"No Results Found" - Why I Started AbleGamers

I'm a huge MMORPG fan. In the early days, I played every single one that came out. My first was EverQuest, a dark-elf necromancer out of Neriak, grinding reputation by killing lions just so I could reach the next town without being attacked on sight.

I also had a superpower: my best friend Stephanie, going all the way back to middle school, played the same game. Unlike me, her disability kept her home most of the time, and she was very high level. That's right, I had a sugar mamma. Her husband Albert, a good friend I'd met while on Active Duty in the Air Force (they were married because I connected them), started his own dark-elf and joined me in the grind, with our high-level guardian waiting whenever our hubris outpaced our gear.

In the early 2000s there were so many great MMORPGs to enjoy. My personal favorites were Asheron's Call and Dark Age of Camelot, I still have real-life friends I first met in those worlds. When EverQuest 2 launched, it became everything. Stephanie, Albert, my husband Michael, and I all started together.

Michael and I were outside Washington, D.C. Steph and Al (he was still still Active Duty), lived in North Las Vegas, nearly 2,000 miles between us. But we met in Norrath, and the miles would vanish. Every Friday evening, the four of us put on our headphones, logged into Ventrilo, and did what good friends do: ran dungeons, worked quests, farmed drops, and caught up on life. We talked about this and that. We were together.

Long before AbleGamers was an idea, video games were how I stayed connected with the people I loved. Talented developers had built spaces where I could share a tavern in Freeport or Riverdale regardless of where any of us were in the real world. I had friends in Texas and Nunavut. I connected with Germans who were learning English through play. And sometimes it was just me and Michael, sitting in the same room, headsets on, together in a way that somehow felt even closer.

Just like in EQ1, Steph was a power player. She had a high-level main and played an alt with us on Fridays. She was a matriarch of the server. She knew everyone, and everyone knew her.

Steph has a disability. In 2000, she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. I've always said that if you meet ten people with MS, you meet ten people with ten different disabilities. It can affect your ability to walk, your vision, your hearing, all of the above, or none. Steph had good days and bad days. Treatment options at the time were limited. You got what you got and hoped for the best.

I was a person with a disability myself. The Air Force had discharged me, they broke me, as I've always put it, but whatever they took, it never touched my hands, never touched my ability to sit down at a computer and disappear into a game. I was lucky in that specific way. Steph wasn't. And I don't think I fully understood what that difference meant until the night it mattered.

One Friday in 2004, Michael and I did what we always did. We ate dinner, cleaned up, and booted up the computer. We jumped into Vent and waited for the familiar digital voice to announce "Camilia has entered the channel," the sound that meant the evening had officially begun.

And we waited.

Five minutes became ten. Ten became fifteen.

I took off my headset and called.

Albert answered. His voice was off. In the background, I could hear Steph crying.

"What's wrong?"

He told me she wasn't feeling well. That we wouldn't be playing tonight. I pressed. He explained that MS had decided, that afternoon, to take away the use of her right hand, her mousing hand. She couldn't use her computer.

I hung up and told Michael what had happened. I couldn't wrap my head around it, that a disability could just decide, on a Friday afternoon, to take my best friend away from me. All four of us had built something in those Friday nights. Something real. The thought of losing it hurt in a way I wasn't prepared for.

But I am a problem solver. I turn emotions into actions. So I opened a browser.

There was no Google then, only Yahoo. I typed in "Disabilities & Video Games," certain the internet had already solved this, that I just needed to find the answer. It hadn't. There was nothing. No resources, no community, no field. Game accessibility did not exist.

I registered AbleGamers.com that night. By the end of the weekend, a rudimentary website was live.

A Note Before I Continue

I'll write more about the early days of AbleGamers in the pieces ahead. What I wanted to capture here is simpler: where the mission came from.

It came from a Friday night. From a phone ringing. From my friend crying in the background because her hand had stopped working and, just like that, every character she'd built, every friend she'd made, every world she'd lived in, gone. Not someday. That afternoon.

MS comes in waves. After about a week, she regained use of her hand. We kept playing together for years, every Friday, in a world made of magic.

But I never forgot what it felt like to search for help and find nothing. I never wanted anyone who was facing the same nightmare to be met with “No Results Found.”

That's the whole story, really. That's where this started.