Social Isolation is a Solvable Problem for People With Disabilities

about the way playing makes them feel. We plug in a gas peddle looking device just like you have in your car, to an Xbox controller, and we moved the foot rest, pulled the little paddle up to the child's foot. He pushes down with a little bit of movement. The car comes roaring to life, speeds across the speedway, slams into the wall in front of him, and he lights up like a Christmas tree, just bubbling and giggling and

having the best time of his life. There's a natural learning curve when it comes to playing video games, learning the rules, getting to know the controller, learning the button configuration. However, for most of us who gain, we may not consider that the ability to pick up a controller, press the buttons with our fingers, and even speak into the microphone are all barriers to entry. For folks who would love

to get in on the action. There probably are people who have gotten an adaptive controller from Xbox and they blew off going to somebody's wedding and doing a toast because they would have rather played the latest, you know, Super Mario Sonic game. It's estimated that nearly two hundred forty million people across the US were gaming at some point during the lockdown. At about twenty percent of US

gamers have a disability. There are more people who would have been bored out of their minds have they not had the ability to connect with these virtual worlds. Stephenspond is a writer, a philosopher, a streamer on Twitch, and the chief operations officer of the organization Able Gamers, a nonprofit organization that advocates for people with physical and mental disabilities in the gaming world. They provide peer counseling and adaptive technology that helps people play the games they love.

The clod stick is a great adaptation that you can play an entire Xbox with just your mouth. You don't need your hands, you don't need your feet, You can just use your jaw to move the controller around. And there are people out there that could absolutely beat you and me up in Street Fighter or anything like that,

even though we're using another controller. One positive thing that's come out of the pandemic is that now more people understand what it's like to be trapped at home, which is something that able gamers and people with disabilities have

been trying to explain for years. For someone who lives their life with a profound disability, if you spend the majority of your time in a bed, in a hospital bed, in a room where you don't leave, that becomes an isolated place and you start dealing with social isolation in a way that before the pandemic most people couldn't really grasp. Social isolation is a solvable problem for people with disabilities through video games. My mom found and Natari I grew

up really really poor. My mom took what money she had bought me a used atari from one of those used electronics stores, and we ended up playing like Burger Masher or something where you like, I had to put a burger together. It was like little ladders and stuff. I think you're talking about Burger type. I can barely remember it now, but it was. It was an adorable

piece of machinery. I think at the time Nintendo was already out, but we couldn't afford one of those, so she was just really thrilled that I was able to operate the controller at all. The earliest one I played was Super Mario one and Duck Hunt of course, and then I had Super Mario three, but I never got Super Mario two, which always which always bothered me. Did

you play Super are you too? I played all of those, although we have to touch on the fact that we shot ducks, but there was this annoying dog that kept puffing up in the middle of your screen, and you'd be like, my dad will get angry and be like, why right next to the TV try to shoot the dog, which and to be clear, y'all, no dogs were harmed in the making of Duck Hunts the video game, not that I know of, but yeah, it did not let you.

So you were diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy. Can you tell me a little bit about how it impacted you in gaming? So spinal muscular atrophy is sister disease to ALS. So if you saw Stephen Hawkins or have you've known anybody who's afflicted with ALS, then you kind of have an idea what I'm going through in my life. So essentially, my muscles are getting weaker and weaker as time goes on,

where ALS is much quicker in its development. SMA can last for your entire lifetime, so you could live an entire set the eighty ninety years and it might never take your life, or you might only live for a couple of months past birth. When I was born, I wasn't able to crawl like a child is supposed to. At X amount of milestones. My mom started noticing that I was using my arms to pull myself around, that my lower legs weren't pushing like they should have been.

