(relaxed instrumental music)
- [Danny] Hello and welcome to Noclip;
the podcast about people who play and make video games.
I'm your host Danny O'Dwyer and today
I'm joined by somebody who kind of has a
finger in both of the pies we generally talk about;
people who play games and also people who make games.
We're gonna talk to him about a lot of different
areas of his work and also the ways in which
he enjoys playing games as well.
He is the COO of AbleGamers, he is a fellow
Trending Gamer nominee survivor.
I am delighted to be joined by Mr. Steven Spohn.
How are you doing my friend?
- [Steven] (laughs) I'm doing well.
Can we just talk about pies for the next 15 minutes?
- [Danny] I wanted to bring up the pie
because I was trying to think about
how you fit into the world of video games
and, in a way, your work at AbleGamers is
involved in both sides of the equation.
You help individuals who have trouble accessing video games
to get controllers and the means
by which to play the games they wanna do,
but you're also talking to game studios
and hardware manufacturers about
they ways in which they can make it
so you don't have to do the other thing.
- [Steven] Yeah.
The truth is when I did the game awards video,
one of the things that they captured me saying was that
I don't know how I got where I am
and I don't know what I'm doing
and it was the absolute most truthful thing
I had said during the whole piece.
I don't know exactly what you would call my job.
My job is literally whatever AbleGamers needs
and sometimes that's talking to hardware,
sometimes that's talking to developers,
sometimes that's talking to fundraisers,
sometimes that's talking to people
with disabilities who need tech support,
so I have really become the Jack of all
video game trade at the moment.
- [Danny] I've got a lot of questions
about your work at AbleGamers
and we've got some from the Patrons too.
We've actually been, like, I feel like
we've been working on the AbleGamers documentary,
in some respect, either us having conversations
or filming stuff like we did last summer,
it feels like it's been going on forever
and it's something that we eventually will get done.
Today I kind of wanna talk a bit more about Steven;
about how you came to be in the position you're in
because, like you said, in a way
I can't imagine anyone else doing your job,
but also I couldn't imagine anyone
doing your job until you did it.
So, let's go all the way back.
When did you start playing games
or when did you start getting interested in games?
- [Steven] I became interested in video games actually
thanks to a friend I had made in high school.
We were in a vo-tech class
and we were doing AutoCAD designing and...
- [Danny] Oh, cool.
- [Steven] I, for just a brief hot second,
I wanted to be an assistant engineer
and then I wondered how much work it is and I said, "Nah".
- [Danny] What was the name of the class?
It sounded like volt-tech class.
- [Steven] It was vo-tech.
- [Danny] Vo-tech?
- [Steven] Yeah, vocational technical school.
- [Danny] Oh, okay, okay.
- [Steven] Yeah, vo-tech is like the American,
"We're not going to real school,
we're going to fancy 'you're going to
learn actual useful life skills' classes".
- [Danny] Awesome.
- [Steven] Yeah, like its where your mechanics go
and all the people who are gonna do computers
and what they do is, or at least in my school,
you did your math and your science in the morning
and then they shipped you on a bus
during lunch to go to the other school.
It's kinda cool.
- [Danny] Wow, we had something similar in Ireland.
It was called Leaving Cert. Applied
and it was where all my friends who are tradesmen went.
Like electricians and plumbers
and then they all ended up moving to Australia anyway
because the economy crashed and nobody was building houses.
So you were in that class and you were learning AutoCAD.
Was that the first piece of software you ever encountered?
- [Steven] It was the first time that I had
really worked on computers for more than a few minutes.
Of course, everybody had Oregon Trail
on their MathLab or whatever,
but I grew up poor so we didn't own a computer
and that was really the only time I got to
have hands on a computer from multiple hours at a time.
One of my friends there worked at a computer shop
and he was telling me how he just
got all these parts for computers secondhand
because people would turn them in for repairs
and then they wouldn't want them,
so he would just end up fixing them and taking them home,
and I was like, "That's amazing",
so he started talking me into getting into video gaming
and he told me about this fabulous game
where you could go online and you could have a life
and you could do amazing things
like walking around the town of Britain
and you could fight dragons and you could own a house,
and I was like, "This is amazing",
and so he sort of talked me into this persistent world,
he was a Guild Master in his own right.
That's how I got sucked in to Ultima Online
and from there I just became super interested
in the alternative reality that video games present.
- [Danny] Was there an element of the
escapism that appealed to you?
Escapism is something that we all enjoy,
but perhaps somebody in your position, maybe,
was there an added element of escapism for you?
- [Steven] For me it was the
timing of where it hit me in life.
I had gone into my senior year of high school
and I had discovered friends and it sounds corny, cheesy;
it's something that I'm probably gonna
get up on a stage and give a TED Talk about one day,
but it's interesting how our school system
kind of segregates people with disabilities
away from the main population if you let them.
They'll put you in a special classroom
and they will put you in a special room to eat lunch
and they really keep you almost
walled off from everyone else and I was super lucky
that I had a friend who talked me
into doing that and I made friends.
Long story short, I sort of got a huge case of senior-itis
and I just didn't want to do the school thing anymore.
I wanted to go have a social life
because holy crap having friends is awesome!
And so I just wanted to go experience that
and have fun with it and it was fantastic.
The only problem was that I was just at the age where
we were transitioning from middle-teens to late-teens
so it was a couple of years of doing...
