Corporate Psychopathy
Relating career experiences to the dark side of corporate culture
I’ve been a video game developer for over twenty years now. In that time, I’ve met some incredibly talented people. I’ve also seen some of those incredibly talented people end up burned out and mentally destroyed. Those of us in the industry tend to point to things like crunch, along with a vast array of inherited cultural problems, when trying to explain some of our most serious cases of exploitation and abuse. Over the years, however, I’ve given a lot of thought to how so many of my industry’s problems are rooted in problems which are not at all industry-specific.
For most of my adult life, I’ve been observing corporations as they engage in genuinely destructive behavior and churn through humans like sacks of meat. It’s easy to spot abuses in the video game industry, and we have a tendency to laser-focus on those specific abuses rather than relating them to their less-specific root causes. This is understandable, as the industry does have plenty of its own challenges, between the ever-changing demands of technology and a passion-driven talent pool which lends itself quite well to many forms of exploitation. However, I’ve found that the roots of the abuse in the video game industry connect to deeper socioeconomic issues, which are gradually eroding quality of life for the vast majority of people. Back in 2010, these observations motivated me to spend quite a bit of time making a video game all about the grotesque nature of corporate culture, by extrapolating it into a world of dystopian violence.
My own experiences in the realm of corporate abuse have been rather varied, and I became quickly disillusioned with the video game industry after experiencing my first crunch at the tender age of 18. I’ve spent most of my career with my own ideas of what I’d like to be working on, and those ideas have almost never aligned with consumer demand, so I’ve generally just used industry work as a way of paying the bills while pursuing my passions on my own time. This doesn’t make me immune to all of the typical industry worker pitfalls, and I’m still often a victim of my own standards for quality when a project isn’t adequately funded or scheduled. However, this neutral poise has allowed me to maintain a healthy level of personal and emotional separation from the work, which has saved me from a lot of potential torment. Even still, in having to rely on industry work to support myself and my family, one experience in particular stands out as the one that finally exceeded my personal threshold.
To be suitably vague, some time ago, I was wronged by an organization and had to sign away a bunch of rights in return for some rather paltry compensation. I still regret doing so. While my wife reminds me that I was just putting the needs of others before myself in financially challenging circumstances, I feel like this is the common case in these “individual vs. organization” scenarios, so the fact that my hand was forced provides little comfort. After signing my rights away, thanks to a couple of individuals reaching out to me at some risk to themselves, I was informed of more ugly behavior within the organization, and discovered that I had been unfairly represented (to say the least) by individuals within the organization after the fact. I was powerless to do anything by this time, however, as I’d already put pen to paper. I also had to protect the people who took a risk in reaching out to me, which prevented me from engaging in any kind of direct confrontation.
One lesson there was “trust no one in business, whether or not they seem like friends”, and it certainly demonstrated that making every effort to be honest and transparent with company ownership is more likely to result in punishment than reward. In many cases, it seems that these people have forgotten how to speak the language of truth. The thing that really sticks with me, though, is how intrinsically my experience relates to broader corporate culture. I can probably thank this experience, in part, for forcing me to further contemplate how and why the system is the way it is, and for giving me greater motivation to actually bother writing articles like this one.
It’s easy to vilify the individuals involved here, or write them off as “toxic”, as they’re prone to doing to those employees who don’t adhere to their own corporate dogma. However, these individuals, while certainly engaging in scheming and manipulative behavior, are just working within socially and legally accepted constraints to produce the “best results” for themselves and, supposedly, their organization. Even when that means engaging in genuinely sociopathic behavior, that behavior is typically not seen as such, and rather is seen simply as a necessity in enacting a business decision. No matter the type of person you are when you start out in business, it’s incredibly easy to be swept up in this process.
The video game industry does get a little more problematic than some other industries at this point, because ego tends to occupy a bigger part of the picture when attribution is involved. Even when you’re a highly valued member of an organization, bruise the wrong ego, and your livelihood can be put at risk. In some cases, this even sparks conflict between owners, and one owner might end up happily throwing another under the bus to save face. In an ideal world, the size and configuration of an insecure business owner’s genitals should have nothing to do with an employee’s financial security, but in reality, the two are very tightly linked together. If you live in America, whether “my ego was hurt” is legitimate grounds for employee termination varies by state. In many states, unfortunately, that reason is just as good as any.
In the event that an owner is relatively broken as a human being, but still business-savvy enough to keep their company afloat, the only thing that might keep would-be employees out of the fly trap is the nebulous notion of reputation. Unfortunately, reputation is completely unreliable. Former employees can be resentful for the wrong reasons, which taints the well to begin with, and allows abusive owners to dismiss small numbers of complaints with relative ease. Additionally, active employees may be afraid of speaking out or may be unaware of the abuses that have taken place. Combined with the fact that it’s almost trivial for a corporation to legally silence an individual, reputation is all but useless in keeping people safe from abusive employers.
Dysfunctional business owner personalities run incredibly rampant in the video game industry, and while saying so isn’t going to win me too many friends in high places, it does warrant saying. However, because this is also a factor in other industries to varying degrees, I don’t think it’s worth doing more of a deep dive into how and why it presents slightly more of a problem in the video game industry. The real purpose it serves here is to highlight the hypocrisy of this corporate duality. Supposedly, we’re making cold and calculated business decisions in dealing with our workforce. At the same time, however, a bruised ego is greater cause to destroy an employee’s livelihood. We don’t say so outright, of course, and we pretend that A and B are not connected, but they are very much connected. Likewise, an employee’s challenging personal/financial/medical/etc. circumstances aren’t necessarily cause for keeping that employee safe from the next round of layoffs. We can’t make such personal considerations. We must put the business first, for the sake of all employees.