My diagnosis is terminal. I will probably not make it to die of old age. But I'm forty now and they've been telling me that I probably had a couple of years left for about twenty some years now. So yeah, I feel like I'm doing that too bad. On that you might not want to take out any vegas bets on when I'm going to leave this big blue marble. Talk a little bit about the online presence of video

games and how that's created new worlds. How do you think that this successibility has been creating new connections for disabled folks? For someone who lives their life with a profound disability, if you spend the majority of your time in bed, in a hospital, little bit in a room where you don't leave, that becomes an isolated place and you start dealing with social isolation in a way that

before the pandemic most people couldn't really grasp. So the one thing that has come out of the pandemic that was a positive for what able gamers does and what people with disabilities have been trying to tell people, is that now people understand what it's like to be trapped in your house, to not be able to leave, to have to stay in one place. Now, maybe you probably during the pandemic didn't stay in one room and never leave the couch. Although that is some people's dream, it's

not so great. Let me tell you. You know, it's a place where do you now understand that being cut off from your friends and your family was horrifying. It was not fun in any way. People literally continually complained about how lonely they were, and that is an epidemic that we largely ignore. It's not about the games. The games actually don't matter. Games are fun, games are very very cool, but it's the connection to other humans that

we were really seeking. We're looking for a form of independence, We're looking for a form of being able to reach out and connect to our loved ones in a way that we can facilitate a great experience and those shared experiences. That's what this is really all about. That's what able gamers is about. That's what being an advocate for people

with disabilities is all about. Building experiences. When did you start making the connection that you were, like, really into video games and that this was something you wanted to play more of, even though playing them might be difficult. You know, it never crossed my mind that playing them would be difficult, because everything in my life is difficult. Getting up in the morning is difficult. You know. I always love the joke that I am just like you, Ronald.

I wake up in the morning and put my pants on with a team of people, So you know, it's, you know, no different. And you know, that's really where it was for me with video games, where I just wanted to play them. However it was that I had to do that, whether that was with standard controller or whether that was with some help. It was one of those situations whereas video games become more accessible, they become

less accessible. So originally we have the you know, super Nintendo controller, the Nintendo controller with two or three buttons, and you can lay them down on a table and I would play it like somebody with a piano just right in front of me, with you know, using my fingertips to move to manipulate the paddles. And then the

same thing with Sega. But then you started having buttons behind the controller and under the controller, and God help you if you tried to play the Nintendo sixty four where you needed an alien arm to be able to hold it, yeah, the middle. Nobody knows why that was there, nobody. So they started coming able, these drastically different controllers, and they were hard, they were hard to use. They didn't go on a table. You had to hold them in your hands or your lap, and so it became more

and more difficult to play consoles. And fortunately for me, that's when the PC gaming really started taking off. And I was actually going to school to be an assistant engineer an AutoCAD class, and one of my buddies there was working at an electronic store, so he was able to get a hold of like used parts and stuff like that. So we callbled together an older used PC and I was able to get into online games, and

that that was sort of the beginning for me. Was he started talking about this this universe where you know, he was in class, but there was this guild that he was running and they were busy farming materials and working on you know, this this apparatus and this world of Ultima Online was constantly running. And Ultima is a massive multiplayer online role playing game. Otherwise noticed that MMOARPG.

People love these games. They can just go on and on and there's expansions and new people to meet, new things to play all the time. But you just live in this online world. And it was so fascinating to me that a digital virtual existence could be out there existing at the same time as real life, and you could be earning money or working or doing whatever you

wanted to in this virtual world. And so I really kind of got to the point where I just threw myself into it and realized that well, if my physical body wasn't going to keep up with my mind, then maybe my virtual self could. So in terms of what you're doing at able gamers, how do you actually improve accessibility between video games and a disabled community. Yeah, you know,

Able Gamers does accessibility in a lot of ways. One of our pillars, as we call them, of our organization is engineering where we literally create controllers, sometimes from scratch at a three D printing, out of household objects, out of controllers that already exist that need modified slightly, and give them for free through our peer counseling, which is another pillar, to people who have difficulty playing games with

a standard controller. So it's not a a matter of able Gamers, you know, being a fast food restaurant where a person with disabilities can pull up and be like, yes, I will take a number five with the fault, it's like no. You go into you know, an actual area and we consult with you for up to eight to sixteen hours, and we look into your life. What are your challenges,

what are your desires? How can we use technology the bridge the gap between the two and fulfill your life by introducing YouTube and environment where people can hang out with you virtually and you can be with friends and family just like you want to be using these specially made controllers. For example, of the quad stick is a great adaptation that you can play an entire Xbox with just your mouth. You don't need your hands, you don't need your feat You can just use your jaw to

