Union activities

As a member of the labor union SAG-AFTRA, in 2015, Elmaleh voted in favor of strike action by video game voice actors against eleven video game developers and publishers to receive compensation through residuals in addition to other requests on working conditions.^[13][14] She participated in the strike,^[15] which began in October 2016, following failed contract negotiations with publishers through the previous year,^[16] and lasted until 2017.^[15] In late October 2018, the union released a contract which addressed the issues of compensation and working conditions for unionized voice actors, motion-capture performers, and singers, and also provided a way for actors to work on small game productions under the union. The agreement was developed through a two-year process led by voice actors including Elmaleh, Crispin Freeman, Jennifer Hale, and Courtenay Taylor.^[17][18] Elmaleh told Gamasutra at the time: "The only apprehension I had in joining the union was missing out on this whole burgeoning space of ambitious artistic expression. Coming out of indies and loving them, and not wanting to lose them as I scale up."^[18] Elmaleh voice acted under the new contract in the 2018 titles Where the Water Tastes Like Wine by Good Shepherd Entertainment and Exapunks by Zachtronics.^[18]

In 2018, Elmaleh, Jennifer Hale, and Cissy Jones created Specialized Workshops And Actor Tactics (SWAAT), a free service to improve video game scripts held with the Los Angeles-based company The Halp Network. Although actors involved with SWAAT were members of the SAG-AFTRA union, SWAAT did not require the game developer's project be under the union.^[19][20]

Elmaleh was chair of SAG-AFTRA's Interactive Media bargaining unit when the union voted in September 2023 to authorize a possible strike against video game companies, amid a strike by SAG-AFTRA's film and television actors alongside one by the Writers Guild of America.^[21] Elmaleh and fellow bargaining unit member Zeke Alton said they were interested in securing workplace measures that were, according to Polygon, "standard elsewhere in Hollywood — five-minute breaks per hour, for instance."^[22] In 2024, after SAG-AFTRA made an agreement with Replica Studios to allow union members to manage a digitally replicated version of their voices generated by artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, Elmaleh stated she had "always been one of the more conservative voices" on the topic of AI voice clones, but now felt more "agnostic".^[23]

gamedev.world

Elmaleh previously worked "game-maker relations" for the IndieCade games festival, a position in which she says she acted as the "single bottleneck" between the festival and participating game developers. She recalled meeting a game developer at her job who struggled to communicate with her in English, which motivated her to meet game developer Rami Ismail after reading a blog post by Ismail on language barriers in the video game industry.^[24] Ismail and Elmaleh eventually organized the online, multilingual games conference gamedev.world in 2019, supported by an advisory board made from Gwen Frey, Houssem Ben Amor and Gabriel Dal Santo,^[25][26] in order to "diversify" the video game industry.^[27] The conference features a series of presentations by developers broadcast with closed captioning and translations in eight languages.^[25][26] It followed an initial showcase of the format organized by Ismail and Elmaleh for the 2015 Games for Change Festival held in New York City.^[27]