This isn't a particularly new story, but what amazes me is that the story -- about the extreme time demands placed on workers in the video-game creation industry -- still exists.

Maybe this is the type of "flexibility" certain employers seek.

An excerpt from the Toronto Star story:

For years, Keith Makse's job consumed most of his existence. As a game designer for a St. Catharines video game developer, he once worked 45 hours straight. Another time he worked 120 hours in a single week. But it wasn't good enough.

"I was working 12 hours a day and people would say I was only putting in a half day's work," he recalls. He says he almost got fired for taking a Saturday off to celebrate his wedding anniversary — and that wasn't even during "crunch time," the brief period before a game's completion deadline. Finally, when he and his wife were expecting their first child, he quit.

"If I had stayed," he says. "I probably wouldn't have been able to go to the hospital when my wife was in labour."

Not every video game company works its employees the way Makse's employer did, but a significant portion make "all work and no play" their unofficial motto — something that has made the industry famous over the past year, thanks to a spate of unpaid-overtime lawsuits in California and a highly publicized online testimonial by a worker's spouse. Industry insiders say employees fare no better in Canada, where some provinces have nurtured growing video game development centres with lavish subsidies and special exemptions from workplace regulations. But Makse's story shows why critics say the industry's approach is unsustainable.