A Glow-Up For Our Awareness From Elizabeth Plant of Glowmade - and fellow G.G Volunteer!
Interview & words by Hugh Wybourne
Today I’ve been given the pleasure of having a chat with Elizabeth Plant, Community Manager from Glowmade and extremely talented independent voice actor. Last month, she put together a number of interviews and articles highlighting queer voices within the voice acting and voiceover community for Glowmade’s website. The interviews are a great read, and so we highly recommend you check them out alongside the new series she’s just started releasing. Evidently, Lizzy cares a lot about bringing attention to the voices that need amplifying and has focused her time talking with and about disabled creators within the industry.
We love all the work that she does and - as making some noise on the behalf of the people we are proud of is kind of our whole gig - we wanted to talk to Lizzy herself and get to know how her personal story and experiences fit into this larger discussion. Also, she’s a fellow G.G volunteer and so we figured it would be fun to let her have the spotlight this time!
Once we started talking we leapt pretty much immediately into the core of her relationship with disability and how it affects her work and lifestyle.
How does your condition manifest in your life?
EP: I lead conversations about my disability by talking about my ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis) also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. It's a constant malaise of fatigue I've had since I was a small child, and that defined a lot of what I physically and emotionally could do; which is what led me to theatre. It was the one way I could feel like a normal kid. Having everyone cheering at the end of the show meant a lot, because it was recognition that I wasn't a wallflower and deserved to be seen. So that led to me studying theatre at uni and for my masters degree, but then covid hit and theatre got buggered.
I'd written my dissertation on how video games and theatre are essentially the same world, because they're both reliant on the live and tangible audience interaction with the piece, and I fell deeper in love with gaming. Trying to make games was what led me to now being community manager at Glowmade. But I'm also a freelance voice actor, because that is a means for me to continue performing and maintain agency over my body and my schedule and not physically burn myself out too much. It’s usually all remote and self-directed, so I can really focus on performance as a mode of normalcy.
Chronic Fatigue is something that generally I have a good handle of now but it's a very unpredictable mistress - in that at any given time my body can just stop. It just gives up for weeks at a time, and I think I've gotten good at balancing it and masking as a ‘normal person’ quote-unquote. I think that’s because a lot of what I do for Glowmade is extremely creative and primarily directed by myself. With Community Management, it's usually one person doing whatever they want as long as it gets results, and I think that works very well for me; I'm essentially the arbiter of what my schedule is, and I can pace myself accordingly, which I really appreciate.
I think it's an excellent position for people who are like me, living with a chronic illness, because a lot of it is down to you and managing yourself and your own expectations. I'm very happy with what I do in the studio and they are very accepting and accessibility-forwards as a company. The reason I do so much of what I'm now pushing for, in terms of representation and expanding into journalism with articles, is half because a lot of people don't really think about these things when it comes to game development and the smaller everyday struggles of certain unseen disabilities and experiences.
We talked about the experiences that her condition prevented her from committing to, and how she’s found so much now that she can do. We talked about the stories of horrendous crunch work and deadline shifting that hammers away at people’s ability to get the job well, and how these environments are not sustainable even for the average percentile:
In what ways do you think the industry’s high expectations for its creators is naturally excluding for the disabled workers within it?
EP: Well, the mass-layoffs for instance are coming from the unfair expectations of the 1% at the very top of the companies. The conglomerate expects certain dividends and paybacks for everything that they're investing into, but that also needs to mesh with the unfair expectations of players who want things in a certain time frame - and they often refuse to wait, so the crunch sort of feels inevitable. Then the Gameplay Engineers and the Developers all expect certain things of the game and they sometimes get let down through development, because they have to meet the expectations of all these different things. Their own perspective then gets hampered, as they can't ship the game that they want to, because now they have to navigate a million barriers and God it's exhausting even for able-bodied people.
There are many well-documented accounts of developers living in complicated relationships with consumers that balance strong support against high expectations - which goes beyond the corporate need for profit above all. As Lizzy says, this is extremely difficult to manage even for the able-bodied and realistically most of these goals are entirely abstract and impossible to predict.
