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