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CraveOnline: Is it more about the games or the controllers?

Robert Florio: I think a combination of both. It's not really only one thing because the controllers, you might have two or three buttons you have to push at the same time. I guess with the game you could just design it so that it only requires one but if there's eight inputs on one controller, that's eight too many that I can't push because I can't push any of them holding the controller. They're just getting more and more complicated. Even the arcade joysticks are almost impossible, some of them, because they're not analog compatible. When you push the button on the controller, those are designed that you have to go a certain distance and then wait for the click, like for fighting games specifically. When I bought the last controller for the arcade control, my hand kept slipping off of it because I don't have finger movement and I was just resting my arms on it. My arm was getting tired and I was using them to push the buttons and program certain functions in in one button so I would do a certain punch or something like that. There's a lot of combos out there you can do. You can either come up with different simpler controllers or just make the games much more easier to make selections.

CraveOnline: What's the longest marathon gaming session you can do with your abilities?

Robert Florio: The longest I think I've been able to do is probably three hours and that's with the mouth controller. For example, I play a lot of the Matrix games. That's my favorite game or I'll play football or the game I started playing recently, it came out a couple years ago called Drake of the 99 Dragons. I was playing that game, my mouth was just getting exhausted because it was rubbing raw. For two or three days straight, I wasn't able to play because I just couldn't touch the mouth controller with my mouth anymore. My arm, when I was using the arcade joystick, it would get fatigued and then I couldn’t lift my arm up anymore. I had to let someone lift it up for me and then it would fall over. So maybe two hours straight, three hours straight. Then it would just be completely hard to push forward, left and right, unless I had my elbow supported in a special way.

CraveOnline: What has been the reception to your ideas in the gaming industry?

Robert Florio: Good. Like "Yeah, that's great" but nobody else really is going to jump in and say, "Let's do it" unless there's more than one person supporting the idea. I think that it's such a foreign idea right now that the industry just hasn't had any examples. I think one of the biggest issues is just having a programming language available. I know David Perry mentioned recently, just speaking with him, Mark Hauser who wrote that story about wanting someone out there just to write the acceptable programming so that developers could just use them. I think it's a lot more than that. I think you need to understand what the function is for. Once you understand what kind of function you need to make, you can make your own coding. It's a lot more difficult to just say, "Oh, here's programming that does autotargeting. Let's use that." Well, maybe you need autotargeting but at the same time, your guy has a special weapon that only works with a certain button. Then what do you do? I know, it sounds pretty straightforward just to find the key to your program and get someone to do it. Then we can use them but I don't know too much about programming. I know a lot about the game part of production, stuff like that.

CraveOnline: Aren't they at least interested in making more money?

Robert Florio: That's another approach that I've been trying to make with my friends also from the IGDA, the IGD special interest group for accessibility. I became a member with them for three or four years now. I might go back to the conference in California again this year to help them out. But yeah, we've taken that approach. Basically, they just don't know the statistics. People want to know, "Okay, how many people out there have disabilities? Is it really going to make our market more extendable?" In my understanding, companies are not willing to invest the extra money it takes to develop a feature that they're not sure will work and they don't know how many people will actually use it. To me, it's a no brainer because it's only a human flaw that we injure ourselves. I was kind of surprised that game developers themselves aren't thinking in the back on what if something happened to me and I couldn't play my own games? I think right now the industry is just looking at what everyone else is doing and saying, "Oh, let's just keep doing that because it's working."