Positive Disability Representation in Gaming — The Genesis of Big Karma

We were waiting in the parking lot for the concierge to give us the keys to the locker-rooms so that we could play our weekly football match among friends. All of a sudden, Hedi Thabet, my phenomenal best buddy who plays with us despite his leg amputation — and who also happens to practice Kung Fu — got bored of chatting around. For no particular reason, he started twirling on one leg, while performing attack moves against imaginary enemies with his crutches high in the air. For a split second, I saw Ninja Gaiden on one leg with crutches.

At first, the gameplay-twists that such a different character would offer appealed to me the most. I didn’t quite immediately realize the more important implications of this vision. In fact, I’ve lazily let the idea percolate within me for a good decade before even doing anything about it professionally…. Until someone in my private life profoundly changed who I am and how I look at the world.

Raising Ariana first changed my heart, then opened my eyes. Ariana has congenital disorders with no formal diagnosis to date (it’s what medicine refers to as an orphan disease). She’s uniquely different. And in her first few years of life, I saw her endure a profound amount of suffering. So much so that today, seeing her smile, laugh, or dance excitedly to a beat makes her the engine of our family unit. She made me approach Joy and Happiness from a much more fundamental angle. Joy being the purpose of video games, it gave me a new appreciation for my craft, too. She also led me to spend a lot of time in clinics and symposiums, talking to doctors and other parents of children with disabilities. For all the support we would get from the health care system when it comes to survival and dealing with the medical aspects of our kids’ conditions, as a gaming marketing dude, something peculiar struck me hard in the face: what about Joy? What about Fun? What about Entertainment? Are our kids supposed to just survive in hiding?

1.75 billion people are dealing with disabilities day-to-day, with their friends and family circles accounting for a whopping 3.3 billion human beings — and yet… the representation ratio in media is abysmally low, and worse, it’s almost always condescending and tear-based content. This didn’t sound like a problem for medical doctors. This was a societal problem for entertainment professionals to tackle. Pop Culture has to play its role in our education, too. In other words, this one is on me — and my wacky friends in gaming.

Ariana gave me the bravery to act on this vision: the one I once had when catching a glimpse of Hedi’s ninja moves; she gave me the inspirational strength and tenacity to formulate it into an actionable idea. After everything she had endured with more resilience in her pinky finger than I have in my entire being, how dare I continue to comfortably earn bounty fees from marketing consulting gigs and influencer-bookings for a bunch of well-paying clients, never taking any risk myself? It’s time, I thought, to go back to the determined entrepreneur I once was in my twenties and to accept everything that comes with such an obsessional endeavor. Let me be driven again!

The next step, after resigning from the CMO position I was holding at the time, was to launch the bat-signal and ring the bat-phones. On my own, I can’t code, I can’t draw, I can’t design, I can’t compose — ironically, there is nothing I really contribute to the craft of making a video game. I can only sell the stuff. Like an old friend once put it: “I’m just better than the next guy at being a jerk.” Without an A-team to execute, this would have been nothing more than a paper idea. After 23 years in the gaming industry, I knew that one needs quite a diverse bunch of expert/crazy profiles to succeed in this ultra-competitive field, which was semi-daunting, but I also had the advantage of being old enough to have served next to some of the brightest creative geniuses alive….

I called killer mobile designer Dimitar Draganov, legendary producer Ralf Adam, magical Angry Birds Art Director Jean-Michel Boesch, and King’s tech wizard Alejandro Niño — they all immediately responded with a “yes!” I no longer had any excuse. We were now a team, and we were doing this. A fun and cool video game that portrays disability under a positive, uplifting, comedic, and kick-ass lens.

At first we toyed with the idea of revisiting “Lost Vikings,” an old 16-bit platform game in which you would switch characters with very distinct attributes to go through the various levels tactically and strategically. We quickly realized that a modern-day platform game was really intensive budget-wise for a small self-funded team like ours — because all levels must be designed and drawn, which requires a whole lot of asset development, while offering very little replay value. Furthermore, platform games are not necessarily easy to make within a mobile free-to-play ecosystem, and this was definitely the way we wanted to deliver our work. We had immediately assessed that the mobile arena is where our message and character-centric IP would potentially spread the widest — and thus have the most impact. There are 2.5 billion mobile gamers who are a tap away from a free download through all the App Stores.

Then, as JM Boesch and I were looking around for inspiration by watching super cool people with disabilities practicing sports and doing cool stuff in social media videos, it suddenly hit us: Aaron “Wheelz” Fotheringham, Woody Belfort, David “Mr. Hand Solo” Aguilar, Tessa Puma, Amy Purdy, Matt Stutzman, April Holmes, Blake Leeper, Marleen Verbeek, Baris Telli, Madison de Rozario — these fantastic people are video game characters incarnate! In terms of achievements, abilities, originalities, visuals, and persona, they have it all. Indeed, they are stars who just didn’t yet know they could be video game stars!

Why don’t we do what the video game world should have done a long time ago? Why don’t we give them the representation platform to shine for their own merits, for what they already do — why don’t we reach out to them and see if they would actually be the characters of the game under license? After all, in the able-bodied world, that’s the reflex we typically have. When Activision made a skateboarding game, they called Tony Hawk. When they acquired Guitar Hero later, they licensed rockstars’ likenesses and hit music tracks left and right.

We called all of those amazing stars, a bit timidly at first, and their reactions gave us a huge boost of motivation and an important realization that what we were up to was important. Not only did 30 awesome people from 15 different nations accept to be the characters of the game, but there was one recurring reaction that kept emanating at the visceral level: “I’ve always dreamed of being a video game character.”

I don’t know about you, but although I’ve been playing video games for 36 odd years and working in the industry for 23 of those years, I’ve never dreamed of being a video game character. I asked around and neither did any of my white-male able-bodied colleagues or other connections in the industry. Essentially, deep down, people who look like me can pretty much identify with almost any video game character. We don’t dream to be a video game character because we are all of them — or any of them that we want to be. This mechanical bonding takes a leap of imagination if none of the characters ever look like you. And that’s why representation matters to those who are represented — but also to those who are closer from the average majority group. Seeing minorities portrayed in our imaginary worlds participate into the process of normalizing these minorities, so that all children can familiarize themselves with the subject before real life encounters. It is hoped that they react with more decency when the latter happens, if they have experienced the former.

After the real cast of Phenoms came on board and became our North Star (it’s about them now!), the idea of the sports game came organically. Dimitar in particular had worked on sports games before, and was an expert at strategy management gameplay, meta-game design, resource-based systems — hence the idea of a “Pokémonization of Sports” was born.

The game play is to collect, upgrade, and train your champions, serving as their strategic manager in the gym. Mini pentathlons and decathlons keep players motivated to evolve and care for all their champions collectively, in order to win, and therefore to consider each of them from a positive skills-based perspective. Ultimately, the universal message is that despite all our flaws, we have the ability to learn and rise above our imperfections. We have the potential locked into us to become Phenomenal!

We are currently raising funds, and exploring synergies with commercial partners — Reach out to me in DM if you want to chat!