For developers, it's not all fun and games

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"They've basically created an atmosphere of fear," said the former employee, who resigned about a month ago because he didn't think he could balance family and work pressures. "Pretty much everyone at EA is scared for their jobs."

An industrywide issue
The IGDA's Della Rocca said work schedules that grind down workers don't make sense. "Happy workers are more productive," he said. "Happy workers are more creative." He said the industry fails to devote enough attention at the beginning of game projects to create prototypes, which can determine what is really fun about a game. Without such initial research, last-minute interventions can be needed that increase the burden on workers, he said.

Games also are becoming more complex, Della Rocca said. A decade ago, five people working for six months to a year with a $100,000 budget could create a game. Now a team might be composed of 200 people working for more than a year on a $25 million budget. But management training to handle these more complicated projects is lacking in the industry, Della Rocca said.

He said EA and other industry players are setting themselves up for potential challenges related to stress-induced health problems and unpaid overtime.

A tangle of rules governs what types of employees are exempt from overtime pay and how it is calculated. In California, an employer must pay premium overtime rates to an employee working more than eight hours in a day or 40 hours in a week--unless he or she qualifies as exempt from overtime pay. Certain administrative, executive and professional employees are exempt. Salaried workers are not necessarily exempt.

The lawsuit against EA, filed in July, claims that EA improperly classified image production employees as exempt from California overtime laws. Those employees, defined to include animators, modelers, texture artists, and lighters, are "assigned to duties inconsistent with exempt status," the suit claims. Among other things, the suit asserts that image production employees "do not customarily and regularly exercise discretion and independent judgment," part of the state's test for determining a "professional" exemption.

EA image production employees "regularly work more than eight hours a day and 40 hours in a workweek," the suit alleges. "They work on weekends and occasionally on national holidays, and are not paid any overtime compensation for such work."

In the wake of the initial blog posting last week, there's been chatter about the possibility of unionizing the game industry.

The IGDA has also joined the debate. On Tuesday, its board of directors published an "open letter" that, among other things, called on game developers to take some responsibility for bad working conditions. "Developers are sometimes just as much to blame for submitting themselves to extreme working conditions, adopting a macho bravado in hopes of 'proving' themselves worthy for the industry," the letter said. "Our own attitudes towards work/life balance and production practices need to change just as much as the attitudes of the 'suits.'"

Straitiff said he's in the midst of balancing his home life and career. He is "getting over the burn-out" of long hours at EA and is enjoying playing with his 20-month-old daughter.

He also muses about returning to a field he's loved since he was a kid. Armed with a Commodore home computer, he wrote his own games. He later took a pay cut to come to EA's Maxis division because he was drawn to the "SimCity" game. But EA was snuffing out his passion with the hours it demanded, he said.

"You shouldn't be able to ask a person to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week for months on end," he said. "You really fry a person working like that."