About Me
I was born with Cerebral Palsy, a non-progressive condition that affects the part of the brain that handles the limbs and fine motor functions. This condition has rendered me unable to talk or walk, confining me to a wheelchair. In addition, I only have full use of my right arm, with the dexterity of my left hand probably being about 25% of my right. What caused my CP is unknown to me, because I was adopted from South Korea at 14-months.
First and foremost, I am a gamer and have been since around the age of 8. Back then the games were simple, so playing one-handed was relatively easy. Growing up on the NES, I tried a number of controllers, from the standard one to a flight stick, the latter I ended up sticking with until my NES finally died. A few years later, I got a Game Boy for Christmas. In the beginning learning how to play it was difficult, having not spent much time with the standard NES controller.
But after a while I figured out to turn it sideways on a table or my lap so the directional pad was towards my stomach and the A and B buttons were towards my knee. I would use the d-pad with my thumb and press A, and B with my index finger or middle finger. This technique has stayed with me ever since; regardless of whether it’s console or handheld, it’s the way I play. I’ve had to make a few changes to adapt the ever-evolving button layouts, but the basic positioning stays the same.
Because of my inability to talk, I have always written to communicate, but it wasn’t until my sophomore year in high school that I really started focusing on it. It all started when we had a locally-published poet visit our English class. After talking about poetry, he asked the class to write poems so I gave it a shot and to my surprise, he was impressed by mine. With his initial words of encouragement to me, I kept at it and somewhere down the line I began writing for the school newspaper. Depending on what I felt like, I either submitted poetry or a review.
I continued to write throughout college, for the school newspaper again. This time however, it was short-lived as I only submitted 2 pieces: another review, and a piece that I worked on with my god-sister, about JPop. Looking back at them now my writing as a whole was rather poor, but I continued to work at it; save for reviews which were especially shudder-worthy, so much so that I’ve not written once since college.
In 2005, I found out over the internet that legendary indie movie studio Troma Entertainment (The Toxic Avenger, Sgt. Kabuki Man N.Y.P.D.) was filming a movie entitled Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead here in Buffalo. Needing something to do, I emailed them and ended up being in the movie (as a rather predominate extra). During filming I became friends with the cast and crew, but have stayed very good friends with one of the female leads, Allyson Sereboff to this day.
Allyson and I’ve kept in constant contact, and in 2007, she told me that she had met guys who were filming a documentary on gamers and asked me if I wanted to be in it. I immediately said yes and she put me in touch with the guys at Pure West Films. After a bit of emailing back and forth between the producer, Victor and myself, two things were revealed — that the documentary was about Massively Multiplayer Online games and the effects they have on their players, and that I was disabled. Luckily, I started playing MapleStory the previous fall, and was currently in Second Life. Later that summer, they came out to my house and filmed me for the documentary which is entitled Second Skin (out now on DVD). In 2008, I started playing World of Warcraft thanks to my involvement in the documentary and contact with my fellow subjects.
The documentary gave me a good look at the fact that while games are very beneficial to disabled persons, there are definitely some improvements that need to be made. So with that in mind, I cracked down and wrote 2 editorials on the subject, both of which were ultimately published, one on Wired’s GameLife and the other on The Escapist. The first one was written to let people know that we, disabled gamers, do exist; while the latter was more of a call to arms to developers and companies to help disabled gamers.
In June of 2009, I returned to work with Pure West, writing for their community pop culture blog, PopTen.