We like to say that none of it’s personal, but in fact, it’s all personal. Making the choice to cut an individual off from their means of survival is personal, no matter how the individual making that choice might wish to detach from it. Our global society is now dominated by capitalism, and many of us don’t have any kind of workable safety net to catch us when something goes wrong. Despite the fact that almost every human on the planet is reliant upon this system for their survival, we’ve completely removed human empathy from the equation.
Because we have accepted and fully normalized this complete lack of human empathy surrounding life-affecting choices, corporate culture has become a breeding ground for psychopathy. Even those who start out as well-intentioned, fully empathetic creatures are unlikely to get past a certain point on the corporate ladder without succumbing to some degree of sociopathy. Full-on psychopathy is rarely acknowledged or admitted as part of the culture, but it often manifests simply as the result of a well-practiced sociopath experiencing some form of petty emotion.
Psychopathic owners and managers don’t tend to influence smaller companies all that much. It isn’t beneficial to reveal their lack of empathy in smaller groups, for much of the same reason that psychopaths were more often punished in early society’s smaller tribes. However, once a company has swelled to 100+ employees, you’ll start to see psychopathy reflected very clearly in the company culture. People who aren’t psychopathic in nature will begin to feel defensive, fearful, and/or combative as a result of the social atmosphere and policies. People who are psychopathic will flourish.
I believe that this all circles back to the fact that psychopaths have been prone to flourishing in positions of power throughout history. This has shaped the world we live in today. This is why the corporate world is the way it is. It isn’t because it’s productive or beneficial to human beings to remove empathy from the equation, it’s because it’s been beneficial to each generation of psychopaths, and they’ve shaped culture and society to suit them. This really does go all the way back to the fact that psychopaths had the advantage in a day when it just took a rock to the back of someone’s head to claim power.
Whether we’re talking about a small business owner who’s putting some form of greed or pettiness above the health and well-being of an employee, or someone who’s working 40+ hour weeks for wages that still can’t put food on the table without the assistance of food stamps, we’re talking about the same thing. These are the results of a corporate culture which has been stripped of all humanity, and now reflects a way of life that no human was ever meant to live.
Many companies will claim that they are not part of this corporate culture, usually in the form of some incredibly inauthentic language from someone in HR or PR, depending on which side of the company you’re standing on. You might have noticed that these companies are starting to sound a lot like cults, with the language they use surrounding “company values” and the complete life package they’re selling to their prospective employees. You’ll hear plenty about a healthy work-life balance, the importance of diversity, and all kinds of other flowery language from any company that has to pay a reasonable wage to attract skilled workers. However, those companies are ultimately working with the same set of guiding principles as the companies that are happy to let their employees work full-time in return for wages that would see them starve without government assistance. The primary difference in approach stems from the company’s wealth and talent requirements.
In the end, none of this is the direct result of some vast psychopathic conspiracy. It’s the result of powerful, often psychopathic individuals shaping corporate policy to suit themselves. This was the inevitable result of allowing financial power to influence government policy, and it’s been happening (in slightly different ways) across the world in every country that’s part of the global supply chain. We’ve told the world that this is how business should operate, and we’ve handed these tainted policies over to a population of perfectly reasonable business owners. In return, many of those business owners have evolved into monsters to thrive under these policies and rise to the top in a world that seems to value financial success above all else. This means that we’re artificially breeding empathy out of human beings, starting from the top.
Why is an old video game programmer writing about all of this? Well, I’ve lived with it for long enough, with some uniquely challenging personal and financial circumstances to help broaden my perspective. Now I’ve got a daughter who’s going to have to live through the near-dystopian aftermath, if we can’t make a meaningful change over the next decade or so. I figured it was about time to do my part in trying to point out the disease that’s eroding our collective quality of life as we sit here.
Having established the core and scope of the problem, it’s difficult to imagine what any individual can do to fight against the tide. It seems to me that the best thing any of us can do is to try our best to not be part of the problem, as difficult as that may be.
Don’t buy into corporate culture. Don’t assume that intelligence automatically grants perspective. Don’t join the Cult of Optimism and assume that the rest of humanity is going to sort itself out just because you have a job that you love and humanity “generally seems to be making progress.” Don’t claim to be a libertarian, then support an agenda which gives corporations power over every facet of your life. For as long as someone is starving to death while someone else is eating two Whoppers because there was a 2-for-1 deal, don’t be complacent. Don’t believe that you’re struggling because a fellow human has taken resources that should have belonged to you; you’re struggling because the system wasn’t designed for you.
Do look underneath the superficial rationale for whatever the divisive policy of the day happens to be. Rather than squabbling over petty partisan issues, trace those issues back to their roots. Always look at who or what stands to benefit from a given policy at global scope. Always follow the money.
I see a lot of activism in the video game industry, oriented around these very specific, often purely social problems that many people perceive to be industry-specific. It seems like people very rarely relate those problems to these broader underlying causes, and the video game industry is not alone in falling prey to this worldview. Addressing symptoms is fine, but if you don’t focus on the underlying disease, you’re just going to keep running into new symptoms.
If we could collectively recognize the corrupt and anti-human core of corporate culture, perhaps we could finally begin to act against it. For that to happen, we need to recognize that most of our ailments, in all forms of capitalist industry, have a common cause. We need to recognize that we’re indirectly adopting a broken way of life through a broken set of policies, which fundamentally reflects core values that prioritize capital over human life.
I’m not convinced that it’s possible to remove corporate influence from socioeconomic policy at this point, but the first step to trying is confronting those who are “just doing their job” by taking money from corporate superpowers to push a broken agenda. It’s incredibly easy to justify doing evil when you’re just doing your job, and it’s even easier when you’re just gradually contributing to a well of poison instead of pulling a trigger.
