The customer service department isn’t the most glamorous part of the video game business. For one thing, it’s the same at any consumer products company. Calls and e-mails filter in and are gently deflected; on rare occasions, action is taken.

At one publisher, the department manager would frequently requisition dozens of copies of the latest titles— it was a big company and they sold a lot of games, so surely there was a lot of customer servicing to do. People would bring home their new games from Best Buy or Wal-Mart and find the discs scratched or broken inside the box. The customer service department would take care of them. Nobody really bothered to check in on it very closely. It was just boring old customer service after all.

One day, though, someone was at the fax machine and noticed what looked like an eBay receipt, and it turned out the department head hardly needed as many games as he was requesting. Instead, he was selling them online to supplement his income.

After firing the manager, the company instituted much tighter controls and greater scrutiny on those parts of its operations. The department had earned a little notoriety.

The team was tired. It was close to three in the morning and the remnants of the night’s crunch food were still festering on the kitchen tables. A quart each of guacamole and sour cream sat untouched, waiting to be discarded.

“It’s a race,” the owner said suddenly, pointing to the condiments. “A thousand bucks to the guy who can finish his first.” Crass entertainment might have been the only goal, or it could have been something a little more sinister— a kind of inadvertent and spontaneous hazing ritual. This was a small group of people who worked hard for little pay but who were part of the proud Dallas first-person shooter lineage. The studio’s employees began gathering into the kitchen to see what the noise was about. Two programmers stepped forward and, on the mark, began to tip the containers of toppings into their mouths.

It was a mess, of course. The man who was gulping down the sour cream finished first, to the hooting and hollering of his co-workers. Then he paused, turned and regurgitated everything back up into a nearby trash can. The audience exploded and collapsed into hysterics. The owner paid him his one thousand dollars.

After something like that, any day is pretty much over. So the laughter died down and the team dispersed into the arid Texas night.

Though we regularly discuss the “quality of life” problem in Western game development, the Japanese have it even worse. There, long hours and sleeping at the office aren’t exceptional— they’re a matter of course for all kinds of businesses. But the combination of the culture of the game industry combined with the culture that produced karōshi (lit. “death by overwork”) can be especially potent. One anecdote I’ll always remember illustrates starkly how wretched it can become.

A large Japanese game studio was crunching, as usual, to get the next game out the door. The hours were insane and those employees with families hardly ever got a chance to see them. One day, a worker went to his boss and begged him to let him leave early that evening. It was his daughter’s birthday, he explained, and he wanted at the very least to have the chance to celebrate with a nice dinner together with his family. “Fine,” the boss said. The man went home at an unusual five o’clock that day.

Then, a little past midnight, the phone rang. It was the boss.

“Your daughter’s birthday is over. Get back to the office.”