Almost every gamer hopes to one day “live the dream”: to work on video games. One young couple thought they had managed to achieve this dream, when she got freelance work within the industry and he managed to land a job at Electronic Arts. But it was the drastic workload that EA put him through that frustrated them both and inspired her to come forward with the couple’s experiences, written under the nom de net EA_Spouse. She and I have had a few discussions over the past couple weeks, and here’s excerpts of those conversations. Note that these conversations began before this article was written.
32_Footsteps: First off, can I get some background on you and your partner? I'm just interested in how much time you've been together, and your decade (your 20's, your 30's, etc.). Also, do you work full-time, part-time, or not at all?
EA_Spouse: We're in our twenties and have been together for about three years now; we're both heavily invested in the game industry. My work is full time insofar as what I do, but half of that is freelance - the other half is by contract. I am a writer and designer.
32_Footsteps: Also, to give the layperson a better understanding of what your significant other works under, can you give rough averages for schedule, salary, and benefits in the video game industry, or what your partner has previously worked under? (For example, 60 hours a week, 75K/year, full health with 4 weeks of vacation/comp time guaranteed.) And, as a comparison, what EA offers?
EA_Spouse: Being in our twenties, although we have been actively interested in games for many years, we have not been in the industry directly for that long. I have been employed in one capacity or another in games for about five years; my SO, about one and a half. My work prior to going full throttle into the industry a year ago was not full time. When I did go full time, my SO and I both entered the same company and took a salary under what our degrees merited to do so. There was crunch, but the attitude was totally different, this being a much smaller studio. The salary was nowhere near 75k, and neither is my SO's salary at EA. EA offers benefits functionally similar to what we had at the last company - that is to say, they provide medical and dental insurance (which we use), and the gym and fancy office (which we do not use, since EA leaves no time to do so). They promise bonuses in vague terminology, and what they deliver, according to those who have been around for the past couple of years, is similarly vague - we haven't passed the bonus point yet, so we'll have to see how that turns out, but our expectations are not high despite the calculated tremendous success of the project my SO is on. EA delivers what a smaller studio delivers through different means - fear of losing one's job that comes from draconian management instead of a high-pressure economy; crunch time that does not end not because the company can't afford to hire more talent, but because it chooses not to. There are stability benefits to EA if one is willing to be a cog and burn the candle from both ends, but I have yet to speak to a single person who didn't emerge from their first project at EA in the past four years without a serious case of cynicism and disillusionment (not to mention frustration and exhaustion). Again, this is merely my experience - it may be that the happy people simply aren't contacting me.
32_Footsteps: Also, to complete the background, what part of EA does your SO work at?
EA_Spouse: My SO is a software engineer in a specific capacity that I can't reveal without basically revealing his identity.
32_Footsteps: To begin in earnest, why have you decided to come forward? Is there a specific incident that led to this, or has this been building for some time? Does your partner know that you've decided to talk about what's going on?
EA_Spouse: There was no single specific incident so much as a stacked tier of increasingly maddening (pardon the pun, but no, he didn't work on Madden) ones. When EA made promise after promise and then failed them in a pattern that increasingly appeared to be intentional, I passed my tolerance for their behavior. Here's hoping it will have some effect. My partner has been with me through this every step of the way, though the motivation to write the article was entirely mine; he read it before it was posted and offered an initial critique, and I implemented all of his suggestions. He has also spoken with a few of the reporters himself, most notably Randall Stross from the New York Times, who turned out a fantastic article.
32_Footsteps: What led your SO to join the video game industry? How have those reasons been affected by their experience in EA?
EA_Spouse: We've been together since college, and our reasons for entering the industry were the same: we've loved games since we were children. They are a major part of our lives and have been for a long time. Something that grows with you and into you to such a degree can't be killed by one or even two or three bad experiences - and mostly we are chalking EA up as a bad experience. Their behavior is indeed representative of a malignancy endemic to the industry as a whole, but they are by far, from what I've gathered, the worst instigators of such widespread and prolonged abuse. We believe that EA can be fixed, and will be, or it will fall, though at the moment we don't plan on sticking around long enough to have first hand experience with any reparatory effort. The spirit to make games is still there, and was never injured, because to be honest what EA is doing ultimately has very little to do with making games. It's a human abuse, and could happen anywhere. Just because it's to a lesser degree the status quo in the industry doesn't mean that the art itself is destined to failure or misery. It will only be there if we choose to allow it to remain where it is.
