The mental health non-profit Take This focuses on promoting mental health in the video game community. The charity is currently celebrating 10 years of providing resources and reducing stigma about mental health to everyone in the world of gaming, both on the player and developer side. The advocacy group is as much about fostering community as it is empowering individuals, aiming to improve and support mental health from all angles in the industry.
Take This frequently partners with developers for charitable fundraising, in the past collaborating with games like D&D spin-off Idle Champion for a good cause. However, Take This doesn't just partner with companies for fundraising - they also offer training courses that aim to teach developers how to provide better outreach, support, and inclusivity for their employees. Take This encourages mental wellness on the player side as well, providing resources to streamers about things like burnout and offering AFK Rooms at conventions as a calm space for anyone who feels overwhelmed.
The Executive Director of Take This, Eve Crevoshay, sat down with Screen Rant to discuss how the nonprofit works to promote mental health in every facet of gaming and how the company has grown over 10 years.
Screen Rant: I know that you've worked at Take This for four and a half years. In that time, what are the biggest shifts that you've noticed in the industry, either for better or worse, when it comes to things relating to mental health?
Eve Crevoshay: The conversation has shifted dramatically, both in the industry and in society, around mental health. We're talking about it, and that's a relief. That's a really wonderful shift. It's interesting, because Brendan Sinclair had an op ed this morning about GamerGate, and it's really topical. The conversation around workplace health and culture has shifted.
We have a very long way to go in many regards, but the conversation around crunch [which is compulsory overtime in game development], harassment and gender-based harm is progressing—as is the conversation about inclusion and diversity. They're topics of open conversation in a way that we haven't seen prior to the last three and a half years. And that's really wonderful to see. I don't want to imply that we have arrived. In some ways, you never quite arrive. You're always trying to iterate and get better. But there's also the shift around unionization, and those are big deals in the sense that they are shifting the way that we talk about workplace environments and the culture of the games industry.
We've also seen a real shift in game content. We're seeing a real diversity of games and game types. We've seen the rise of mobile games, and then the breaking of that ecosystem. And we've also seen a shift to a much more interesting range of games, and types of games and approaches to what gameplay can be that serve a broader audience. That's an exciting thing to see, and those two things go hand in hand. Because if you create space for more people in the industry, then you create space for different types of games and different types of gameplay content.
What would you say are the biggest differences you've noticed between the mental health issues faced by those on the developer side, and those faced by players and content creators?
Eve Crevoshay: These things are directly linked, because if we don't care for ourselves, we are not aware of the things that we do to harm the players. If we can't create a space that is safe and welcoming and health in a game studio, you're not going to be thinking about those things in terms of gameplay in an effective way. You're also not going to be welcoming to a diversity of people who can then make games that are welcoming to a diversity of people. Really, one comes from the other.
Tech, more broadly, and social media in particular is so white and so male. It's designed with a particular perspective in mind, and that perspective is very harmful to people who are not of that category. You see the spaces that games exist in being similarly harmful to a lot of people. Now, that is not to say that they are universally harmful all the time, but that's definitely a theme we see.
You see the games that are created with the most sensitivity, the most diversity, and the most flexibility around what it means to be a game also creating the most welcoming spaces that are really wonderful. I think that's really fantastic when you see it work; when you see healthy studios and open studios and studios that are really trying to work across a broad range. They create really wonderful stuff.
Are there any games that come to mind when you're talking about that?
Eve Crevoshay: Well, one of the big ones is The Sims. It's like, "Wow. That's really cool." And I always think about - because my husband makes the game - Cozy Grove, which is a great game. It's a very sweet game that's very different. Yes, the studio heads are both white men, but it is made with a very different perspective in mind, and with a very different culture behind it.
There's a bunch of games that Take This has recognized as really fantastic games for mental health representation and diversity. Those include Spiritfarer, Celeste, Stardew Valley, and Psychonauts 2. Those are games that have won our mental health and representation award, and they're games that are designed to really create welcoming spaces to reimagine the kind of gameplay that is possible; that showcase and help people see themselves reflected in these spaces. That's really amazing.
Also, the gold standard around mental health representation is Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, because of the way that it really evoked the experience of auditory and visual hallucinations. That was really amazing, and it was done with people who experienced those things in their lives. Those are the kinds of things that are really wonderful.
These games that are made with a broader audience and perspective in mind wind up being some of those most popular games that we've seen in the past decade or so, which is really amazing.
Eve Crevoshay: Yeah. If you create experiences that represent people's lives, where people can see themselves in the game, that is compelling gameplay. Absolutely.
