bad.
Anyone who’s designed a combat system can probably see where this is going. Your body primed itself for a hundred fights that never came, and loaded a magazine full of cortisol bullets. You’re continuously adding stacks of a berserker buff, then not consuming the flow-on status effects. And you’re adding stacks faster than they can time out. You’re being activated at a rate greater than your body can fix what being activated does to it.
When you entered freeze instead of fighting-or-flighting, the chemicals your brain dumped and the effects they had on your body didn’t just dissipate or disappear. And in order to return to normal, you’re going to have to stop adding stacks, and then expend, purge, or heal from the flow-on status effects – one way or another.
In short - the constant sympathetic activation is adding cortisol faster than your body can remove it, and so the effects accumulate, wreaking havoc.
To be totally transparent - even this is an oversimplification of a set of very complex processes. But using it as a lens through which to view and understand what happens to us without a degree in neuroscience, it can still help us wrap our heads around the problem.
There is no singular, universal, guaranteed way to return to normal after hitting that freeze point, but because this has physiological causes, there are things that are very likely to help in most cases, even if the exact path looks different for each of us. For some people, it might be trauma therapy. For others, it might be quitting a job, or moving, or both. For the rest, it might be breaking themselves open with a particularly emotional piece of music, then letting themselves feel and express all of the emotions and reactions they suppressed in the lead-up to the freeze state. You may need to punch, kick, and curse to the high heavens, screaming every turgid word of hate you held in when your needs, your hopes, and your safety were shattered. I recommend a punching bag, a pillow, or a bed, in that order. But be warned - it may not be enough to merely carry out these actions, especially if you’re still dissociated or disconnected - you may need to re-enter the state where your body screams “fight”, and burn the fuel it filled you with. This was my experience. It may not be yours. And exercise, however bad it feels to start, helps in almost all paths.
When It All Goes Horribly Wrong
Trauma complicates matters. It can leave you in a state of perpetual fight or flight, or keep you braced to enter it at the slightest trigger. For some, the exhaustion of the continuous fight or flight response can also leave you in a perpetual freeze. It can even end in C-PTSD.
The real dark industry secret of this article is that many of us just end up living in these states, not knowing what they are, and not understanding why two weeks of vacation doesn’t help. Even when we quit our jobs and take extended breaks to decompress, we often don’t get better, because the underlying issue hasn’t been addressed. The pain is quite literally stored in our bodies chemically, stuck operating in a state where we’re one step from breakdown, and we live trapped in a cycle where we can never get back to that safe and healthy state.
My articles usually include very little advice, and instead seek primarily to educate, but after diving into our collective pain, I can’t not talk about recovery.
First off: It is possible to heal. It won’t just magically happen though — there is no set amount of PTO or recovery time between jobs that will guarantee healing. Rest alone is usually insufficient. But there’s almost certainly a minimum amount of rest time each person will require to heal. That timeframe will be different for everyone. But you have to do the work. Get help. Be active in your own recovery. Your friends are good support. A trauma therapist is better. One that knows the industry? Better again — it’ll save you explaining things like “crunch” and “patch days”. If you can’t find one, this thread may help.
You may need to redefine your relationship with work. You will need to learn that the people who hurt you are not the only kind of people out there, and that sometimes, mild annoyance from a boss or coworker is just that — and it’s not a sign that you’re about to be blamed for something that’s not your fault, or held accountable while the people who created the situation are not.
The goals of all these is to:
Stop adding berserker stacks (stop creating unnecessary cortisol).
Remove the stacks you currently have (normalize excess cortisol).
Heal the damage caused by them (fix the flow-on effects of freeze).
Retrain yourself so that the pain you carry is not perpetually adding more stacks.
How To Prevent It
If you’re an executive reading this, you need to understand that this is probably happening to someone who works for you right now. Your corporate values won’t protect them from it. “Empowering” language and concepts can easily be weaponized against vulnerable employees. Convincing yourself that your space is “safe” will prevent you from seeing when it’s not. Ideas don’t protect anyone — only action can do that.
For workers:
Industry-specialized therapists can help you learn better communication, better conflict resolution, and better ways to handle when things go wrong. There are actions you can take to give yourself the best possible shot at having a good work environment. But ultimately, you can only ever be responsible for your own behavior, and there’s a limit to how much an individual contributor can affect in a workplace.
For managers, executives, founders, and owners:
You have to mitigate toxicity with robust process, with anonymous reporting and feedback, with project management designed to combat crunch, and with product management designed to prevent thrash. You have to design your work methodology intentionally to protect the people who work for you. There is no way around this. And since I know that some people will be reading this saying “But surely not HERE? We’re a family!”, let me disburse you of the notion that work “as a family” is a necessarily good thing. Those implied social and emotional obligations can further freeze people who need to fight or flee.
So let me give you all some clear, direct questions you can ask yourself about the place you work:
Is it possible for employees to raise issues they have, without any risk to themselves?
How does the company react when workers raise issues? What management practices do your managers adhere to that ensure staff are heard?
How do the company’s performance improvement or disciplinary processes ensure that managers are not targeting vulnerable staff or people who raise complaints?
What training is provided to managers? What expectations does the company have of its managers, and how do you measure their efficacy?
Do you give teams the agency they need (agency is action, freeze occurs on inaction) to self-determine the people, practices, and tools that best suit their work?
Is there any way that your corporate values could be misused? Could they be abused the way that Riot’s “default to trust” was used to hand-wave away sexual harassment? As in, “I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way”?
How often does unplanned work occur? How do your processes and prioritization handle that “found” work? Do you bake additional time into your project planning to allow for things not going to plan?
How often do employees work outside of standard business hours? How do you track it? How do your processes ensure that the majority of work does not escape standard business hours?
How clear are the objectives for each of your teams? Can people trust that the targets and goals that are set for them will still be true in two months? If not, what effect do you think this has on their morale and general trust in the company?
How do you instill a sense of psychological safety in your employees? (If the answer to this question is not something organizational, you don’t.)
Do you use automation and workflow management in your task management software (e.g. JIRA)? How do these systems empower the teams that use them?
Are the communication paths between your various teams well-defined?
Does your accountability structure align with those communication paths?
How do you ensure that promotion opportunities are visible and available to anyone who might be interested in them? How do you ensure that they are given fair consideration, accounting for bias?
Is your organizational structure well-defined? For each of the areas of your product, who is responsible? Who is accountable? Who is consulted? Who is informed?
Are employees consulted about changes that affect them, or merely informed?
What structures and processes are in place to ensure that people are not misusing power in your organization?
How many people who leave your company leave the industry forever?
How many people who leave your company leave without a new job to go to?
Be honest with yourself when you answer these questions. The answers may be unpleasant, but that can be good. You do not solve problems by looking away from them. And even if you don’t give a shit about the people who work for you, there is no greater hit to the bottom line and to your deliverables and schedule than burnt out, traumatized staff that don’t trust management and will eventually quit (or be fired for voicing their concerns).
Mental health stipends and work-subsidized therapy will not help. Looking after staff is a company-wide directed effort that always flows downhill from the top. Whatever behavior is displayed in the most influential positions will be mirrored down throughout your management structure. The behavior we accept is the behavior we condone. It is up to the managers and the executives to maintain a healthy environment.
And if you’re a worker reading this, you have a list of questions you can take to your management to ask. And if they don’t have good answers, every company I know has bone-dry hiring pipelines, and the best way to get a pay raise is to switch jobs! Get the fuck out! No game or job is worth your health, either mental or physical.
I leave you with two images.
Until next time.
for those we have lost
for those we can yet save