Stories

The hard truth about absence anxiety (and how to actually take time off)

I’m about to enter my thirties, so I’m taking some time off to celebrate. Why does that make me so stressed? Well, it’s absence anxiety. Since joining Safe In Our World in October 2024, I’ve been tackling some of the...

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News | Stories

Prioritise Your Wellbeing: Beat Burnout

As a Community Manager, Content Creator and Mother to a diabetic 10 year old, I have been experiencing an increased feeling of burnout with both work and personal projects over the last few months. It’s been harder than normal for...

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Prioritising your wellbeing at Develop:Brighton 2024

Going to Develop:Brighton for the first time? Here’s some mental health and general wellbeing tips that I found really useful that I wanted to share. Develop:Brighton can be a hive of energy, excitement and reunions, but it’s important to check...

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‘Gamifying Wellbeing’: Designing Therapeutic Videogames to Treat Mental Illness

My phone buzzes, making the whole table vibrate. I flip it over apologetically, so that the screen is hidden. This gesture is partly to reassure my colleague that he has my full attention, and partly to conceal the fact that...

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PRISM: Creating safe spaces for our people

Guest post by Alif Trevethan, Inclusion and Belonging Manager at Sumo Group, one of our Level Up partners. In 2021, Sumo Group launched its internal Inclusion and Belonging community, PRISM. What started as a small, ambitious group passionate about diversity...

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Redundancy Support

Whether you knew it was coming or not, a redundancy can feel really difficult and lead to all kinds of questions and uncertainty. We know that this feeling can challenge everyone’s mental wellbeing and, in some cases, worsen existing conditions....

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The Dev Traffic Light System

The ‘Dev Traffic Light System’: A mental health tool for the games industry, created by Matthew Stevens This month, we spoke with Matthew Stevens about a resource he has created for the games industry: the ‘Dev Traffic Light System’ (or...

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Financial Wellbeing

When it comes to money, it can be a source of stress for many of us, especially if you’re working independently in the games industry. Lots of us worry about money from time to time – I know my wallet...

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Supporting Mental Health Through Flexible Work

Guest post by Farah Ali, SEO & Content Lead at Flexa Careers   The demand for flexibility has increased over the past few years, with a staggering 80% of games industry professionals expressing their desire to work flexibly, and it’s been...

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Stories

How Becoming a Game Tester Changed My Life by Marcin Romaniuk

A note from PTW: The following essay was written by Marcin Romaniuk, a member of our Glasgow Localization QA team. It’s a very personal account of their experience with mental health and how they were able to find joy through...

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Ease your winter woes with a virtual wellness walk

There’s a lamp on my desk that belongs to my dad. I’ve had it for years, and while I don’t recall exactly when I acquired it, it spends half the year switched off and the other half on. At the...

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‘Duration playing video games is unlikely to impact wellbeing’

At the end of July 2022, a new research study has been published by the Oxford Internet Institute, which found little to no evidence for a causal connection between gameplay duration and wellbeing. The Study The study was conducted with...

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Covid 19 | News

Returning to the Office Post-COVID: Insight and Best Practice 

Any period of change can be a volatile time for those who suffer from mental ill health. Two years ago, for many, that change was the switch to working from home full-time, which came with rising concerns about loneliness, work-life...

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Celebrating a year of being part of the Safe In Our World ‘Level Up Mental Health’ initiative with Sumo Group

In May 2021, Sumo Group partnered with Safe In Our World as part of its #LevelUpMentalHealth initiative. Joining at this time reflected the commitment that Sumo had already made to supporting the mental health of its people. The Group had...

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University of Oxford Study Says Games Are “Good For Well-Being”

A recent study from Oxford University has found that time spent playing video games is positively associated with wellbeing. The data, derived from Plants vs Zombies and Animal Crossing (with over 3,000 surveys) has suggested that competence and the social...

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Hellblade developer Ninja Theory announces “The Insight Project,” an initiative to make games addressing mental illness

Ninja Theory, the developer behind cult-favorite titles such as Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and Heavenly Sword, has announced “The Insight Project,” a research and development initiative marrying game design and technology together with clinical neuroscience to produce games specifically intended to promote...

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