- [Danny] Hell.
- [Steven] Oh, hell!
But also doing video games in your friends garage,
to, "Hey, let's go to the club and pick up girls."
and its like "Well, the club has a stair
to get into it, so I can't do that, oh damn".
So I started kind of being walled off by life.
Just happenstance of things not being wheelchair accessible
and here's my other friend going,
"Hey, here's a world where your wheelchair
doesn't eff-ing matter".
I don't know if I can say swears on this show.
- [Danny] Say whatever you want, man.
- [Steven] Right, cool, so they were like
"Who the fuck cares if you're in a wheelchair.
Go play this world where everybody's equal",
and I was like "Oh, this is my first experience
where everything is a level playing field"
and it was amazing, so...
Was it escaping or was it choosing
to forge a different path in life?
I don't think I'll ever really know the answer to that,
but consequently, through the butterfly effect,
deciding to do that and take that friend's advice
led me to where I am right now.
- [Danny] You're an incredibly social person.
I feel like everyone in the industry has met you
and had a conversation with you.
I've noticed that you're very good
at advocating for people's time,
which is something that a lot of people
who like having friends and like being social,
they sort of don't put themselves out there to, you know,
they don't want to be a bother or something like that
but I've always found you to be incredibly inviting
and sort of proactive in your friendships,
which I think is a really important trait,
especially the older you get.
Video games, in that way I suppose,
have sort of provided you with a lot then,
in terms of both your social life
and your professional life.
Is it fair to say that most of that sort of
revolves around the world of games?
- [Steven] I think it is now.
I mean, you hit the nail right on the head.
When you're in your thirties,
going out and making new friendships
is exceedingly difficult and we could literally
talk for the rest of the podcast about the
difficulties of living the disabled life
and having to fit in to the norms of society.
But as far as the video games industry has been,
to me it's been a very welcoming and inviting place
and I am super honest guy, you know,
you follow me on twitter,
we've been friends for a couple years now.
I, to my own detriment, I am way too honest sometimes
and I am sure that there are people in the industry
who love me and there are people who
probably wish I would just stop talking so much
and I feel like if you don't have some people that think
you talk too much then you're probably not making change
and that's what I'm trying to do.
I have terminal illnesses, I have a disability
for those of you who don't know me.
I am aware that there is that shot clock ticking
and I don't talk about it a lot but I'm aware it's there
probably more than your average person
and I'm trying to use all the time
I've got to do something with it.
- [Danny] It's an interesting dichotomy you bring up there,
in that, in many ways, who could say a bad thing about
Steven and AbleGamers, you know what I mean?
At least, who could say it out loud? (laughter)
But you are kind of creating problems for companies, right?
Like you're creating a problem that,
by the fact that you're even having the conversation with it
was a problem that they thought didn't exist.
You're fashioning it for them. (laughter)
Is that the case?
Like, is it different now talking to companies
than it was when you first started doing this work?
- [Steven] The difference really is
that I didn't make the problem.
I shined a spotlight on a problem that was in the darkness.
It was always there and the more technology advances,
the less accessible it becomes,
just by the very definition of advancing technology.
So, we banded together,
me and Mark Barlet and Craig Kaufman,
and a bunch of amazing people, now AbleGamers, got together
and decided that we were going to take this problem head on
and we changed a multi-billion dollar industry.
I tell you the weirdest thing that I could
ever say to another human being
because it is entirely factual, you could prove it,
in fact, we're doing a documentary talking about it,
so it's, you know, it's something that's kind of
shock and awe to even try to talk about it,
but here we are, years later,
where developers went from laughing at us
and walking away to now coming to talk to us,
so, you know, it's pretty amazing.
I am very fortunate in my position that I am able to
walk all these different sides of the video game life.
- [Danny] When you think about some of
the ways in which you guys have changed the industry,
the one that comes to mind right away,
for me at least, because it's probably the most recent,
is the work that you guys did with Microsoft
on the, is it the Adaptive Controller,
is that what the name is?
- [Steven] Yeah, it's called the Adaptive Controller.
- [Danny] What other stuff comes to mind for you,
over the years?
- [Steven] You know, I think some of the biggest were
going into Harmonix and getting to talk to Alex.
Sitting down in his office
and doing the whole Rock Band thing
and talking about the various ways
that you might wanna play the game.
The fastest way I can tell this anecdote
is we were sitting in his office
and we were talking about how,
if someone wants to play the video game,
how many buttons would they have to use at minimum?
Could you do this if you only had three fingers on on hand?
Could you do it if you were one-handed?
You know, yes, no, yes, no.
So we talked about that for a minute
and I just came up with a question to ask;
"Why did you come up with three buttons
as the minimum to be able to play?"
and his answer was, "Well, it's just the number that we
thought was the smallest that people would ever wanna do".
I said, "Well, what about somebody who only
has the ability to push one button?"
He said, "Well, we never thought anybody would want to
be able to play Rock Band with just one button."
I looked him in the face and I said, "I would."
And the color just drained out of his face
and he just nods his head and goes,
"Okay, we'll have to work on that"
and that was sort of a great beginning point
for, not only my friendship with Alex,
but AbleGamers as a company we
have worked with Harmonix ever since
and they've been really great partners of the business
and I've made some good friends over there as well.
