It wasn’t all that long ago that accessibility was barely a concern for many video game companies. Some time in the past half decade or so, major publishers realized they could augment their marketing efforts with good old-fashioned back pattery, and now here we are. But there’s more to games than products and features. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we talk about the ways disability journalism surrounding games needs to evolve.
This time around, we’re joined by award-winning disability reporter Grant Stoner to discuss Disability Pride Month, as well as his own growing body of investigative work in the accessibility space. Grant draws a line from the early days of companies largely ignoring accessibility-related concerns to the moment they realized such options could serve as a marketing hook – and then up to the present, which Grant argues would be better served by journalism that goes beyond praising PR-friendly features.
After that, we move on to the horse girl sensation that’s sweeping the nation: Umamusume. Chris, like the whole internet, is obsessed. He explains why this oddity speaks to him, and then we grapple with how the game’s newfound fandom has impacted real horses. Finally, we decide that anyone who pastes into a document (or email or what have you) with formatting is a deviant who deserves to be confined to the deepest reaches of hell.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that Aftermath can buy a horse and then have an Umamusume horse girl named after it.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Grant: I think a lot of stories about advocates and consultants are usually through a positive lens. They tend to focus more on the work they do to benefit the company. I think the biggest example is The Last Of Us II. When that game came out, they really put their consultants on sort of a press junket where they were shopping them around to different outlets and showing the good work they did and everything.
We saw that again with Forza Motorsport, with their blind driving assists. [Accessibility consultant] Brandon Cole, who sadly is no longer with us, and Phil Spencer and the Turn 10 team went everywhere, to every publication to talk about the work that they did and the work that [Cole] did.
But we rarely see what those advocates and consultants go through on a daily basis to be able to do their jobs. I think if we could humanize that, it’ll help maybe not developers and publishers, but it’ll help the community better understand what it actually takes to perform these jobs. As for what I want the industry to start doing: shift away from [only covering] studios that develop these games and create these features, because you can read those pieces everywhere. I think we should instead focus more on disabled people in the industry – whether that’s workers, players, or developers – and how they interact in this space.
Chris: Also, a developer is not permanently good. That’s not a condition of the developer; that’s a condition of the people who’ve worked there. [A studio] could just get shitty. It’s a very real and meaningful impact that can happen.
Grant: That’s what spawned my AbleGamers piece. The work they did there was good, but then over time it allegedly became a toxic environment that made it so that you couldn’t really highlight the good work anymore without acknowledging the harm that they were doing.
Nathan: My guess is that a lot of stories like that go unreported, especially in vulnerable communities. I think you often find a lot of abuse in vulnerable communities. Do you feel, Grant, like disabled communities are uniquely vulnerable to this type of abuse?
Grant: The disability community, in my experience, we treat each other like a monolith or a family unit. And when that family unit is disrupted in any way, the disability community often struggles to accept that. Because for years, we’ve been cast aside. We’ve been not given the same space as other people. We’ve always had to fight harder than most to belong, especially in the gaming industry. So whenever stories like this highlight that there are some messed up things going on, oftentimes the community itself struggles to accept it, because we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe that we’re all one big happy family.
I also tend to blame marketing departments for big companies that make us feel that way. Like Xbox’s tagline “When everybody plays, we all win,” I argue that has done more harm to the greater movement because it makes us act like we’re all friends – which then allows these bad actors to come in and make victims out of the particularly vulnerable. So I think there’s different layers to why disabled people feel the way they do about these stories, but mostly it’s the fact that we struggle to have individualistic agency. We’re mostly led to believe that we’re all one big happy family and that no one would do this to us because we’re all one big happy family.
