Cultivating Self-Care in a Time of Crunch
At the beginning of this process, I knew that I wanted to do the interdisciplinary portion of the project with the game studio. Not only because, Champlain is one of the only colleges in the country where you can get a degree in making video games. When I spoke to my friends in the game studio, they talked about their environment at Champlain but also about the wider industry as a whole. As a psychology major, I was particularly interested in the descriptions of burnout, crunch culture, and turnover rates. I knew that my friends were passionate about their major because for some, that’s specifically why they came to Champlain, but it seemed to be a lot more intense than many of them were expecting. My friends described multiple all night sessions in the labs, not enough time to shower, and an overwhelming amount of stress. I’ve heard Champlain described as a bootcamp, rather than trying to help the students fight back against crunch culture, we prepare them for it.
This was the basis for my project, the students know about self-care and what they need to do but, prioritization is what was lacking. I could’ve focused on a cautionary lens, talking to students about the dangers of lacking basic self-care. However, that could have caused more defensiveness as many of the students have already been lectured about taking care of themselves. I decided to take a relaxed and fun approach, I wanted them to feel like they had control of what we talked about. From what I had heard, not a lot of the students get the opportunity to actually let loose and have fun with each other, so that’s the environment I decided to cultivate. I thought students would be open to the information if their guards were down, rather than me lecturing them about how much fun taking care of themselves could be, I wanted them to experience it. Thus, I designed three different workshops focusing on aspects of basic self-care that the students got to choose from. One of the presentations was about self confidence, another was about sleep, and the other was on time-management. It was an unintentional bonus that I got to see which aspects of self-care students wanted to pick and which ones were not chosen.
In each of the presentations, I designed and implemented different activities that were focusing on getting the students to experience and reflect on different aspects of self-care. With advice from some of the game professors, I also tailored the activities to fit what game students were already participating in. In the self-confidence workshop for example, I had students create a script for a short commercial about themselves as though they were pitching a game to their investors. Afterward, we would talk about the experience and reflect on how they made us feel and although there was some expected resistance, students seemed to enjoy themselves while participating in the activities. The goal from the activities was to start planting a seed in their heads, maybe self-care didn’t have to be complicated or time consuming. However, I also stressed the importance of practice, nothing is going to get done unless you start small and practice those little acts of kindness towards yourself. One example of this was from the time management workshop, where I talked about holding yourself accountable for the goals that you set for yourself. When you say that you’ll only work one more hour, and you stop after an hour, that’s practice in setting and following through with your boundaries. In the game industry, when your boss asks you to stay overtime, the more practice you have in setting up boundaries for you, the more likely you’ll be able to stand up for yourself in those situations. Another goal I set for this project was to create a sense of unity and connection. I wanted the students to be able to talk with one another because knowing that you’re not suffering alone can make you feel just a little bit better about moving forward. So in each of the presentations, there was a scavenger hunt that would get the students moving around campus and working together to find clues. Many of the participation activities involved group work and group connection. The reason for this was also because when presenting my project I noticed that a lot of the students would treat their friends better than they would treat themselves in many of the scenarios we created. I stressed that self-care is an act of having personal self-regard to be able to recognize when something is weighing you down. The first step I focused on was having them think about their schedules, activities, and environments through the eyes of a friend. If a friend was going through what they were going through what would they tell them? Much of my project involved having the students silently reflect on their behaviors and activities so that hopefully in the future they will pause and take a moment to think about what they are going to do.
Overall, this project was meant to cultivate a meaningful, relaxed environment in which students could reflect and participate in activities that asked them to question the nature of crunch culture. To take a moment to remind themselves that they are people first and workers second, because from what I’d seen it seems like they were losing sight of that. If they can’t think of themselves as an individual person then pushing them to talk to one another could keep them holding each other accountable for what they want to do. Hopefully, the impact will hold well into when they get out into the real world as we are on the precipice of either breaking crunch culture down or glorifying it further.