It's this amazing thing of how,
one of my friends put it best,
my job title is to go out and be who I am very visibly
and let people learn lessons from my experiences
and I've been able to thread this needle
of using personal experience and second hand experience
from the gamers I've met along the way
to then translate that into the friendships
that I've forged in the industry
and then turn that into making changes for other people.
So it's this tightrope act of making sure to
be friends with everybody because the only way that you
really can get people to make change is if they want to.
If they don't want to, they're not gonna change.
- [Danny] When you think about changing those games,
were there games when you were growing up that you were like
"Oh man, I'd really love to play that",
but then you realized that there were
barriers in your way to doing so?
- [Steven] Yeah, I can tell you that I wanted to play
Dance Dance Revolution and that'd be a great sound bite.
(laughs) Of course I'm in a wheelchair
but I've always been a very realistic kind of guy.
I am a logic-based person, I have the weird sort or
emotional Spock thing going on where
I wear my heart on my sleeve and I will
fight for anybody if I believe in them,
but there has to be logic in my brain,
also why this is a thing,
and I'm never gonna be on Dancing With The Stars.
I'm never gonna be a ninja.
It's just not in the cards for me.
So I am okay with that and there was no particular game
that I wanted to play that made
me start advocating for people.
It was simply having a disease that was advancing slowly,
taking away abilities one by one,
made me go, "Oh, shit, I guess I need some technology"
and somewhere along the way I discovered that it was a lot
more fun to help other people than to help myself.
- [Danny] What was it like then for you,
trying to gain access to that technology?
Presumably you were doing that before AbleGamers existed,
so was it a case where your conditions were getting worse
and you were effectively looking for solutions
as the issues presented themselves?
- [Steven] So it's interesting when you're doing a
technology upgrade as someone with a disability
because it's often a mismatch of just
MacGyver-ing your way through technology.
To eat potato chips, I used to use hot dog tongs
as I couldn't lift up my biceps,
but I could rotate my wrist so I would just
pick up one chip at a time with a hot dog tong.
It's the same thing with video games.
I used a little tiny dental hygiene tool
that has a little crook on the end of it,
has a little rubber tip
and I would use that to push W, A, S, D when I couldn't
reach it and operate the mouse with the other hand.
So I was already using technology,
it was just this way...
Doing things the low-tech way
was beginning to start to fail,
so I had to find a little bit more high-tech solutions.
- [Danny] And how did you do that?
Did you fashion stuff yourself?
Were there people out there making custom rigs for people?
- [Steven] Well, you know, I started doing it by
finding ways to play video games with only the mouse
and just getting rid of keyboard entirely.
Fortunately, I had found a program called TrackIR
which generally allows you to look around in the cockpit
of a Microsoft Flight Simulator
and when you're looking around,
you're also telling the computer
to push different directions and I found that
you could use this to push keyboard buttons
and it was a totally unintended thing
that this program was offering.
They were trying to use it to help people have
a more virtual experience, more immersion,
and I ended up using it as a disability tool
and now I teach others how to do the same thing.
- [Danny] That's incredible.
So you sort of hacked it in a way
to be quick key-binding stuff.
How many buttons could you set up on a TrackIR?
How many directional ways are there to use it?
- [Steven] So the best way to think about it
is to think about a dartboard.
- [Danny] Okay.
- [Steven] If you think about each position,
each little block, being a different key
then the laser pointer that is attached to
the brim of one of my hats allows the laser pointer
to move around based on the way I'm looking.
- [Danny] Right.
- [Steven] So I can move it to whatever block.
The only downside of that technology, of course,
is if you're thinking about moving in a straight line.
If you gotta get to block number three,
you gotta run through block number one through two.
- [Danny] Right.
- [Steven] So, it sort of becomes this interesting way
of lining up the buttons so that they don't
do the wrong thing at the wrong time.
- [Danny] It sounds like key-binding is something
that is one of the most powerful ways of allowing
people to use controllers in these interesting ways.
You say using a mouse only; I imagine setting up
'run' to be right-click or something like that
would maybe fix one sort of problem.
We talk about the hardware issue,
but also one of the biggest issues in games
that has sort of been slowly fixed over the past
five, 10 years, well, maybe closer to five,
is the ability to re-bind controls,
which certainly has never been something that was standard
and is a lot more common now.
Is that a big issue with accessibility as well?
- [Steven] Yeah, re-mapping has gotten a lot better.
Now, re-mapping is almost as standard as
closed captioning is for TV shows and movies.
That's a lot thanks to the groundwork
that people have done, demanding it to be a thing.
It's not just a disability thing.
Everybody loves for you to be able to re-map
things so that they're more comfortable,
so that your hand isn't stretched out in weird ways
that the developers didn't quite
think somebody would try to do.
So it's good for everybody, it's good design
and it allows us to be comfortable playing video games.
- [Danny] So what other big games were you a fan of?
Or what other games were you a big fan of, rather,
back in those days, back in the Ultima Online days?
Eventually those doors closed,
but you could've got back into that fantasy world.
So what other games are your favorites when you look back?
- [Steven] Back then Diablo was huge, I loved that game.
Star Wars Galaxies actually was the bait that
Mark used to get me into AbleGamers.
- [Danny] How'd he do that?
- [Steven] Okay, so I loved Star Wars Galaxies so much.
Star Wars Galaxies was, and maybe is,
my favorite game of all time
and they had just changed it to the NGE
and the NGE made it more into an action simulator game,
which took away a lot of the accessibility.
