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GAMING JOURNALISM AND DISCOURSE ABOUT DISABILITY

VIDEO GAMES ARE ABILITY MACHINES THAT CONTINUE TO challenge cultural conceptions of disability. They inspire discourses about how physical interactions with interactive media, guided by accessibility in design, matter in defining abilities. This chapter examines those discourses and addresses what disability and accessibility mean in gaming culture.

Take a moment to consider the term gaming culture.¹ It is an odd phrase. There are no comparable popular expressions in other media: a quick look at Google trends reveals that “movie culture” is a flat line compared to our subject, and “reading culture” only appears as it relates to literacy (i.e., schools trying to create a culture of reading among students). Book Culture is the name of a bookstore in New York. Perhaps “foodie culture” or “fashion culture” describes a similar enthusiasm apparent in how “gaming culture” is used. Gaming attracts, or perhaps creates, a certain type of devotee, the most entangled of which participates not just in a fandom but also in an entire global subculture with its own jargon, prophets, pariahs, and history. Scholars and journalists alike write about gaming culture as a specialized subject, often straining to accurately describe it: who belongs, who doesn’t, what its members like, what they avoid, and so on. It is a monster of a thing.

If there is a leading promoter of gaming culture, it is journalism. Not games or platforms. Not large game companies or even e-sports. At the center of it all, what gets discussed, scrutinized, debated, and, above all, rabidly consumed are online news articles about gaming. And there is no relationship between enthusiasts and thought leaders quite like that between gamers and games journalists. Gamers vocally proclaim, often in all caps on various subreddits, their disdain for games journalism. In one particularly dark moment in gaming culture history—if I can call it a moment and not an ongoing stain—gamers “rose up” against the supposed lack of ethics in games journalism to the point of issuing rape threats and harassing women who are prominent game designers and writers. It was called “Gamergate,” and it still makes my hair bristle when I think about it.

Games journalism is a thought leader in gaming culture. Yes, it discusses issues and interests among gamers through game reviews, game development updates, interviews with members of the industry, coverage of game conventions, reports on e-sports, and more. But games journalists also choose the subject matter and the tone of conversation in their articles, and then gaming culture shares, discusses, and reacts to those articles online. There are only so many games to review or events to cover or industry professionals to interview. But there is always time to pontificate on broader issues, and game news websites spend a significant amount of their word count on those subjects. One of those broad topics appearing regularly on game news websites is disability. If gaming news articles are any indication, gamers are increasingly aware of the tension between gaming and disability. There has been a spate of articles since 2010 about accessibility options in games, gamers with disabilities, and general think pieces about how disability, accessibility, and gaming coincide. Culture defines disability, structuring what it means to have disabilities, and one way it accomplishes that task is through discourse.

Discourse is to culture what food is to cooking. Culture produces discourse, and discourse defines culture. It is apparent that if one were interested in mapping out gaming culture’s relationship to disability and accessibility—identifying the primary themes and attitudes about disability that emerge in gaming culture—then the discourses produced by gaming journalism are the best place to start. How does games journalism describe disability? How does it reconcile the tension between the physically demanding nature of gaming and the physical challenges of disability? Does gaming journalism pretend that people with disabilities don’t play video games, or does it embrace that fact? How does games journalism define what it means to be a gamer with disabilities? What is the role of accessibility in the game design process?

As Steven Spohn describes in the interview preceding this chapter, attitudes about accessibility among industry insiders have changed dramatically over the years. At the beginning of Spohn’s activism, companies would ignore or outright discourage his questions and feedback. But now his charity works closely with major game development companies. This change in attitude coincides with a flurry of interest in disability and accessibility in gaming culture in 2018. And so, along with Karen (Kat) Schrier, I turned to game news websites to study the discourse on this subject.² In this chapter, I report and reflect on that study before looking at how gaming journalism has continued to tackle issues of disability and accessibility. I also provide suggestions for how games journalism, and perhaps gaming culture at large, can improve its discussions about accessibility and disability.

Accessibility History and Paradigms

The history of accessibility is difficult to assess on a global scale since most landmarks in that history are legal protections that differ depending on the country. In the United States, at least, the first major moment to consider came post–World War I when veterans looked to the US government to aid in their rehabilitation from debilitating injuries. The 1930s brought medical technologies and some government assistance for people with disabilities. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (served 1933 to 1945) was the first president with a disability. He was famous for, among many things, using a wheelchair while also attempting to hide that fact from the public. World War II veterans with disabilities advocated for rehabilitation and job training from the government in the 1940s and 1950s, and their cause gained visibility due to a culture of vocal gratitude from the citizenry. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, many people with disabilities did not have access to transportation, public telephones, bathrooms, or even safe entry into buildings.

