What's Stressful About Video Game Designing

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The hidden emotional toll that comes with a career in video games

An Australian game maker opens up about the stress of having to deal with abuse and threats on a daily basis

Jan 19, 2018 • January 19, 2018 • 4 minute read • Join the conversation

Morgan Jaffit's latest game, Hand of Fate 2 was designed by his company, Defiant Development. Photo by Defiant Development

Few jobs are without stress, but many people who make video games have to deal with a type of emotional strain that most office workers likely aren't familiar with: Daily abuse and threats from the people who consume the wares they create.

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A recent post on Medium by independent Australian game maker Morgan Jaffit titled "The topic every game dev is talking about behind closed doors" went viral within the global game making community. It describes the sort of cruelty he and people he knows within the game industry suffer on a regular basis through social media, email, forums, and other modern forms of communication.

Scattered through his article is a sampling of public Twitter messages received by game developers that illustrate the kind of abuse to which he refers. It ranges from vulgar insults to suggestions that they "die screaming" or "hang themselves," typically for little more than having inserted a feature within their game that someone found disagreeable.

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Jaffit's greatest insight comes when he describes the mindset of players who post abusive feedback. Based on his experience, many players would agree with this statement: "There are times when it's reasonable to send personal abuse to a developer." He goes on to say a smaller group of players – "but still a real number" – would support the idea that "there are times when it's reasonable to threaten a developer's life." And he says that there's also a number of players – "enough to do damage" – that believe "there's times when you should dox a creator, and try and find their family."

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Why do these players believe this behaviour is acceptable? Perhaps because they're angry about the model a developer chose to use to monetize their work. Or maybe the way they balanced play mechanics. Or it could simply be the style of art they chose to incorporate.

And, as many people who have commented on Jaffit's article point out, the abuse often gets even worse for women in the industry, with threats of rape and, in some cases, stalking. Indeed, there have been plenty of publicly reported instances of women within the industry receiving a heaping helping of abuse over and above the kind typically received by their male counterparts – including the very public hate suffered by Zoë Quinn , the woman at the centre of 2014's headline-generating "GamerGate" saga.

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This abuse, Jaffit says, is "the cost of doing business" in his industry. He leaves open the question of whether the reward is worth it.

And that is a very interesting conundrum. What is the reward? For most game makers it's the satisfaction of working in a creative field doing something they love. But for how long do you continue to love your job if you're regularly receiving venomous criticism from the people who consume your work? Will this cruel, vocal minority result in you second guessing your decisions in the workplace, and, if so, end up compromising your creativity – the very thing that makes your job enjoyable? Worse still, what happens when you start to feel truly afraid for the security of yourself and your family? At what point do you decide it would just be easier and safer for you to leverage your technical skillset into an anonymous IT job?

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The inevitable and regrettable outcome of all this abuse is that the game industry will lose some talented people. And potentially quite a few of them.

Some might say these people should simply buck up and deal with it. Working within a public or even semi-public sphere has always carried with it the risk of abuse and even threats. But the volume and nastiness of this sort of behaviour has grown exponentially with the advent of online communication. In the past, most potential abusers were thwarted by the simple fact that they would rarely be rewarded with any sort of reaction to a letter or phone call. It just wasn't worth the effort. But now they can post their vitriol within vast public forums with ease and feel like they've been heard – if not by their targets then at least by other people who might sympathize with or encourage them. It's never been easier or more satisfying to express your hate.

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It's tempting to suggest that victims simply switch off. But not only is that unfair, it could prove detrimental for their business. For better or worse, modern game design is largely fuelled by player input. Customers want to feel like their voices are being heard by game designers. Companies that opt out of digital communications with fans in an attempt to silence or at least more easily ignore the bad eggs risk alienating their entire player base.

What it all boils down to is that Jaffit is quite right; dealing with abuse and threats is indeed the cost of doing business as a video game maker. It is an ugly side of the industry that game design schools would do well to take into account, preparing future workers via support and curriculum.

It's hard to know, though, how you'll react until you experience it for yourself. And by that point you might feel like there's no turning back as you watch your once exciting career path merge with something considerably darker.

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