- [Danny] Oh, really?
- [Steven] Yeah, in SWG, the original vanilla version,
you had macros, you had slash commands,
you had buttons on the screen that you could click,
you could do macro ability to do
more than one action at a time.
It was a very very friendly game
for people with disabilities and they didn't even realize
they were designing it that way.
They were just trying to make it friendly for everybody.
So, it just happened to be accessible
and I happened to latch on to it as
the most amazing thing since pizza
and it was great and they changed it and then,
right after that, they were gonna change
it again for the combat upgrade
and they were gonna make it into this,
I don't even know what kind of 'Barbie Ken Dreamhouse'
thing they were trying to do with this game,
but it was just destroying it from the inside out
and then then closed it so I literally
told Mark that I would come work for AbleGamers,
volunteer my time, and at the time I was just
being a writer and trying to help the cause,
and I would do it, but only if he would give me the
email for Smedley so I could tell him off.
(laughter)
- [Danny] And did you?
- [Steven] I did, yeah, absolutely.
- [Danny] Oh, God.
- [Steven] I wonder if he still has that email.
- [Danny] Did he respond?
- [Steven] No. I was nobody then,
so just an angry guy yelling at him,
which he had a bunch of those already.
- [Danny] How long is the email, do you reckon?
Is it like one paragraph or was it like 20 paragraphs?
- [Steven] It was like five paragraphs with expletives
and doing something between rational explanation
of why he should change it back to, you know,
"I hope both your eyebrows catch on fire!"
(laughter)
It was not my most refined moment
but I was just so passionate about it.
- [Danny] Yeah, shoot your shot, fair enough.
So what have you been playing at the moment?
We were playing a bunch of PUBG I remember last year
and then you went off and joined the Fortnite gang.
You said you could never be a ninja
but there you are, every day, playing Fortnite.
Are you still playing it?
- [Steven] Actually, no.
I don't play Fortnite as much as I used to.
It is still a fun game for me,
but I've actually began to fall away from
first-person shooters a little bit.
I've been doing the Rocket League thing,
I've been really into Kingdom: Two Crowns recently,
just playing that 8-bit life.
Yeah, it's the third installment of this franchise
where you're just a little dude or a queen
that's got a kingdom to take care of
and there's little greedy things that are trying to
take all your money and beat up your people to get it,
so there's no fighting involved so, I don't know,
I'm one of those gamers that,
I used to run a violent game like a Diablo
and then I would run The Sims Online.
I would just bounce back and forth
to satisfy both sides of my brain,
so I guess right now I'm just like,
"I don't wanna shoot people, I just
wanna watch little monsters be murdered."
- [Danny] Okay so by that rationale,
Rocket League is the violent game?
- [Steven] Yeah, well, if you've
ever seen me play Rocket League,
it depends how many times I get scored on.
- [Danny] Oh dude, I swear to God,
I have never been as angry and stressed out
as when I play Rocket League online.
- [Steven] It's like a stress test,
they should replace that at the doctor's office.
- [Danny] I swear to God, I had to start playing on
PS4 because then I couldn't type shit at people.
(laughter)
Then I just started doing it on that as well,
bringing up the little PlayStation keyboard.
In between goals where you've hardly any time to
trash talk anyone and you just figure out ways of doing it.
- [Steven] What a save, what a save, what a save!
- [Danny] Oh, yeah, totally
and all that sarcastic stuff for sure, yeah.
It's ridiculous.
Did you do a 'Top 10' list or anything for 2018?
- [Steve] You know, I think I'm one of the three video game
industry people that didn't do a 'Top 10' post.
(laughter)
- [Danny] You need to get Alex Navarro over at
Giant Bomb to email you as well next year.
- [Steven] Apparently, yeah.
Next year I need to get on the list, I was like,
"every one of my friends has a list, what the hell?"
Damn.
- [Danny] So what was the stuff last
year that really caught your eye?
Were you playing a lot of those games?
Well, playing Rocket League I guess, since 2017.
- [Steven] (laughs) Yeah, it was a
good year for video games, man.
The one I wish I could have played the most was Spider-Man.
Man, that looked like an amazing game.
I couldn't personally play it,
so it was actually one of the only games that
I sat on Twitch and watched friends play
from the beginning to the end.
It was so good.
I loved it so much.
- [Danny] Is that because it's a console game
and it's just the accessibility issue?
- [Steven] It was the way that the accessibility
was set up was just a little bit rough
for trying to aim and change your weapons.
Anything that has a weapon wheel just
adds another layer of complication for people who have a
limited number of buttons that they can push, so, yeah.
Even if you were using a QuadStick on a console,
the weapon wheel is just difficult, so, you know.
- [Danny] How does the QuadStick
interface with the PlayStation?
Because obviously Microsoft now has a controller
that's like officially doing it.
Do you have to hack it to get it to work?
- [Steven] Yeah, its just an adaptor.
- [Danny] Oh, really, just like off the shelf?
You just get it off Amazon or something, or eBay?
- [Steven] Well no, it's not off the shelf,
but there are adapters out there that let
you use PlayStation and Xbox things, vice versa,
depending on which console you need to use the most,
so we can put a QuadStick on either one.
It doesn't really work on a Swtich, unfortunately,
looking at you Nintendo.