One of the first Take This projects was the AFK Room at conventions. Since you've joined the team, how have you seen them evolve? I know a Discord version of the project was recently created, and I'm curious how it's changed over time.
Eve Crevoshay: The AFK Room program was developed by our original clinical director, Dr. Mark Kline, who's now on our board. A wonderful, wonderful man. He's a psychologist in the Boston area. And Dr. Mark created a space that we saw we needed at conventions. That model still exists; we still run that model. We were just most recently at PAX West, and we're getting ready for Unplugged. It's really exciting, and it's a foundation that's really integrated into the way that enforcers work at PAX. It's really integrated into what people expect of the convention experience, which is wonderful. You can kind of plan around it, so we haven't done a whole lot to alter that program. It is designed to be the most boring place on the convention floor. That's what it's supposed to be, and we want that to be the case.
But during the pandemic, we spun up a Discord-based version of that for online experiences, which can also back up an in-person experience if needed. One of our wonderful partners is the Games and Online Harassment Hotline, and we're talking about bringing them in as a partner in this kind of environment.
The AFK Room is a really concrete important service at PAX and at conventions. It is also a gateway for conversations about mental health, self-care, and even potentially accessing therapeutic services or other types of things. Its power in starting the conversation about mental health for people is really compelling, so we think of it in multi-parts now. We think of it as a service and as an opening conversation, and that's really wonderful.
I know that Take This has also done a lot of work with different studios to address things like crunch culture and mental health stigma in the workplace. Can you talk about the collaborations that stand out most to you?
Eve Crevoshay: We have a workshop and training program, and a consulting program. We work with studios that are tiny, and we work with massive AAAs. We did a lot of work during the pandemic helping people work through the boundaries around what we can provide in terms of support.
How do we ease the burden on managers? One of the things that we saw across all sorts of companies and studios in the pandemic was that managers were taking on a really extreme burden of emotional support for their employees. So, we developed a Crisis Listening for Managers workshop, which is one of our most popular workshops. We've brought it everywhere; to folks like Iron Galaxy and to Wizards of the Coast, I believe, yeah, we've run it everywhere. And the thing that we've done there is really ensured that managers and leaders have practical tools, like words and phrases and a concrete understanding of what their lane is and isn't, that they can bring to the table in conversations that are difficult.
That's a hard place to be, and when managers have some boundaries around that, they have more confidence and can respond with more compassion. But they can also respond with less fear that they're gonna go too far and do something that really isn't in their lane, or that isn't what their skill is and isn't appropriate in a workplace conversation. We talk about in our Leadership and Self-Care workshop, and in our Burnout workshops, which are sadly also really popular right now.
We talk a lot about work-life separation—not balance, because balance is an evolving and hard to find thing. Work-life separation is knowing what's work and what's not, and having really clear boundaries between the two. When you give people the concrete information about what those boundaries look like, where they are, and how to enforce them? That's really powerful. Walking people through that kind of thing is really exciting. We also vet and do assessments of people's mental health benefits and access to services, and we help people understand what potential barriers their employees might be facing in terms of access to mental health care and support.
Building community in a workplace to help mental wellbeing is really important. Can you speak about the best ways that companies can foster this, and how output differs for positive and negative environments in a workplace?
Eve Crevoshay: Yeah. We've written about this, and we have a 2018 or 2019 State of the Industry white paper that outlines this, and our sophistication around that has grown since then as our knowledge of the industry has grown. In fact, I wrote a blog post for a great little organization called Red Magpie that's out in the ether about what to look for in a good workplace for game industry folks who are early in their career.
There's seven things on there, and I'll spit ball it a little bit, but the basics are that you need a place with transparency and good communication. You need healthy work-life separation, so there's clarity around what is work time and what is not. You need really solid benefits and support and fair compensation. You need some level of a practice of accountability. And when I say this, I'm not saying, "Oh, the company takes accountability." I'm talking very specifically about principles that are not part of standard HR practice, but that are really from transformative or restorative justice.
This is learning that I've come to from other folks; from folks at the Games and Online Harassment hotline and some of my own team members, all of whom are not white and some who are non-binary. That language around accountability and repair is about how you understand the dynamics around harm. How do you center survivors, and center their safety and their needs? You have to acknowledge that this happens in a community, and that all the bystanders are affected, and then also believe that people have the capacity to change and give them the tools to change. That accountability process is complicated, it's messy, and it's labor-intensive—but it is the way that you do this work in a way that leaves people better than where they started.
