Activision QA worker warns OSHA about excessive overtime in games

Amber La Macchia was prepared to deal with crunch before she even joined the video game industry — it’s something she heard over and over again while studying game design in college just five years ago.

The practice of crunch — a word that games industry workers use to describe brutal overtime — is well-documented across multiple video game studios. You’d be hard-pressed to find a developer who hasn’t encountered it at least once. To better understand the impact of crunch on workers and gamers, developers have begun to confront it. Studios like Rockstar Games or Activision Blizzard are examples. Lego Star Wars The Skywalker Saga Epic Games and developer TT Games have all been criticized. The public’s scrutiny has prompted some industry changes. It’s starting to, as workers push back against the practice, refusing to put their health and safety at risk for work.

La Macchia (a senior QA tester at Activision) is one such worker. This week, she’s at the Department of Justice’s Workers’ Voice Summit in Washington, D.C., where she’s acting as a representative for the video game industry and, in particular, for Communication Workers of America’s efforts to make the industry more equitable for workers.

La Macchia addresses government officials at the conference over three days, informing them of health and safety hazards associated with crunch.

“The video game industry is brand new, at least compared to many of the other industries in the United States,” La Macchia told Polygon. “OSHA is not very present when it comes to health and safety [in the video game industry]. One of the big things that I would like to see done is proper investigation, training for health and safety concerns, and regulations.”

Industry regulation is a better option than tackling each shop one by one. It could bring about fundamental changes in how businesses operate.

Workers from a ton of industries are present at the conference, and La Macchia said that their concerns are often very similar across industries — just different names for similar issues. The way workers are impacted by harsh working conditions is similar, too: There’s real risk to both physical and mental health attached to these issues, and La Macchia is emphasizing that to officials, too.

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 damaged actors’ vocal cords. In a similar fashion, crunch might be examined soon.

“There’s this perception that crunch is necessary and unavoidable, or that complaining about crunch is odd in the face of other injustices — like it’s an insignificant issue — but crunch ruins lives,” La Macchia said. “This is something we don’t have to face as a very young industry, and because it’s a young industry, things are not locked in stone.”

She continued: “We barely have established standards. They have obvious flaws and they need to be fixed. Crunch is just one example. Crunch is not just a problem for workers’ livelihoods, it can also impact on the quality of products and the culture of a business. I don’t see why anyone would object to trying to eliminate crunch, no matter where they sit.”