But, yeah, PlayStation and Xbox works just fine.
- [Danny] Is it the type of thing that they know about and
they're cool with or they know about it
and they're just gonna go, "Ah, whatever"?
Like what is it that Nintendo are doing that
stops people being able to make adapters for that?
- [Steven] You know, I'm not really
sure what I can say, legally.
I can tell you that it's still works on Xbox and PlayStation
and it doesn't work on Nintendo.
(laughter)
- [Danny] Fair enough.
Sorry, you were saying, what other games are you playing?
- [Steven] The God of War series was,
of course, super amazing.
I had a lot of strange indie taste as well,
like Tricky Towers was a really good game I found.
Just something sort of different.
I loved Into the Breach.
I think the only one I've lost a
lot of time into was Odyssey.
Odyssey is just so good; I can't stop playing it.
- [Danny] My wife is playing it too.
It's the most game I've ever seen.
- [Steven] It is ridiculous, it is.
I mean there were so many good
games that came out last year,
but Odyssey is maybe the first one in
forever that I've been playing off-stream.
There's usually, for me,
only two kinds of games that I play;
either I play them for work or I play them for stream work.
Don't you get it where it's like, I'm sure, just like you,
I don't like play just to play very much,
so when I do, a game's gotta be great
and Odyssey was fantastic.
- [Danny] Did you play the Origins?
The one that came out the year before?
- [Steven] I didn't.
You know, Odyssey was actually my first
venture into Assassin's Creed world.
- [Danny] Oh, cool.
It's crazy how people are,
I feel like there's two groups of people;
there's the people who played so much Origins
that they just can't play Odyssey because it's just like,
it's just so too much, too quickly
and then there's people who didn't play Origins
who are loving Odyssey because it's
a lot of the same sort of systems
and stuff that worked there,
but in a much bigger map with so much stuff.
It's ridiculous how much stuff is in that game.
Like how much of the map have you uncovered?
My wife's been playing for months and like a third
of the map has been opened up.
- [Steven] You know, I probably have got a little
over half of it at this point,
and it just seems like the game just keeps going and,
I gotta say, I'm into it though.
It's one of those games where I'm finding
I don't mind how much time has been sunk into it.
Normally by like hour 50 I'm like,
"Alright, come on, we gotta wrap this up",
but this one I'm like,
"You know, I could probably play this off
and on for the next year, I'd be alright with that."
- [Danny] What is it about it?
Is it the setting or the combat or is it
the ticking off the things on the list?
There's a lot of 'do these things' and then
you do the things and they give you stuff for it
and you're like, "Yeah, give me more things to do."
Is it that?
- [Steven] I think it's a combination
of the story and the never-ending tasks.
I love the bounty hunting system, oh my goodness.
I love how you just randomly get hunted
and then you get to kill them and then more people hunt you.
It's just awesome.
- [Danny] That's rad.
What are you playing at the moment?
So you're playing that at the moment still, are you?
- [Steven] Yeah, I mean whenever I get spare time,
that's where I'm sinking my time right now.
That was after I beat Far Cry.
I don't know if you got a chance
to sink your teeth into that but,
man, that was a mind trip.
- [Danny] Yeah, that was another one,
my wife is basically just on the
Ubisoft open world ticket at the moment,
so that was another one I watched
her play a lot in the evenings.
Had you played previous Far Cry games?
Was that your first foray into that one as well?
- [Steven] That was another first note as well.
It seemed to be my year to break into story games.
I guess now we're looking back at it and I liked it but,
this is gonna turn into spoiler-cast if I'm not careful,
but, man, the ending in that game.
At the end of the day I am a writer
who just happens to be doing other things right now
and so I love, love, love a good story.
So, if it had something that can just
grab my attention and make me wanna
find out what happens at the end, then I'm in.
- [Danny] You're one of the first people
we're talking to in 2019,
I mean you're one of the first people we're
talking to on this podcast, this is the 5th episode.
I feel like I haven't been able to stop
and take stock of what's coming out this year.
Is there anything, I have a list in front of me here
but is there anything off the top of your head
that you're looking forward to?
Because I feel like 2018 actually ended up
being a fantastic year but I worry that we ended up
going into a slower one, when that happens.
But is there anything off the top of your head that's
popping out that you're looking forward to in 2019?
- [Steven] I don't know, it can't be a slower
year than last year.
Last year was just boom, boom, boom.
I would say, right off the top, and the same thing
everyone is gonna say is Anthem.
If Anthem is bad then I am going to riot.
I'm going to grab a pitchfork
and I'm going to the studio and I'm gonna stand there
and be like, "You guys fix it."
I'm gonna do it in a very non-threatening way.
I'm just gonna stand there
and it's gonna be a safety pitchfork,
there's gonna be little plastic things on top of it.
- [Danny] (laughs) Orange tips.
- [Steven] Yeah, orange tips on it.
I'm gonna have a peaceful vest on me
and just be like, "I just want you to fix the game."
- [Danny] Well you say you're a fan of stories,
does that mean, are you a fan of Dragon Age and Mass Effect,
the other BioWare games?
- [Steven] Oh yeah, oh my goodness.
Dragon Age: Origins is... (laughs)
So Dragon Age: Origins, I love it so much,
so anybody who really is a fan of mine may
have picked up my one and only book that I have out there
and if you look hard enough at the book,
you'll see that one of the main characters is actually
nearly directly pulled out of the Origins video game.