Is there an instilled sense of self-competition within each individual in these places to always succeed against these moving goal posts and impossible to measure statistics?
EP: I think there has to be, because with any art form these days, unfortunately, it is a competition a lot of the time. There are so many incredible creative people out there and only so many opportunities that I think we are allowed to present, and that leads to fewer risks being taken in terms of the type of storytelling we're making. That's how we keep ending up with sequel after sequel, because it is a numbers game when it comes to audience reception. People can't produce things that are soulful or can take a long time because you have to churn through all of your creative fire at once to get a game out.
The discussion came back to art and expression frequently, and we talked more about the ability to express yourself despite the societal, economical, and physical restraints present.
Do you think then that art will naturally allure people who don't inherently fit into the able-bodied assumption of needing to give up so much of yourself for ‘greater’ work?
EP: Absolutely, I so firmly believe in art being the thing that unites and connects everyone regardless of experience, because everybody has different tastes and experiences. All movements in art have their place, and they came about because of a reason, and there was a real human behind them. So regardless of what you're into, games and art and theatre and music can touch all kinds of different stories just through experiencing them. I think naturally all kinds of people, especially ones who are marginalised and don't feel understood or seen everyday, will gravitate towards things that represent the imaginary and the fictional that are made by human hands because art is a thing that inherently you can understand.
They can also be more physically attainable than, say, chasing an office job. There are ways that you can make art mould to you, whereas if you want an office job you have to be able to access the building, you have to be able to fit around the schedule. There are barriers for entry even just for basic everyday jobs where you think “This is the most generic job, it can’t possibly be considered difficult by anyone” for instance, but some can't. Meanwhile, anyone can find an art form that works for them.
We also discussed how a lot of the issues that disabled workers face in the industry more so than any sort of reactionary hatred or dismissal was the simple problem of a lack of understanding. Amongst many types of people, there is an assumption of ability or understanding that simply doesn’t apply as universally as it is made out to be. Unfortunately, a lot of people are forced to amend their behaviour and ‘mask’ their otherwise usual self for the sake of avoiding creating situations that might be perceived by others as obstacles.
Do you think people underestimate the toll that long-term masking can have on somebody?
EP: I think so much of what the general person comes to understand about disability in their lifetime is this very visual conception of what a disabled person looks like. It's the same with gender ideology and sexuality, thinking “I can clearly tell that that is a female presenting person, they don't look gay, they don't look disabled, they still have both their legs” for instance. So much of the time in the media you will see this very specific representation of what disability is. For instance, most of the iconography in everyday sight for disability is a wheelchair. If you go on the tube or you get on a bus the spot designated for it is a person in a wheelchair.
I don't have a wheelchair. I have a chronic illness that makes it impossible to stand for more than an hour or two before I start collapsing. But, if you see me on the tube for instance, and I desperately need the disabled space - if I'm aching and I'm begging to sit down - I get filthy looks for being this degenerate young woman who's just lazy. So much of it comes down to people not being willing to move beyond their own preconceptions of what things should be. There is a lot of closed-mindedness, especially in a post-Brexit world and economy where everything is a little bit up the spout everywhere in terms of everything.
When it comes to masking, I'm a very extroverted person who just likes to make people laugh and goes about as if I'm a normal regular person who just happens to get more tired much easier than most people. The only things that I really mask are like, instead of responding to people asking how I’m doing with “Oh I'm terrible, I slept awfully, I have this going on and I have that going on and my body's shutting down” instead it’s: “I'm okay, just a bit tired”. There's so much that I could say about how awful I physically feel that I'm not gonna ruin someone's day with. Trying not to be a nuisance, trying not to be a stereotype. I think people vastly underestimate how draining it is to try and perform an acceptable and understandable form of disability. Back to being on the tube, I'll feign a limp sometimes to make it look like I deserve the seat and that feels bad morally and I feel really insecure when I have to do that. Thank god I don't live in London anymore where I have to do that.