Decision-making in a company must be open or evolved enough that people with a variety of lived experiences, work experience, and skill are given access to decision-making. That diversity of knowledge and perspective is actively incorporated into critical game decisions at a state of pre-production, at a stage where it matters and where it can affect and actually impact the way that the game turns out, before major mechanics or art style or character decisions are locked in.
When you bring those elements together, you have a workplace that respects people; that honors people and their need to be actively engaged in the work and actively appreciated for their skill, but also given the space to have a life outside of the workplace and not burn out from the work. People need to feel like they have enough knowledge and understanding of what's going on in the studio to operate effectively, and that means that leaders need to show vulnerability. I think that this work depends so much on leadership vulnerability, and that's not a skill or quality that is celebrated or taught or learned and facilitated in almost any context. Building vulnerability, learning that skill and demonstrating it as a leader, can be challenging, but I think it is one of the most critical aspects of this work.
The overall mission of Take This is so all-encompassing, and so many people in the industry are facing so many different types of problems. How do you break it down into something more manageable and tangible on a day-to-day basis?
Eve Crevoshay: You mean, how do I keep my ducks in a row? [Laughs] That's a legitimate question. I have an amazing team. What I do is think about the things that contribute to or detract from mental wellbeing among people who make and play games and are content creators in this space. I'm a systems thinker, and when I came to Take This four and a half years ago, I was like, "Great! We have this visibility mission, and we have this AFK Room, but how do we think about structural change? How do we actually change the playing field, so that we have better outcomes as a norm?"
We have the experience of working in games, we have the content of games and gameplay and ways in which people experience that play, and we have the communities and online spaces that are adjacent to and inside games. We have the media perception of games, which isn't great and is unfortunately filled with really bad information and persistent prejudice. And we have a content creator economy and streaming economy that is pretty exploitative and challenging. How do we bring all those pieces together around building positive communities and safer spaces, and celebrate games at the center of it?
That's the organizing force for Take This at this point. That means there's a lot of places we have our hands in. We have our hands in extremist research in games and in practical resources for streamers around burnout, wellbeing and managing a community. And in the middle, we we're consulting with Game studios. Undergirding all of that is this immense amount of free resources for people who are just looking for how to find a therapist. "What does it mean to get therapy? What are mental illness diagnoses, and what do they mean? How do I talk about mental health and mental illness?" The unifying force is how we make this a better experience that promotes wellbeing.
Take This is coming up on its 10-year anniversary. Are there any big plans or projects in the works as that approaches?
Eve Crevoshay: As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we have just revamped our website and are updating all of our major resources on the website to make them more culturally applicable and more internationally applicable, broadly-speaking. We're getting back to our roots of providing free resources to the game community at large. We're really excited about it.
We've built this infrastructure, where we can really start to talk to and work with the industry cooperatively. Underneath this all, people just need to know how to talk about this. They need to know that there's a resource out there, they and need to feel like there's support underneath them for this conversation. And so, we have a major set of resources for streamers coming out, based around what it means to get therapy and how to do it. We have a flowchart for how to find a therapist that we've had for years, and now it's also showing how to advocate for yourself in therapy, how to find the right therapist, and what you are allowed to ask for and expect. All of this stuff is just getting the refresh it needs.
And also, what does it mean in this post-COVID environment, to get online therapy? Because the landscape has changed so substantially. What are the services and opportunities out there? What are the pitfalls and advantages to all of those, etc.? Our commitment right now is really to serving our community with the most up-to-date and effective resources we possibly can. I'm so jazzed about our new website.
Is there anything else you want players or those in the industry to know about Take This?
Eve Crevoshay: I would say that we are committed to having everyone's back. We are here to be a resource and to be a support and to be an advocate. That is why we exist, and that is how we operate. We have pretty strict ethical codes and boundaries that we respect, and we do that on purpose. We do that because we want everyone to feel like we are safe, we are authoritative, and we can be trusted. That is the most important thing to us, beyond anything else we do. And we do that because we love games and we love the game community. We are all gamers; we are all part of this community, and we come with genuine joy and love to the work. That undergirds everything we do, whether we are asking hard questions or just having a lot of fun. We're there because we want to be and because we love being part of this community.
That's a really nice sentiment.
Eve Crevoshay: It's even nicer because it's true. [Laughs] We're all in it, and we get excited about cool games and funny things. Someone on our team is a Witcher influencer, so there's been a lot of debate and processing over the last few days because of the casting switch with The Witcher. These are real things; this is our life. And Dr. B, our clinical director, went with his partner as Dungeons and Dragons for Halloween. He's a fantastic DM.
Take This resources can be found on the nonprofit's website.