doc

you wanna know something? last night, i tried to run a raid with my friends. now, i'm getting over an illness and i spent a week running on adrenaline at GDC, so my internal battery is lower than normal, but like... Destiny took everything out of me last night. I crashed.

I normally go asleep after midnight, I found myself crawling into bed at 9:30 and sleeping for something like 14 hours, with a couple interruptions. Destiny took a ton out of me. Because it's a PC FPS, the pain issues are minimal, but the fatigue is still there.

I can absolutely guarantee you that if you played Dark Souls for an hour or two and after that suffered from muscle spasms, severe physical pain, nausea, or the need to go to bed, you'd be telling everyone it was too hard too.

Everyone who says "it has to be hard" misses the point where it's twice as hard for me already. An easy mode means I get to play the same game as you, instead of playing a game that, for me, is simply tuned to be so much harder.

I already have life on hard mode. Get on my level, scrub. You don't even know what struggle is.

Dark Souls having an easy mode would allow me to experience the game the same way as you. Also, this weird fucking moral panic over "games shouldn't coddle people" is so fucking stupid. Dark Souls easy mode means it's as hard for me as it is for you. That's not coddling.

I work harder than every able bodied person out there. A physical therapist once told me that people like me dedicated almost all of our attention to pain management. An endocrinologist told me it shouldn't have been possible for me to get out of bed to see her that day.

Being able to get out of bed every day and fake some sense of normalcy in person is a huge fuckin achievement. 'Git gud?' Buddy, one of my doctors told me that it takes an incredible strength to survive like I have. If you were in my shoes, you wouldn't have made it this far.

If you want to see what Souls is like for me, do yourself a favor: install a trainer, increase all enemy speed by 30%, and double enemy HP. If you can beat the entire game on that difficulty and decide that's actually a more fun experience, then okay, you win. I bet you won't.

Everyone who keeps thinking I would breeze through Dark Souls if an easy mode exists is an unempathetic asshole who doesn't fucking get it and I don't know how to communicate this any better than I already have. It would not be easy for me.

So, the other day, some guy quote tweeted me with a sarcastic "I guess you think every athlete should get medals, huh?" and it's like, no it's weird to see you arguing that wheelchair basketball should be banned because it would take away from Steph Curry's achievement

imagine someone going "oh wow, you're deaf? fuck you, you're not allowed to see Once Upon a Time in the West because you HAVE to hear the Morricone score the way Sergio Leone intended." disability. requires. compromise. it's shitty, but that's reality.https://twitter.com/PABastien/status/1112089157306736640 …

Some people have suggested to me that because other people have ~other disabilities~ that ~don't~ impact their game, I should be fine. Hey, here's a quick look at the disability ~I~ suffer from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb3yp4uJhq0 …

"just watch a let's play" um, hey that's... nowhere near the same thing. it's like saying "because you are deaf, you shouldn't watch sergio leone's once upon a time in the west or you'd miss the 'full experience' without hearing the audio... read the wikipedia entry instead"