Lizzy also told me about content she had made during International Women’s Month celebrations, how she had put so much effort into that - and more recently with promoting queer voices and educating people on disability - and how little engagement that content gets compared to other things; and how disappointing that was. There seems to be a critical lack of understanding and empathy with some of these issues. Nonetheless, people generally do want to learn more and do better and improve, knowledge of these things helps everyone and increases happiness and productivity all around.
What can other studios and individuals do or be aware of to try and promote this further?
EP: I really tried to emphasise when I did my diversity panel at Guildford.Games Fest, people stop trying when things start “working.” It's not like everything's on an even playing field, it literally never will be until we finally force it to be. You need to allow yourself to be conscious of the people that are around you in order to then listen to them and understand them. It is up to you to make safe spaces for your employees who are black or brown or queer, trans, disabled, or neurodivergent. It is up to you to educate yourself on those matters.
It is not our responsibility to teach you the ins and outs like we just went over for 45 minutes. I don't know half the things myself about living with chronic fatigue, and understanding my place in the disabled community, so it is not up to me to educate you. The onus is on people who are hiring and working with their colleagues. If you genuinely want to even the playing field, give yourself that education and understanding to create those safe spaces to then know how to build processes that work for everyone. Especially in game development, because you don't know who wants to pick up that controller and there are so many incredible varieties of people that play video games.
A player might have prosthetic limbs or psychosis or something - there's so many disabilities out there that manifest in so many different ways. I've never seen anyone with chronic fatigue or something even remotely similar to what I go through represented in games. Give me a game with a character with endometriosis for instance; that would have fit right in in Bloodborne, which is all about femininity and motherhood. Even when a character has a prosthetic limb, for instance, it's almost always framed as this great boon to the character because now they have a tool that lets them do loads of things. Think about Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice; when Wolf loses his arm, does he grieve it? No, he has a cool slingshot thing now. Like, it’s not disabled him, it’s made him stronger and that's not the experience for a lot of people. It doesn't mean anything for disabled representation if it's objectively a good thing that he had his arm chopped off.
Lizzy and I found we each had so much to say about the patronising half-inclusions of different identities in media and the importance of portraying them realistically to help people get a better understanding. We fundamentally agreed that at the end of the day, something we can all do is just be aware that these people exist and their day-to-day lives are going to be different. Lizzy cares so passionately about this, and she will always bang the drum for the people who deserve it the most, and she has a lot more of that coming up soon:
Can you tell us about some of the work you have planned for this month?
EP: Yeah absolutely, I’m having a general discussion with various people like Dom Shaw who's from UKIE and Jess Molloy who's just joined Glowmade on general representation of disability in gaming and the ways that people can work with disabled developers to incorporate that into games. A third of all gamers in the UK and US are disabled or identify as disabled or neurodivergent in some way. That is a third of our audiences who experience a barrier of some kind, and it will only worsen the numbers game and return on investments to continue to exclude them. When you think about accessibility settings in games, those things aren't generally baked into the game and the experience, and the ways that we tell stories and represent disabled people as characters. I want to unpack that with people who are seemingly leading the Guildford and UK scene.
Secondly I plan on doing a sort of group conversation with my fellow disabled and neurodivergent community managers about being the face of a studio and a company whilst also being a minority. People have a lot of notions about what disabled people are or what we're like or what we can even physically do, and community managers do a lot! We're kind of unsung heroes in the scene and I have so much respect for everything that community managers do, when able to create content off their own backs, because there's not a lot of scope to collaborate with other departments because everyone's so busy all the time. I think community managers are absolutely wonderful and I love seeing the conversations that they can spark, and I think it's really important for us to share and be proud of!
There was so much more we talked about but we’ll have to close that off here. Hopefully you can get a sense of how important this topic is and how much it means to all us here at G.G. If you want to learn more, then definitely check out Lizzy’s previous interviews for pride month and keep an eye out for the disability-themed work she’s doing now - the first of which should already be live! We want to thank her again for her time and wish her and the rest of the team at Glowmade all the best in the future!