move the controller around. And there are people out there that could absolutely beat you and me up in Street Fighter or anything like that. They work great, They're just massively up there on the learning curve. You have to really really want to play games with just your mouth. So it sounds like you guys do a lot on the back end of adapting video games after market, after things already made to allow disabled folks to play. What type of advocacy are you doing to get video game

companies to make their hardware software more accessible. I can tell you that there is not a day that goes by that someone in the organization is not contacted by a Triple A developer asking how they develop a new X title for X system in a more accessible way. We have so many people now that reach out to us because the industry has woken up and they've realized that disabled people are a viable market. You know, you don't have to change your entire video games to support

people with disabilities. You just have to allow options that allow people to play the game that you would design. We've been doing this for sixteen years now. The first ten years was just convincing the industry that people of disabilities were out there, they wanted to play games, they wanted to continue to be Are these worlds, these wonderful virtual worlds that we all love? Right in the last four or five years is where you've seen enable gamers pivot.

And now instead of convincing people that they should care, we're convincing them that these kind of things are worth putting a few dollars behind. Whether that's a person donating to the organization to be able to fund the controllers that need to be given out, or it's from a major place that has developers that are developing games. And so we developed an entire course at Accessible dot Games.

Accessible dot Games is where you can go see right now our program called Accessible Player Experiences, and it's all about input patterns, it's all about development where you can go and you can look and say, all right, well, if you only have the ability to have one functioning arm, what are some of the things that would be pertinent

to that particurely disability? What are some of the things that like undo redo, Like what should I design in my game so that if someone you know has a cognitive disability, or they have a tremor where they click the wrong button. What's the way that I can make that easier for them? Oh, I just allow them to undo what they just did and do it again. Easy done.

And so instead of trying to look at this as a checklist of items like you must have closed capturing, you must have the ability to push the A button twice like, it's not up to us. We're not here to tell you how to develop a game. Are All we're here to do is change your mindset to be accessible so that you can start looking at development in a way that you understand that people aren't necessarily going to play the way that we often thought they did.

Maybe they're going to use special controllers, maybe they're going to have limited staminam, maybe they have pain levels they have to deal with. There are more people out there that you need to be thinking about when you develop, rather than just your average joe able bodied person. So people with disabilities are already isolated from the physical world. Do you think that connecting them with video games runs

the risk of further isolating them. That's a great question, right, So if you have a situation, did your life where you're going to be stuck inside and you're going to be watching TV. If you're not playing a video game with friends, then why wouldn't I want to give you the avenue to have the social interaction the way that you wish it to be. You know, are there people out there who don't follow the everything in moderation rule

of life? Probably? There probably are people who have gotten an adaptive controller from Xbox and they blew off going to somebody's wedding and doing a toast because they would have rather played the latest, you know, Super Mario Sonic game.

I can't tell you whether or not that's happened. What I can tell you is that there are more people who would have been bored out of their minds had they not had the ability to connect with these virtual worlds than people who misuse the technology and have gotten addicted to, you know, shooting pinball with their friends. What's what's your favorite game that you're playing right now? My favorite game right now is probably Rocket League. Yes, it's really good. Yes? Yes, okay, you are you on a

PS four? I am on I'm on PC. Okay, so we'll have to Yeah, we have to exchange my game attack is, Oh, it's big ron, so you have to exchange gamer. But I I'm rusty, I haven't played in a while, and I started playing Fortnite, uh and during the pandemic. And but Mike, I mean, there's something there's

something humiliating about being devastated by like an eleven year old. Yeah, but you were killed by a bunny rabbit who was surfing on a rocket who was doing cheering, chirping noises that managed to home in on you from a thousand feet away. There, you can't be mad about that. Likes it's not serious, and you know, that's what I really like about those kind of games. It's just that it's a competitive nature. And sure, you know, I'm proud of the fact that I only play with a mouse and

a tracker on my head. I don't use a keyboard, I don't use the controller, and I'm you know, freaking diamond in Rocket League. So I'm proud that I was going to ask because I'm like silver three. I want to say, so we're so you're obt of the game is just like soccer. You're just trying to score the ball into the other team's goal and there's a hierarchy system, Steve, you want to explain the hierarchy system. Yeah, so the hierarchy.