- [Danny] Oh, careful, this is fucking EA man! (laughs)
- [Steven] I did not steal their IP,
but that was like my main inspiration.
It was so good.
- [Danny] That's awesome.
- [Steven] It was like, you know,
the character and the everything just
was so great to me that I was like,
"I have to create my own version of this
and plug it in somewhere",
and I ended up doing that.
- [Danny] That's right, what's the name of the book?
Where can you get it?
- [Steven] It's a horrible book, you don't wanna go find it.
(laughter)
- [Danny] Hey man, I a 33 year old video game fan.
I don't read books, I just buy them
and put them on my shelf.
- [Steven] That's fair.
So the book is called The Finder.
You can get it on Amazon still.
I got it under my pen name, Steven Rome.
Honestly, I hired an editor but the editor
really kind of let me down so there's grammatical errors
and there's an audio book uploaded to it.
I really tried pretty hard and it sold actually pretty well.
So I've actually got a screenshot.
Back in the day, you could put your Amazon book
up to be downloaded for 72 hours for free
and I put it up to be downloaded for free
and it was downloaded as much as Game of Thrones was bought.
- [Danny] Oh wow.
- [Steven] So I've got picture of my book right beside
George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones.
(laughter)
- [Danny] That's rad.
Yeah I see it here, right here on Amazon.
Go pick it up everyone, 13.95 paperback, Amazon Prime,
you can have it by the time your next bowel movement comes,
that's the way Amazon works now, it's pretty good.
- [Steven] Yeah, if you need bad reading material, then...
It's so sad too, because it's one of those things.
It was a good story in my head
and then it's like you can tell
there's a certain point in there
that I just wanted the book to be done.
So I was just like, "You know what, I'm just done with it",
and it goes from a very slow-paced book to
"Alright, it's done."
- [Danny] Steven, I feel like people go their entire lives
trying to write their books so
do not kill, or kick yourself over the fact that
your first novel wasn't exactly what you needed it to be.
That's incredible.
Are you writing another one?
Are you looking to write another one?
Are you too busy with AbleGamers stuff?
- [Steven] You know, I am super busy,
but this is actually AbleGamers' 15th year.
So, as I was saying to you privately
when I agreed to come talk to you,
not only because we're good friends
and I wanted to help you launch this thing
and if three of my fans will come listen, that'd be great.
You know, its one of those things where
I'd like to get into the writing
and doing some of my own flights of fancy
that I've been putting on the back burner for so long
because I feel like after 15 years
I've put in a little bit of blood
and sweat into the cause and now maybe I can do
a couple of other things I wanna do
before the shot clock quite runs out.
- [Danny] Well, I think there'll be a lot of
people who would be interested in experiencing
whatever you put out there into the universe, so...
Let me tell you about this place called Patreon.com
and it lets people do their dreams and get funded
by the people who want to experience those dreams.
- [Steven] Really, I'd never heard of that, Danny!
Do you have one of those?
(laughter)
- [Danny] Steven, can I ask you some questions
from people who pay us money?
- [Steven] Nope!
I'm out of here, bye everybody.
(laughter)
- [Danny] Thank you to Steve for being here.
If you wanna get your questions in,
go to Patreon.com/Noclip.
If you're on the $5 tier you also get this podcast early.
You don't get it exclusively.
We had some people be like,
"Hey, I can't get the podcast"
and we had to be like, "No, you literally can't,
everything we do is available,
except the behind the scenes stuff".
But if you're on the $5 tier you get this
beautiful podcast early as well as a bunch of other stuff
and we put the word out for some questions,
we got a bunch of them.
I'm gonna ask about two or three of them here.
This one's from Matthew Glenn, he said,
"What accessibility feature should indies
and small teams prioritize when
hoping to be more accessible?"
Any come to mind?
- [Steven] You know, I think the thing about being an indie,
and I've had so many great conversations
with Rami about this,
indies have such a luxury of being flexible.
Being an indie developer is super hard, right?
It is back breaking work in a mental way.
It is blood, sweat, part of your soul going into this game
and here I am telling you you have to do even more.
To indie developers out there,
keep in mind everybody on the accessibility side
understands that you didn't need
one more thing to worry about,
but if you add things like re-mappable keys,
you add things like sliders for all of your settings,
or allowing people to edit the INI files
instead of keeping them hidden or encoded.
Allow people to move the game as much as they can,
without breaking your game or altering it, `
then let them play it your way and you'll have more sales
and you'll have happier customers.
It's interesting how some games tackled problems.
Let's take, for example, one of my favorite
indie games of 2018 called Raft.
Raft was a cool little indie game where
you basically were on a raft, spoiler!
You had to fish junk out of the ocean
and build a bigger, better raft that had
air conditioning somehow, I don't know.
It was a fun game but the settings
in it were bare and minimal
and when I reached out to say,
"Hey, I can't play your game because
the mouse sensitivity is very low,
you capped it barely above what you'd need to move the mouse
across the screen if you got an entire mousepad,
not to mention you don't have the ability to re-map,
you didn't have stuff like that.
And within two days they turned around;
they added the ability to map the mouse,
the added the ability to uncap the mouse sensitivity.
These are all things that don't
take developers a lot of time, but if you don't do them,
they can lock people out of your games.
