Amber La Macchia was crisis prepared before she entered the video game industry – that’s what she heard over and over while studying game design in college for just 5 years before.
The practice of crunch – a word that people in the game industry use to describe brutal overtime – has been well documented across many video game studios. You will be hard pressed to find a developer who hasn’t encountered it at least once. The industry has begun to count the collapse, to better understand how it affects both workers and video games; studios like Rockstar game, Activision Blizzard, CD Projekt Red, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga developer Game TT, Epic game, and many others have been criticized for this practice. But has the industry changed in response to public scrutiny? It started to happen, when workers protested the practice, refusing to put their health and safety in jeopardy at work.
La Macchia, a senior QA tester at Activision, is one of those workers. This week, she’s at the Justice Department’s Workers Voices Summit in Washington, DC, where she serves as a representative for the video game industry and, in particular, for the efforts Media Workers of America to make the industry more equal for workers.
La Macchia is speaking to government officials during the three-day conference, educating them about the health and safety risks associated with the fallout.
“The video game industry is brand new, at least compared to many other industries in the United States,” La Macchia told Polygon. “OSHA doesn’t come around much when it comes to health and safety [in the video game industry]. One of the key things that I would like to see done is proper investigation, training regarding health and safety concerns, and regulations. “
Instead of applying store-by-store, industry regulation can create sweeping changes to the way companies operate.
Workers from a wide range of industries were present at the conference, and La Macchia said their concerns were often very similar across industries – just different names for similar problems. The way workers are affected by harsh working conditions is similar: There is a real risk to physical and mental health associated with these problems, and La Macchia emphasizes the same for officials.
Of course, this isn’t the industry’s first brush with OSHA. In 2016, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) asked California regulators to investigate the industry’s treatment of voice actors, alleging that Unsafe work damages actor’s vocal cords. Soon, crunch could be investigated in a similar way.
La Macchia says: “There is a perception that bending is necessary and inevitable, or that complaining about rudeness is odd in the face of other injustices — like it’s not an issue. significant – but rudeness destroys lives. “This is something we’re not dealing with as a very nascent industry, and because it’s a nascent industry, things aren’t tied up.”
“We barely set standards,” she continued. Obviously they have flaws, and it needs to be fixed. This is one of them. Crunch not only affects workers’ livelihoods, but also the quality of products and a company’s culture. I don’t see why anyone would object to trying to get rid of the creaking, no matter where they sit. “