The way the game works is like every video game has a ranking system where you start at bronze and then you progress to silver and then gold and Platinum and then Diamond and then Champion, and what the ranks are changes based on the game, but it's always the same five rank system, which basically allows the game to put you up against people a similar skill level so that people who are lower skill level don't get destroyed by the higher skill levels and feel bad about themselves,

and then the people at the top don't get bored because they don't have a competition exactly. You know what's funny is, as I spent so many years getting destroyed in every other game online saying, you know what, I still want to play online anymore until Rocket League comes along. It's like, come on, Ronald, You'll play with a bunch of other people who are all as terrible as you are,

and you'll have fun. It'll be really competitive because you'll all like you'll all like you'll all be terrible in the same way together while like learning the game. Absolutely, Steve, clearly, I love video games. You love video games, and I'm guessing a lot of our listeners do too. What are some things they could do to help make gaming more accessible for everyone? Of course, I'm going to tell you that we need donations. You can go to able gamers dot org. You can check us out on any of

the social media's able gamers. So if you have a dollar, five dollars, twenty thousand dollars, it doesn't matter if you have that kind of cash to give out that it helps.

So the average controller is three hundred and fifty dollars to make the average session for someone to sit with us and be fully funded to go through peer counseling is about eight hundred and fifty dollars that goes through you know, up much higher if someone has a profound disability, that takes you know, more time getting to know them and their situation and how to help them on a very personal level. But you know, that's that's where essentially

your donations go. So if you have the ability to, we always say please consider a donation. If you are not in a place where financially that makes sense, you can always just talk about able gamers and people with disabilities. Now that sounds extremely generic. Here's the thing about that game companies only care about what is being talked about.

So if people aren't talking about how accessibility options are important, about how they want to support people with disabilities, about how people with disabilities matter in games, and they want to see that representation for people that don't look like them, then the support goes away. The only reason that companies support initiatives for people that are not quote unquote in the mainstream audience is by them figuring out that, oh, they are in the mainstream audience and they do matter,

and we can make money off of them. And that's how we get that done. Is about you going out to Twitter, you going out to Instagram talking about this kind of thing, tweeting at your favorite companies, facebooking. You know, that's how you can support able game was the best. And if you're a developer out there listening, go to Accessible dot Games. It's a free thing. You can go

check out all the material for free. Right now. There is a certified course that you can take for a couple hundred dollars to be certified to be able to be an accessible developer. But if that's not within the budget of your studio. You can always look at the material for free online and check it out and incorporate that into your next game. Are there any movies or books to learn more about accessibility generally? There is a great documentary called crypt Camp. It's on Netflix right now,

you can check it out. It goes through the entirety of like what it's like to be a disabled person and what it is that people maybe not seeing in their everyday lives the people disabilities have to go through. There's also a great movie that was released years ago.

It was all about the ada the creation of it, called The Sound of Thought, and it's really about how these two guys, one who was disabled, one who was not, wanted the ability to go out into public without being harassed for being disabled, and how businesses really weren't taking the disability community seriously. It's very heartwrenching to me to remember and to remind people that if you are thirty five years old or older within your lifetime, it was

legal to discriminate against people at disabilities. If I had gone into a McDonald's when I was one years old, they could have kicked me out for using a wheelchair because I was quote upsetting the other guests, and that's something that a lot of people tend to forget because we have very short memories when it comes to things

like this. So remember that. You know, it wasn't that long ago that we said that no disabled people are important, and you know, having those rights was important for that community and it still is today. Thank you so much for being with us today, Steve. Thank you. Steven Spond is the chief Operations officer of Abel Gamers Solvable. Senior producer is Jocelyn Frank, Research by David Jah, booking by Lisa Dunn. Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and our

executive producer is Mia LaBelle. Solvable is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. It helps us find our way to the ears of new listeners. You can find Pushkin Podcasts wherever you listen, including on the iHeartRadio app and Apple Podcasts. I'm Ronald Young Jr. Thanks for listening.