I happen to be one of the people that gets caught up
in those times when you're alienated,
so I always recommend, you know,
do as much as you can with little effort
and things like adding settings and adding re-mapping
are often relatively easy,
nothing is "easy" in development,
but if you do it early in development cycle,
it's doable without too much cost.
- [Danny] Raymond Harris asked the question,
"Have you tried Microsoft's new accessibility controller,
if so, what do you like and dislike about it?
I mean you guys were involved in the whole
R and D aspect of that, is that correct?
- [Steven] I was privileged to be one of the people
that Microsoft pulled into it first.
Me and my co-worker Craig, we were the ones that
were asked to come sign some NDAs
and check this out on a low key,
'here's a tablet with a drawing on it because
our lawyers won't even allow you to look at the real
prototypes, so here's what it looks like' kind of thing.
Yeah and then from there we brought in AbleGamers
and we became an entire organization to help,
not just one or two of us, but everybody had a hand
in making this thing better,
so it was great to get to be a part of that
and it's honestly going to go down in my brain
as one of the highlights of my career.
I had a very small part in personally bringing about
a controller that is now available in freaking Walmart.
Well, technically the Microsoft Store, whatever.
Walmart, Microsoft Store, same difference.
I'm definitely not gonna get an angry message
from Microsoft PR tomorrow, its fine, right?
(laughter)
- [Danny] Matthew Rogers asked the question,
"Do you find that people with disabilities
often write off video games as a hobby
and don't realize that there are
organizations like AbleGamers out there?"
- [Steven] I do.
I think one of the things that my job has become
has been fighting against the stigma of being a gamer,
let alone having a disability,
so, in a lot of ways, 15 years ago when I got into this game
and when AbleGamers first started,
we were not only fighting for people with disabilities,
which, back in the early 2000s and early 90s,
was not as welcomed as it is now
and neither is being a gamer and both of those
had negative connotations on them.
If you were a gamer, you're lazy.
If you were disabled, you're lazy.
We had to fight all these stereotypes and yeah,
I think that there are so many companies out there who don't
even understand what we do, what I do
and my daily operations and what my company does
and what even is represented by
gamers with disabilities being a part of the world.
I don't know that everybody's quite yet aware.
I think we're making it so.
I think people like Danny are helping us
push the narrative into the mainstream
that it's not some little niche bunch of
people that just wanna play a couple of games,
but gamers with disabilities are everywhere.
People like Halfcoordinated who are out there
on the stage of Games Done Quick,
who are out there pushing, me being on award shows pushing.
I think we're all doing our parts
and I think everybody who is listening can
do their part by saying to their friends,
to their family whenever the situation comes up,
that people with disabilities
want to enjoy every hobby, including gaming.
I think it's gonna be interesting watching companies
get involved more and more as they figure this out.
- [Danny] We go back and look
at the commercials of the 90s,
where the prevalent idea of the teenage boy,
the white teenage boy, right?
The able-bodied, white teenage boy was the...
- [Steven] Straight, able-bodied, white teenage boy.
- [Danny] Yeah, lets keep going!
Eventually we'll find that gamer.
(laughter)
The one that gave birth to us all.
Do you find that accessibility
and people with disabilities have a place at the table now
in a way that they didn't five or 10 years ago,
or it is for people like you that are visible,
but for most people it's not?
- [Steven] Here's the thing.
I think that accessibility has come a long way
in a lot of ways thanks to the work that has been done
at AbleGamers and our allies
and our people that care about our narrative, right?
There's no question, accessibility is better.
Full stop, period, end of sentence.
However, to continue the conversation,
if you are not somebody that has a high profile,
you do not have as good of a chance of
things being made accessible quickly.
I am extremely privileged, in that if somebody
gets a hold of me and says,
"I can't play this game because of
this feature being in the way",
chances are I can get to a developer and say,
"Hey, is there something you can do about this?"
Sometimes they can do it quickly, sometimes they can't.
I've had developers literally, and I will not tell you who,
go behind their bosses back and find code
and tell me slash commands in engines to
get around the accessibility things
because the publisher didn't want to deal with the problem
and the developer cared enough that they were like,
"Just tell them to do this and it'll be fine."
Okay, cool, I am super privileged in that I can do that,
but there's not a lot of people
in my position that can do that
and I can't do that for every single person all the time.
Everybody at AbleGamers has their people that
they can turn to and they can make magic happen sometimes,
but there's only so many of us
and only so many hours in the day,
so you can't do that for everybody.
What happens if you're a gamer who can't play a certain game
and its because of a feature in a game
and there's nothing that can be done
until that feature is changed?
Well, you can tweet and you can email
and you can send a feedback report,
but you have to wait your turn, right?
So there's definitely a position of privilege
there for people like you and
me who are in the game industry
because we have the right ears.
We try to do that honorably.
Danny and I try to use our power for good.
At least I do, Danny, I don't know...
- [Danny] No, no, honestly please don't even say
us both in the same sentence because you
give me credit that I do not deserve.
The work that you've done is literally
changing people's lives.
Maybe I'm making people smile a little bit,
but you're doing some work that is really
affecting people in incredibly important ways.
- [Steven] I think we all have
a different part to play though.
I think that everybody who's listening
has their part to play.
This magnification of positivity that I have turned
my "brand" into, if you will,
is 100% honesty and compassion.
We're all playing a part.
