Videogame developers among “extreme” workers: Are death marches over?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: The videogame industry is a work environment that is emblematic of O’Carroll’s (2015) encompassing model of a 24/7/365 working time model of flexibility. We use O’Carroll’s model to challenge two myths about videogame developers (VGDs): the long hours of work are in fact unpredictable hours, and flextime HR programs do not allow for real control over working hours.\nDesign/methodology/approach: We use a mixed methods approach (international online survey and 100 Canadian interviews) to analyse the case of VGDs - a different, but similar type of worker to the IT workers analysed by O’Carroll.\nFindings: We can generalize O’Carroll’s model based on the IT case to the VGD case. Based on these two cases, we propose that the rise of project-based work environments is a major explanatory factor of this raising trend in the 24/7/365 model of flexibility.\nResearch limitations/implications: More research examining project based regimes in other sectors and settings is required to generalize further.\nOriginality/value: Though this model can appear to fit the reality of knowledge work in general, it more accurately describes project-based work in creative environments, which is nearly always knowledge work, but the reverse cannot be inferred.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it