Most triumph over adversity stories are boring tales of people who learn to overcome their disabilities to do to do things most people don't care about to begin with. But imagine if you were so injured that you couldn't even play video games. Robert Florio was paralyzed in an accident at 14. Not only did he learn to play video games with his mouth, but now he has graduated from design school online and aims to develop more accessible games for the community. There's a movie of the week they should make. You can read more at his website, http://www.robertflorio.com and go deeper in this exclusive interview.

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CraveOnline: How long after your injury were you able to start playing games again?

Robert Florio: I think I started playing games again a couple years after my injury. I just started playing with the arcade joystick, Playstation 1.

CraveOnline: So not that long without a gaming fix?

Robert Florio: Maybe two or three years at the most.

CraveOnline: What were the best games at that time you were able to play?

Robert Florio: It was the golf games like Tiger Woods, the baseball games. I started playing a little bit with the first Tony Hawk game. Back then, when the Playstation first came out, the games were easier to play because you didn't need two dual controllers, two dual analog controllers to do a lot of the functions.

CraveOnline: And those sports games have a lot of pauses so you can catch up?

Robert Florio: Yes, exactly. There's a lot of lag time in between setting up and the next function. It makes it a lot easier.

CraveOnline: But Tony Hawk is a huge jump.

Robert Florio: That's one of those things where you just wish that you can play it and then you start pushing certain buttons to jump and it maxes up your ollie as high as you can so that you can make a trick.

CraveOnline: What is the plan for more accessible options in today's games?

Robert Florio: I think that the plan for today's games would be to simplify the selections and make it more user friendly, a lot smaller learning curves and make it so that it's not so complicated to make tons of selections. Simple things really make it a lot easier to do. One of the most dramatic things would be in my opinion, changing the way games are played with controllers. A big example is the Nintendo Wii. Nintendo Wii is kind of revolutionizing the way games are made. I kind of envision in the future that maybe someday I'll design a certain kind of controller that will really catch on and everyone can use and there won't be an issue anymore of accessibility because it was designed for everyone to level the playing field.

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."

CraveOnline: You play a lot of movie-based games. Are those games more accessible to you?

Robert Florio: Not exactly make them easier. Maybe they're more of an escape for me I guess. For me, it's more of an emotional relationship. I've got a lot of functional loss and when I watch a movie, I feel like I'm even more stimulated by playing the game of the movie. For me, that's why I gravitate to those kind of games more. For design-wise, a lot of them are kind of similar. You have a couple of super powers that you can push and activate them kind of easily. The X-Men games I've been playing recently, you know the X-Men Legends game. A lot of them, you have to push two buttons at the same time to activate the super power, so actually now that I think about it, I think that those kind of games are actually more difficult because you have more than one ability you have to activate. They usually give you a weird combo. It's usually some kind of weird button pressing to make it work.

CraveOnline: What systems do you own?

Robert Florio: I have a PC, I have Xbox and I have Playstation 2 and I have a Gamecube. I haven't been able to afford the next generation ones yet but looking at Nintendo Wii is the one I want to play the most. It looks like I might be able to use it but I don't know how much dexterity it'll take. Maybe I could strap it to my hand but that feels kind of weird.

CraveOnline: So your arms move enough to use the wireless controllers?

Robert Florio: I don't know yet. I'll have to see if I can use it or not. I think I might be able to but I don't know about the buttons.

CraveOnline: What games do you feel you're missing out on the most?

Robert Florio: I think I'm missing out a lot on the first person shooters and a lot of the Tom Clancy games I really want to play. The World War II games I miss out a lot on. Definitely Halo 2. I want to get into that. I think that I miss out on that. It's just not a whole lot of fun when I can't actually aim the gun and shoot and look around. It gets really tiring too and it disconnects me from the experience of immersion that a lot of gamers thrive on. Kind of like you're in the game, you're in full control for me. I have to stop, hit a switch, look around and then I'm dead in the water if someone's shooting at me. Hit another switch to run away and my camera angle's all screwed up. So that's kind of the things I really miss.

CraveOnline: They don't have easy mode like Goldeneye did anymore?

Robert Florio: No, very early games used to have all of it, with all the targeting because there wasn't another analog stick for Playstation 1.

CraveOnline: Do you have a full time job in gaming now?

Robert Florio: I haven't gotten a job yet. That's my next step. I'm actually interested in Big Huge Games, also Bethesda Games and Breakaway Games. I actually spoke at a Games for Health conference in Baltimore and this lady who worked there, she was in the audience so I got a hold of her. They're starting a game division and they want me to be part of it I think. I've been working with Acclaim for several months now. I'm working with them now more ever since graduation, as a volunteer thing. If you go to Acclaim.com, you'll see Top Secret. David Perry's directing it so that's a big challenge. It's a real busy industry. It's really tough from start to finish doing a game because with Top Secret, the funnest part was starting the game. Now we're in the middle part of it doing all the little tiny parts. That's exciting too to see happen but it takes a lot of dedication and I guess a lot of money.