The Fedex package arrived at Mark Barlet’s home in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, on Christmas Eve 2016. He opened the box and gingerly pulled out a sleek black-and-white device with two large buttons: a prototype for the new Xbox Adaptive Controller. He touched the logo and tears came to his eyes. “I couldn’t believe it,” Barlet tells me. “I said to myself, ‘We fucking did it.’ ”
Barlet, 44, is a disabled Air Force veteran. He injured his spinal cord in 1996 at Andrews Air Base in Maryland. He can walk, but he suffers from chronic pain. One evening in 2004, he was at home playing the multiplayer game EverQuest II with a friend in Nevada who has MS. “Suddenly, her right hand just stopped working,” Barlet recalls. She didn’t regain mobility for months. Deeply affected by the experience, Barlet started emailing and calling game companies to ask about modified controllers and other assistive tech. What he learned was discouraging. Few major gaming companies had even considered developing consoles for players with restricted movement. Later that year, Barlet founded AbleGamers, an organization that advocates for accessible gaming options.
Disabled gamers are a very real, very vocal demographic: AbleGamers estimates that there are more than 30 million of them in the US. But across all systems, videogame controllers are configured more or less the same: two thumbsticks, a D-pad, and a slew of buttons. Increasingly complex gameplay—think popular shooters like Call of Duty or fast-paced action games like Assassin’s Creed—often necessitates rapid-fire button combinations, like tapping one repeatedly while pressing another, or moving both thumbsticks simultaneously. Motion controls, like those required for Nintendo’s upcoming Pokémon: Let’s Go games, are another challenge altogether.