I think anybody who's listening to the 75 minutes
of this that we've done so far is doing their part by
absorbing this information that they might not have known,
about the struggles of people with disabilities.
They may not have known that these are problems and issues.
Now they can watch out for them.
Now they can be an advocate.
But, to get back to the original question,
you do everything that you can
and I think that we're in a position that we can
make as much change for as many people as we possibly can,
but I think that there are
minority groups who are very vocal.
The LGBT community which, of course, I support
and Blacks in Gaming is one of my favorite GDC groups.
I support every minority I can
because I know my own struggles
and while I may not know theirs,
I know how difficult mine were and I can imagine
and empathize with their struggles
and I try to amplify where I can.
The problem that I always find,
and it breaks my heart, is that I'll see people
that I respect so much in the industry,
tweeting about how we need to
support races, genders and sexualities
and then they'll leave out disability
and I don't understand why we're still not putting
disability on the same level as these other minorities.
Because guaranteed every single one of those groups,
there's also people with disabilities within that group.
So I would like to see when we're all unifying a bit more,
to say that my LGBT friends who are disabled need support,
my black friends, my latino friends need support.
We are all in this together and I think that
if we continue to amplify each other,
we'll make this battle just a little bit easier.
- [Danny] Is that why you make yourself so public?
Like, you talked about your brand, right?
You don't strike me, I'm not gonna bullshit you,
you don't strike me as someone who suffers fools,
you've got an incredibly intelligent head on your shoulders
and you talk about this like feel-good brand
that's really really important.
Do you have to be watchful of people
who would try to utilize that for their own optics?
Like who would try and manipulate
or would try and use the feel-good narrative
to make their brand look good
and then ultimately not really invest in your mission
in a way that is substantive?
- [Steven] Oh, absolutely.
It is a hard and fast rule at my place of work,
that no one with a disability is to
do work without being compensated in some way.
It does not have to financial because sometimes
the government frowns upon that kind of thing,
so maybe someone who is on government assistance
can't take a payment because then
that could endanger their insurance,
and that we would feel horrible about,
so instead maybe they get a copy of the game.
Maybe they get a free tablet.
Maybe a new webcam, who knows?
It's that you don't use people.
You utilize their skills, you utilize their experiences,
you do not use them.
And I think that's something you have to watch out for,
and again, just anybody who has followed me so far,
or if you plan on following me,
Danny knows all too well that
I am a lover but I'm also a fighter.
If I see an injustice, I will strap on a sword
and I'll go to town.
I have no problem with picking up the battleax
and running into the fight.
I am not somebody who thinks the world is rose colored
and we can just all love each other
because that's the right thing to do.
I think sometimes there comes a time
where all people must fight.
- [Danny] And whenever the battle happens,
I'll be, hopefully, standing right beside you,
swinging my morning star as well.
(laughter)
Steven Spohn, an absolute pleasure
to talk to you as ever, my friend.
Where can people follow your work?
What are you up to?
Where can they consume your delicious content?
- [Steven] (laughs) I don't want that
advertisement on my phone.
My most active place right now is Twitter.
I find it's the best place to amplify
positive messages to fight some of the darkness;
you can find me @StevenSpohn
and you can find me on Twitch at
the acronym that is my name: SteveInSpawn,
like the comic book character,
and I stream on twitch five days a week,
just trying to showcase that people with disabilities
are out there and we're not innocent snow flowers
that don't so anything but sit around and watch TV.
We're out there playing games,
we make dick jokes and we're funny and inappropriate
and we're just human beings like everyone else
and I'd encourage anyone that has a disability
that happens to be listening to the amazing Danny O'Dwyer,
that you too should go out and live your life
as visibly as you can because that's the
only way that we're gonna change the world.
- [Danny] Steven, thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
We'd love to have you back on if you're
up for it again in the future.
- [Steven] I'd be more than happy, Danny.
Thanks for having me.
- [Danny] No problem.
Thank you, as well, for listening,
everyone out there.
We don't know who's up next week,
but if you follow @NoClipVideo on the Twitters,
you'll get an update over there.
I'm @DannyODwyer on Twitter.
If you have any feedback or any ideas for guests,
you can also hit up our sub-Reddit, r/Noclip,
or if you're a patron there is always
a Patreon post you can just jump into,
or hit us up on the DMs.
The podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher,
Google Play, the whole sha-bang.
Anywhere podcasts are sold, stick 'noclip'
in there and hopefully we'll pop up.
We also have a new YouTube channel as well.
If you type 'noclip podcast' into YouTube,
we'll get that short URL soon enough,
but until then if you hit that up,
you'll be able to watch, slash,
I mean 'watch', it's just a static image,
pretty much with some gameplay in the background,
but it's up there on YouTube.
We also have full transcriptions as well.
We don't talk about it very often.
We do closed captions on all of our videos,
but we actually also provide full transcriptions of the docs
if you go to our Libsyn page, so that's like
noclippodcast.libsyn.com and there's a link in all the
descriptions no matter how you're listening to this
and you can go check that out as well.
Patrons get the show early.
$5 if they're on the $5 tier.
Thank you to them for making this ad-free
and making it possible in the first place.
Patreon.com/Noclip if you're interested in that.
I hope, wherever you are, this finds you well.
I hope you're enjoying some video games
and we look forward to talking to you again
on the next edition of the Noclip podcast, next week.
See you then.
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