As fun and exciting as working in the creative tech industry of video games can be, it isn’t always flowers and sunshine. An online survey conducted by the North American labour union International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees this year found that less than half of workers make it to their seventh year in the industry. Figures published by LinkedIn in 2017 showed that the games industry has an employee turnover rate higher than that of any other tech sector.
Mental health conditions and neurotypical disorders have also suffered pretty poor representation in video games themselves on the whole for many years, further reinforcing stereotypes and stigmas.
In 2019 a trio of UK games industry veterans launched the charity Safe in Our World (SIOW) with the mission of improving mental health and neurotypical recognition, awareness, and support both in the industry itself and among the gaming audience.
Safe in Our World
We talked to SIOW’s charity director Sarah Sorrell who is a guest of Melbourne International Games Week and will be giving a keynote at Games Connect Asia Pacific and appearing at Creative Exchange: Mind Games.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
SARAH: SIOW was launched on World Mental Health Day 2019, so it’s coming up on four years old. It was set up by a group of industry folk who are now our trustees. They’d got together quite a few years before that to chat about mental health and the journeys that they’d been on individually, and they thought, ‘I know, we’ll raise some money for a mental health charity!’
As they started talking, they all agreed that this industry needs a charity dedicated to looking after mental health, both within our industry and for gamers as well, because as we know, gamers often look to games for that solace and belonging when they’re struggling. The charity then raised funds for a few months and then I became the first member of the team in September 2020.
Now we’re fully operational. We’ve got three full-time members of the team and a part-time person as well, and we’re here to talk about everything mental health related. We’re here to give help and support to an industry that I believe is desperately in need of our help, and just to raise awareness, reduce stigma, and signpost people to go for help when they need it.
JAM: How has it been going? How has it been approaching studios, publishers and gamers?
SARAH: It’s actually been great. Obviously, the industry is massive and we’re still relatively small. We reach out to everybody. We say that we’re here for anybody who would like help on their journey. Some people that we talk to are right at the beginning and they don’t have a mental health charter, they don’t have a policy, they don’t have anything, and they want to get started.
So we help them with toolkits and resources. Other people are much further along, but they want to keep the conversation going and they want to do more. So we’ve got people involved with us at various ends of the scale. As a whole, the industry has been really welcoming for us and has said, ‘yeah, we need some help here. Thank you.’
JAM: One of the more infamously common problems in games is ‘crunch’ culture. Of course the pressure of ‘we must meet deadlines at all costs’ exists in many industries, but it’s always seemed particularly egregious and much too commonly accepted in games.
SARAH: Crunch has been around for a long while. I don’t think it’s going away completely any time soon, but more people are waking up now to the cost of it. You burn out your employees and you’re going to lose them. It’s not worth it. All you’re doing is killing the teams that work for you. If you actually go back to square one and think about it, it’s all about project planning, but it’s also just about taking it seriously.
I do know of studios now who actively put on their website ‘we don’t crunch’ as a benefit for new people coming into the industry. We’ve just accepted it for way too long. I think there are people coming into the industry who are able to set boundaries better, who have seen some of these terrible stories online about toxic companies and what they’ve done to their teams, and they’re coming in saying ‘I’m not going to be part of that.’
JAM: SIOW has a big initiative called Level Up. Can you talk to me a little about it?
SARAH: Our Level Up mental health program does exactly what it says on the tin. This is us talking about mental health, which as we all know, can be a very invisible illness. People will come in to work and talk about how they twisted their ankle gardening on the weekend. They won’t come in and tell you they were up all Saturday night with crippling anxiety or debilitating depression.
It’s about normalizing that conversation, that’s the crux of what Level Up is about in practical terms. It’s about offering tool kits and support on how to get your journey started and what you need to do. You need to train up mental health ambassadors.
JAM: What’s your set-up to keep that conversation going?
SARAH: We have a different topic every month. We have podcasts, panels, talks, and personal stories on our website. When people hear those stories, they don’t feel so alone. Often the crisis is in loneliness, it’s when you feel like nobody else feels like that, so it’s just all about normalizing the conversation and having that top down approach within companies.
The top leaders need to understand how important it is to talk about your mental health and have employee assistance programs and resources.
JAM: I myself studied game design a few years ago and ADHD and other such similar neurodiversity diagnoses have spread widely throughout the scene over the past decade. If you think about it, it’s not really shocking that such a hyper-specific and creatively complex field as game design and game making might attract a high proportion of such people, and the only way I myself was able to get diagnosed and start treatment was because my peers started openly talking about it.
SARAH: Years ago these things weren’t talked about. We now talk about ADHD, autism… and through openly chatting, people think ‘that might be me’, so they look into it, they get a diagnosis, and then sometimes, when you’ve put a label on something, you can deal with it because it was an unknown before.
It’s these characteristics about yourself that maybe you don’t understand, but then when you put it all together and you have a diagnosis and maybe you need medication, maybe you don’t. Maybe you just need some adjustments or maybe you just have learned to understand yourself. It’s really quite healing just to know, ‘yeah, that’s what I’ve got.’
JAM: And if you can openly work with your employers and colleagues to understand what works best for you and them in relation to it, it tends to only benefit everyone.
SARAH: Yeah! It’s about empowering people. I often cite a certain statistic where only half of people in this study admitted a mental health or neurodiversity diagnosis to their employer. That’s half of the people that are going through their everyday life masking it. You can’t be your authentic self if you’re masking something like that.
JAM: You’re UK based obviously, but do you see the industry’s problems as being much the same the world over?
SARAH: SIOW is a global charity, which is a challenge because, well, it’s a big place. Many of the issues are global. In some countries their view on mental health can be very different, but we try not to get too deep into that. We’re here for people to come to us and say, ‘how can you help us do better?’ There was a statistic from a study of the UK industry since I started here, and that is that if you work within the games industry, 38 percent said they live with anxiety and depression, yet outside the game’s industry, it’s only 17 percent.
Now that is a UK statistic, but I’ve got a feeling if we did that study in other countries, we probably wouldn’t be too far out. It just goes to show to us that we need some extra support in this industry and that we haven’t always quite looked after our teams as well as we can.
JAM: SIOW advocates not just for better treatment of workers but also for better representation of mental health and neurodiversity in games themselves. Do you say things getting tangibly better in that regard and is it different dealing with indies over AAA?
SARAH: On the whole we tend to deal with more indie-scale developers. They’ll come to us saying ‘we’ve got this game. It portrays psychosis or whatever, can you help us make sure that it’s done in the most respectful way?’ We have a clinical board of people. One of our clinical board members is Paul Fletcher, who was the clinical lead on Hellblade.
We have worked with some of the bigger companies as well just to make sure their games are as inclusive as possible. The problem quite often is that developers come to us a little bit late. The game’s designed and now it’s going to be published and there’s going to be a lot of media and then they start panicking that, maybe some of the content may not land right, but that’s too late, we need to help right at the very beginning to build this into the game all the way through.
A lot of games do have some kind of mental health element within them, and getting it right is really important. I think in the past some big mistakes have been made with how they’ve dealt with those subjects, but I think going forward people are more wanting to make sure that it is done in a really Inclusive and authentic way. They deal with some really tricky subjects now much more sympathetically.
Those in Melbourne during Games Week can book a free ticket to see Sarah talk as part of the Creative Exchange event at the Melbourne Town Hall on October 5th at 11am, and members of the games industry attending the annual Games Connect Asia Pacific conference can catch Sarah as she delivers the Wednesday opening keynote.
We thank Sarah Sorrell for her time.
