the Remarkable Life Of Ibelin- A Love Letter To Those Gamer Friends You’ve Never Met
Quick Take: The Warcraft doc of the year, available now on Netflix, talks about a player who was disabled, and found his online family through gaming, only to sadly pass away. It made me think a lot about being a gamer, and when someone you’ve known for sometime as a gamer tag just disappears, you wonder why. Before going blind, I played a ton of online games, and had a rich base of friends I’d never met. Some of us had exchanged real life information, so we could text each other, and were open Facebook, but I still hadn’t actually met these players. Even with over 10 years of online friendship, the best we got was online streaming videos. then, my diagnosis came, and I played as long as I could. Most of my friends knew my condition, and then one day I just stopped. Part of it was that I didn’t know how to activate the screen reader right away on my XBOX, but I could no longer see to navigate the screen. So I never said goodbye to a lot of people. Then, I took a long break. The only people I had left were the ones who had my cell, and over the course of years, keeping up with the blind guy who seemingly will never be able to join in again is an upkeep. I just wished my last friend from just online gaming a Merry Christmas just a little over a week ago, and didn’t get a response back. Our texts, the length of time to reply, had been getting further and further apart.
So to say this documentary hit me in the feels, yeah. It did. While gaming is starting to figure out what accessibility for the blind means, we are a little ways off from me being able to jump back into the first person shooter games I played, or trying to stay alive in Call Of Duty zombies, or dodging rocket launchers in GTA.
To learn the story of Ibelin is to watch a community mourn the loss of one of its own. I think we’d all like to think, as gamers, if we stop playing, people would notice. But, certainly not to the extent this man impacted those around him. If you were ever a gamer, this will hit you in the feels. Hard. For more, check out my video.