32_Footsteps: What kind of work has EA demanded of your SO? Have they slept the night at the company during the project crunch? Has your SO brought work home and been expected to continue it outside of the office?
EA_Spouse: He hasn't slept through the night at the office, no, but many times I've driven to pick him up in the early hours of the morning (during the crunch I started driving him both ways out of concern he would get into an accident from fatigue). He hasn't brought work home from the office simply because there hasn't been time to do anything except snatch a few hours of sleep while he's been home.
32_Footsteps: Now, I'd like to ask some personal questions, if that's fine. How has your relationship with your partner been during this time? Does EA (or any company that you're familiar with) offer relationship counseling as a part of the benefit package? How have relationships with other family members been during this time?
EA_Spouse: By design or fate my SO and I have an extremely resilient relationship. When he's exhausted and I'm consumed with worry for his emotional and physical health, there were occasional moments of friction, but at no point did we ever lose sight of the origin of that friction, which was not ourselves. I'm not sure if EA offers relationship counseling specifically, but they do offer general anonymous depression counseling as part of their 'benefit' package. Our family has been extremely supportive, though quite angry on our behalf. We both have relatives in the software industry, and all of them have been appalled by EA's treatment of their employees.
32_Footsteps: Similarly, has your SO been experiencing any health problems from his work recently? Either symptoms or known maladies are fine.
EA_Spouse: When a human being is under this much stress, if they don't already have a stress disorder, they will develop one. In my SO's case, he already had one, and it did worsen significantly, to the point of seeing a specialist outside of his normal schedule for doing so. On top of this were the normal symptoms of prolonged exhaustion - headaches, high blood pressure, stomach malaise, and eye trouble. What is alarming right now is that he's had some time off for Thanksgiving, and rather than abating during that time, the symptoms of his stress disorder continued to worsen.
32_Footsteps: Have you tried networking with other spouses of video game industry professionals? Have you talked with other spouses of EA employees about the situation within the company? What avenues of recourse have you looked into?
EA_Spouse: I have been contacted by a number of spouses through email and through the LiveJournal. Through them I have heard of loose spouse social organizations, but none generally seem to last through a project. Organizing through spouses is a dicey thing, because none of us wish to endanger the jobs of our spouses (that's their job, if they want to), and so are specific about anonymity. As far as recourse goes, we are still exploring our options. On an immediate level, a 'response' that is more proactive and less in pursuit of recourse, we are looking into forming a non-company-affiliated volunteer organization specifically to publish information on quality of life in the game industry, in the hopes of promoting compassionate (and commercially effective) companies and make them more visible to industry talent.
32_Footsteps: What reaction, through message boards and email, have you received so far? Has it been all positive? Have you received any threats, either by EA or subsidiaries?
EA_Spouse: We have heard not a peep from the official voice of EA. They appear to be pretending that we do not exist; the closest that EA has gotten to addressing us was stating that they "do not respond to rumors". Response through email has been 100% positive; comments on the message board not so much, perhaps 95%, and all criticism has been anonymous (though so has much of the support, to be fair).
32_Footsteps: What do you want EA to do, within fair expectations, in response to the problems you and your SO have? Ultimately, what do you hope will happen as a result of coming forward?
EA_Spouse: To be honest, I don't have many expectations of EA itself. EA is a corporation and has made its stance quite clear - they have a bottom line, and that bottom line is lower than the bar for humane worker conditions. What I expect and hope is that the industry itself will take a stand and declare with one voice that this treatment is not acceptable. I do not know whether that will happen. Trying to get unity out of game developers is like herding cats - and I say that with tired affection. What I hoped from the beginning has always happened - we've started to finally talk about this rather than exchange strained war stories around the virtual water cooler. I am working on the formation of a volunteer organization - website-based - that will review game companies and give workers the opportunity to anonymously (but with verifiable authority) review companies for a range of aspects of work ethic. Our goal is in line with the goal of the original blog entry - to propagate information and jump-start dialog. As developers, we deserve better than this, and we can get it if we want it. My idealistic hope is that if top talent (and middle talent and potential talent) in the industry is aware of their options and aware of what companies genuinely act on behalf of the health and well-being of their employees, a natural shift in the industry will occur and places like EA will no longer be able to hold on to talent sufficient to sustain commercial success at the level they desire. Here's hoping for the future - it really is ours for the taking and ours for the doing.
