Report says well-known videogame accessibility advocate may not have actually existed

A bizarre but extremely thorough new report at IGN claims that a prominent advocate for accessibility in videogames, who co-founded the Can I Play That? website in 2018, may not have actually existed at all—but instead appears to be the creation of her purported romantic partner, Coty Craven.

Banks first appeared as One Odd Gamer Girl in 2015, and quickly grew to become a well-known member of the disabled gamer community, according to IGN's report. In 2018, for instance, she was featured in an interview with leading videogame accessibility website AbleGamers; in 2019, following her reported death, the site paid tribute to Banks in "A Farewell to a Friend," calling her an "amazing ally" and "a brilliant light in the fight for accessibility."

But five years later, the IGN investigation has found no evidence that she was a real person. Quite the opposite, if anything. The report is deeply detailed, but one particularly damning claim comes from a source who hired a private investigator to confirm Banks' existence prior to her death. The investigator was unable to come up with anything demonstrating Banks was a real person: No immigration record (Banks was supposedly Turkish), employment record, address, birth certificate, or anything else was found.

In fact it seems that nobody had direct contact with Banks. The report says interviews and other interactions were conducted exclusively through email or Twitter DMs, facilitated by Craven. Steven Spohn, senior director of development at AbleGamers, confirmed he never directly spoke to Banks but said it didn't seem unusual at the time because many deaf people—Banks was reportedly deaf—prefer text-based communications over voice calls. 

That's not incriminating in its own right, and plenty of people (myself included) would rather send an email than make a phone call, disabled or not. But the IGN report says no one it spoke to for the story had ever seen or heard Banks by herself, "outside of her social media profile or with Craven."

The report details various other oddities related to Banks and Craven: In 2021, for instance, the Game Accessibility Conference presented the Susan Banks Advocacy Award for "an advocate using their voice to make a difference across the wider [videogame] industry." But a year later the International Game Developers Association received an email questioning whether Banks was in fact a real person; when Craven was told about it, he said the incident was impacting his mental health and merely asked that Banks' name be removed from the award, a position he maintained even after being offered legal support. The award was subsequently renamed to the Advocacy Award.

The full report goes very deep into the weeds, including coverage of two of Craven's subsequent romantic relationships, both of them also with accessibility advocates whose existence is in doubt. Craven wrote about the mother of one of those purported partners on Medium in 2023, claiming that his tutelage "ignited a love of games for a 96-year-old woman" named Bess; eight months later he announced on Twitter that Bess had died, but IGN was unable to find any record of the reported death.

Craven declined to comment on the IGN report, although he did apparently ask the site not to publish it at all. Since the report went live, he's deleted most of his social media accounts, as well as his personal website. The Can I Play That? website has also taken action, removing a reference to Banks and Craven as the site's founders on its "About" page. (The original can still be seen via the Wayback Machine.)

The whole situation is deeply weird, especially since as far as I can tell, the only motivation for this complex, persistent, nearly decade-long scam—if it is in fact a scam, which technically at least remains unproven—is clout. And I know people do a lot of wild shit for clout, but this? This is a lot. It's also a remarkable piece of investigative reporting—check it out in full at IGN.