It’s Crunch Time: Burnout, Job Demands and Job Resources in Game Developers

Abstract

AbstractAlthough game development is a recent profession, many of its issues have been associated with the straining working conditions experienced by workers to keep themselves in the industry. This requires balancing job demands and job resources, and, in cases of extreme and prevalent job demands, it can elicit burnout as an occupational phenomenon. This study aims to identify burnout and job demand-resources levels among game developers, their relationship, and variation according to social individual/labour characteristics. An online questionnaire collected data from 193 game developers. Regarding burnout, results showed moderate levels of exhaustion and disengagement, while job demands revealed high levels of mental and concentration demands, moderate levels of time, emotional, material, and physical demands. For job resources, we found high levels of autonomy and moderate values of personal development, quality of personal relations, ethical, and social utility of work. Exhaustion is positively correlated with working hours per week and job demands, and negatively with job resources. The same happens with disengagement, except for mental and concentration demands. Time demands explained 27% of exhaustion, and personal development explained 14% of exhaustion and 51% of disengagement. Therefore, game developers face very demanding work conditions, alerting to the need to develop strategies for burnout prevention, and for the adequate manage of job demands using job resources, thus, promoting happier and healthier workplaces.KeywordsBurnoutJob demand-resourcesGame developers