For many of us, it’s easy to leave your work at the office once you’re done for the day. If you like what you do, you might still be thinking about it even when you’re not on the clock, but it’s easy to fill your mind with other things.
Unfortunately, not everyone has the luxury of leaving their work behind them when the day is done. For one “Mortal Kombat 11” developer, that manifested in sleepless nights, self-doubt and a diagnosis of PTSD.
Violent video games have a history of making people uncomfortable. Since the ’90s, politicians and angry parents have cited games as the cause of mass shootings and violence around the country, despite there being no evidence to show any correlation between the two. However, consumers aren’t the only ones being made uncomfortable. Developers of violent video games have come forward throughout the years and talked about how their work has impacted their lives.
In 2003, Rockstar North released their game “Manhunt” which was about a criminal on death row who is given the option to star in a snuff film for his freedom. The game was surrounded by controversy because of the glorified realistic graphic violence it portrayed. Former Rockstar employee Jeff Williams said in a 2007 blog post that “there was almost a mutiny at the company over that game.”
Rockstar’s other games such as “Grand Theft Auto” and “Red Dead Redemption” have also had their own controversies over graphic content. However, the developers didn’t see them in the same light because “you never had to hurt anybody that wasn’t a ‘bad guy.’”
“‘Manhunt’ just made us all feel icky. It was all about the violence, and it was realistic violence. We all knew there was no way we could explain away that game. There was no way to rationalize it. We were crossing a line,” Williams’ post said.
As games have become more photorealistic, the violence has gotten more realistic too. This pushes developers to create moments in their games that make the hair stand up on the back of the player’s neck. The moments of intense violence in a video game are usually quick, often only lasting a few seconds before the player moves on to experience the next section, but for the people making the games, those quick moments take days to create and even longer to research.
In an interview with Kotaku, an anonymous cinematics developer for “Mortal Kombat 11” described what they would see on their coworkers’ computers during an average day.
“You’d walk around the office and one guy would be watching hangings on YouTube, another guy would be looking at pictures of murder victims, someone else would be watching a video of a cow being slaughtered,” said the developer.
Seeing that kind of harrowing content repeatedly every day at work caused the anonymous developer to have “extremely graphic dreams, very violent,” which lead them to avoid sleeping altogether.
“The scary part was always the point at which new people on the project got used to (seeing graphic material). And I definitely hit that point.”
The developer decided to see a therapist and was diagnosed with PTSD. The interesting thing is that they aren’t the only person who’s received similar diagnoses when having to view graphic content for their job.
Social media websites hire content moderators whose main job is to look at pictures and videos that users post. Then they decide whether or not they violate their website’s code of conduct. This means that they spend their workdays watching suicides, murders and rapes and working to take them down.
In 2017, two content moderators at Microsoft sued the company claiming, “negligent infliction of emotional distress,” as they were forced to view graphic content including child pornography, bestiality and murders to name a few. Both men claimed to be experiencing the symptoms of PTSD according to the suit as well as being triggered by “adults who look like ‘potential abusers’ and ‘fear for the safety of children (they) meet.’”
Microsoft claimed to have given the two men and everyone else in their content moderating department resources in the form of a counselor and a “wellness program,” but “failed to help the workers understand the ‘vicarious trauma’ and PTSD they were suffering.”
Later in 2017, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the addition of 3,000 new moderator jobs in response to the pressure Facebook had been receiving from its abundance of unfiltered violent content such as a live-stream that saw a man murder his 11-month-old daughter.
Similar to Microsoft, Facebook wants to keep its content moderating staff emotionally and mentally healthy. The Guardian reports that “a Facebook spokeswoman said that the company recognizes that the work can often be difficult and that every person is offered psychological support and wellness resources. The company said it also has a program in place designed to support people in these roles, which is evaluated annually.”
This idea that Facebook wants to take good care of its content moderators comes from a place of well-wishing, but the reality of the situation is a little grimmer. Facebook doesn’t want to deal with their content moderators directly or to have to pay a high price for them. While some moderators are full-time employees, the vast majority of them are hired as contractors in order to keep costs down for the company. The average Facebook employee makes roughly $240,000 annually, which contrasts their content moderators’ annual salary of $28,800.
This pay difference is just one of the many discrepancies between Facebook employees and employees for Cognizant, the company Facebook contracts content moderators from. According to The Verge, “employees can be fired after making just a handful of errors a week.” Additionally, “employees are developing PTSD-like symptoms after they leave the company but are no longer eligible for any support from Facebook or Cognizant.”
One anonymous Cognizant employee would bring a concealed gun to work because he feared for his own safety since “fired employees regularly threatened to return to work and harm their old colleagues.” He told The Verge, “part of the reason I left was how unsafe I felt in my own home and my own skin.”
It’s clear that companies are starting to recognize the importance of their employees’ mental health, but there’s still a long way to go. Most people who speak out when their jobs are taking advantage of them speak out anonymously for fear of damaging their reputation in an industry that thrives off of closed lips. Their anonymity keeps them protected from losing their job but can’t protect them from what their job entails.
