Humans aren't machines: Exploring the physiological effects of crunch

gamedeveloper.com:

The conversation surrounding crunch in the video game industry continued at GDC 2022. While the negative impact on mental health has been well-documented, Ian Schreiber, assistant professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and game designer, spoke during a GDC 2022 talk, focusing on the physiological effects of non-mandatory crunch rather than mental.

Schreiber noted that workers' cognitive function for creative tasks peaked around 25 hours per week, suggesting it takes a day or two for workers to get in the groove of tasks before slowly losing steam by Friday.

"Once you get past 60 hours, your cognitive function is actually worse than someone who wasn't working at all," Schreiber said. "So there is actually scientific evidence that Mondays suck, but if you talk about Wednesday being hump day, that's actually not supported by science."

Schreiber noted that, under crunch conditions, there's a degradation of productivity over time that continues to go down the longer that crunch happens at a studio. He demonstrated how extended crunch can negatively impact productivity with a chart showcasing literal negative productivity after approximately a month.

"This can actually go negative, and the reason is because the more fatigued someone is, the more likely they are to make catastrophic errors," Schreiber said. "So what zero productivity looks like is you spend three hours fixing a simple bug and you create another bug in the process. That's zero productivity."

"Negative productivity is you're tired, you see a deprecated file in the git repository and you go to remove it to clean things up. And by accident, you actually delete the entire git repo and cost the entire company like a person month's worth of work because a