Liam Erven makes Let's Play videos of console games on YouTube and develops mobile and computer games for the blind in his spare time. Like Cole and an estimated 39 million others worldwide, he's blind. "Some people think that I'm doing this for attention," he explains, "and as I tell people, I'm like, 'Look, if I wanted attention, I don't think I'd fake being blind, because being blind sucks. There's nothing fun about it. It's just not a good time.'
"I've talked to some people off the channel and once they realized that I was real they got really interested," he continues. "People's biggest question is, 'How do you do this if you can't see?' And it's such a hard question to answer because it's like I just taught myself to do it."
Erven was born blind, but he played games from an early age. "My family is one of those families that, even if you are blind, they still treat you equal. I was still expected to do everything," he explains. "So the line between being blind and sighted kind of blurred and so as kind of a lark they bought me a Nintendo."
This was 1989; he was around 4 years old, and he played Mario all day. "I couldn't get very far," Erven admits, "But to me the concept was interesting and I found it fascinating that you could do this. So I, for whatever reason, always got every new system as it came out."
Like Cole, Erven soon found games he could play. "My favorite was Track and Field 2 by Konami," he says. "It was really cool because a lot of it was based on timing." Years later, he discovered the same fact about Punch-Out!!. "I found it really interesting that you didn't have to look at the screen so much because everything was based on patterns.
"So for Glass Joe, you worried more about, 'OK, let me think about the uppercuts, let me know when that's coming' — I have a sound tell. Or, 'I know he's going to throw a certain number of punches,' versus games today [which] actually have an AI where the AI kind of anticipates what you're going to do before you even do it."
Erven pursued his hobby with vigor. "I was the first at Blockbuster in '92 when the first Mortal Kombat came out for Sega," he recalls. "I didn't really know what it was, but I just had the feeling that it was something I would enjoy. And I did. I loved it."
He would be there again 19 years later for the midnight launch of the series reboot. He's also a huge fan of PaRappa the Rapper, as well as a skilled Rock Band player — thanks no doubt to his learning cello, clarinet and accordion in school. Hearing him talk about his love of video games, Erven sounds just like any other self-professed gamer.
But his inability to see excludes him from many games. Final Fantasy X was the first in Square Enix's famed series to be voiced, and still it requires huge amounts of memorization or sighted assistance for the blind to play, while Pokémon has yet to receive a single entry that's even remotely blind accessible.
Even text and menu-sparse games, like those in the Mario and Sonic franchises, present a seemingly insurmountable challenge for a blind person (although Erven's first attempt to play Sonic 4 is impressive at times).
This is where Let's Play videos come in. Erven can share his unusual perspective on popular games, educating his audience on how they work in the mind of a blind man, and he can get a taste of games as the sighted experience them.
"There's a guy that I really really like, and he's actually a really cool guy outside of the arena of Let's Play-ing," says Erven. "He goes by newfiebangaa; his name is Clint. And he reads all the text on screen, which is fantastic." Not only will he read it, Erven adds, "but he'll change the voice for each character."
"It's a mindset of people. People choose not to understand. They choose to ignore what they can't understand."
Let's Plays are a window into the world of sighted gaming for guys like Erven, who understand the lingo but can't see the screen. "Me and my friend have a Dropbox folder that literally is 96 gigs of mp3s of different Let's Plays," he continues.
"We just get into it because it's so cool that these guys will read stuff — with some games like Mario there's not much to read, but it's cool to hear them describe stuff," explains Erven. "Some guys are really, really good at that.
"And you can enjoy it more because instead of just having the game audio with no one talking, you actually have an idea of what's going on. They may not describe every little thing like, 'Hey, I just hit a red block and something came out,' but you know more than you would if it was just straight audio."
Erven enjoys making his own Let's Play videos, playing favorites like Space Channel 5 and Tekken 3 from start to finish. "The thing that I explain to people is, 'Look, blind people are like every other person; they just can't see,'" he says. "We have a multitude of interests."
Erven rifles off a list of blind friends who are into cars, anime, gardening, skydiving and even rafting. "There's kind of like this — I want to say belief — that because blind people are blind they don't have the same [interests] that people with sight do, and I don't think that's true," he adds. "I think that's the biggest thing that has to be dispelled.
"It's a mindset of people. People choose not to understand. They choose to ignore what they can't understand, so instead of maybe taking the time to really think about how this would work for somebody, they just brush it off and go, 'Whatever,' which is unfortunate."
Erven takes care to put his best face forward, because he knows he's representing blind people everywhere. "What I tell people is if you're blind what you do directly affects what people think about everyone else in that community," he says.
He travels an hour and a half every day on the train to and from work. He talks to a lot of people, doing his bit to show how blind people are just people who can't see. This includes explaining that he plays games. "Why not?" he says. "Gaming has sound. You won't see me playing Pong. But gaming is something that we can do."