The civil rights movement in the United States gave disability advocates a language of protest and struggle for equality: challenging stereotypes, advocating for legal protections, and seeking recognition as an identity group. Parents demanded that their children with disabilities receive equal access to education and attend school with other children instead of being relegated to asylums or other denigrating institutions. And in the 1970s, disability rights activists marched on Washington, DC, demanding that the Rehabilitation Act include civil rights language to give people with disabilities legal protections. They succeeded. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 guaranteed equal opportunities for employment within federally funded organizations, including protections to prevent discrimination against both physical and mental disabilities. Section 504 also guaranteed equal access to public housing, transportation, and other services for people with disabilities. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act passed in 1975, mandating that children with disabilities receive equal access to public education, delineating that every child has a right to an education and that they should be included in regular classrooms (except in those cases where it would be impossible to provide equal education in that environment). The act was later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1990, and the revised act added measures that gave parents the right to be involved in decisions affecting their children’s education. The act introduced parental approval for each Individual Education Plan for children with disabilities.

After a decade of lobbying in the 1980s, the now famous Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) passed in 1990. This act consolidated previous legislation into a unified protection bill that mandated equal treatment and access for people with disabilities. The ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in a variety of contexts, including transportation, employment, and telecommunication services. All public services were now required by law to provide reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. Even with these legal protections in place, public attitudes needed to catch up. Harmful stereotypes still stigmatize people with disabilities, legally mandated accommodations are not always followed, and many people with disabilities must continue to advocate for equal treatment.

Two key words in this history require formal differentiation: accessibility and accommodation. I touched on the distinction between these terms in the introduction, but just as a reminder, accommodation typically describes legal protections for people with disabilities while accessibility is a more specific term referring to universal access to something. While an accessibility feature might be required as a legal accommodation, accessibility implies benefits for people with and without disabilities. An example of accessibility is the “curb-cut effect.” Curb-cuts, those safe slopes from raised sidewalks to the street, benefit people with disabilities—including wheelchair users—but also benefit people without disabilities. Parents pushing babies in strollers, people moving large pieces of furniture with dollies or hand trucks, or even small children who often trip on large curbs: all benefit from using curb-cuts in sidewalks. Subtitles for TV programs (a legal accommodation for people with disabilities) are used widely by a majority of people, including those without any hearing disabilities: language learners, fathers comforting a sick child in the middle of the night, and even people who want to see the exact wording of their favorite joke or song lyric.

Accessibility benefits everyone. But implementing accessible design in entertainment media, and especially in labor-intensive productions of most major video games, is a challenge at best. Three primary paradigms describe the approaches to reconcile this challenge with real-world results. The first is a legal paradigm. George Powers, Vinh Nguyen, and Lex Frieden argue for this approach by using established legal precedent for requiring accommodations for persons with disabilities in the United States.³ Eschewing the notion that mere advocacy or social awareness will solve the many issues faced by video game players with disabilities, they argue for a legal strategy to establish guidelines for video game design, publication, hardware design, and sales. They write that “to achieve equal access in this industry, a legally binding accessibility standard for video game design ought to be adopted,” and they describe various pieces of legislation as examples for accessibility in other contexts, such as the abovementioned Americans with Disabilities Act and the twenty-first-century Communications and Video Accessibility Act.⁴ Current groundwork for similar legislation for video games comes in the form of white papers and best practices documents published by advocacy organizations.

The second paradigm focuses on design practices. Dimitris Grammenos, Anthony Savidi, and Constantine Stephanidis propose the design principle of universally accessible games, meaning games designed for players with a wide range of abilities and disabilities, specifically with the flexibility to adapt to players’ varying abilities.⁵ They conclude by stating that “universally accessible games may be a demanding but still manageable and achievable task,” before listing a set of best practices to accomplish that goal.⁶ Games that are universally accessible will not only better support individuals with disabilities but will benefit all people with all types of abilities. As an example of the design-based paradigm, the AbleGamers charity created the Accessible Player Experiences (APX) system to help designers create more accessible games.⁷ Similarly, I have coauthored work on this topic that I return to in a later chapter on accessibility design in games.

The third paradigm targets culture and discourse and stems from work that my colleague Kat Schrier and I did on the topic. The cultural paradigm calls for a holistic understanding of the nature of accessibility and disability through discourses in game culture, including discourses pertaining to games, controllers, and accessibility design features. This paradigm aims to describe how games culture constitutes the nature of disability and accessibility but also identifies any challenges that emerge so that solutions can come from the study of actual cultural attitudes. The remainder of this chapter will describe this paradigm in practice.

Themes of Discourse Regarding Disability and Accessibility

Discourse analysis is interested in the “properties of texts, the production, distribution, and consumption of texts,” with an eye toward “the relationship of social practice to power relations, and hegemonic projects at the society level.”⁸ Put simply, discourse analysis looks at products of culture, such as news articles, movies, and online discussion forums, to discover how they create or adopt certain values or ideas. The method concerns the nature of social constructs and how they emerge and repeat. The method captures this information by first designating a corpus of texts and then examining how those texts create and expand a specific aspect of culture. If culture creates these texts, then a proper examination of them will reveal cultural attitudes about that subject. There exist a variety of approaches to discourse analysis, and we tackled topics of disability and accessibility in the critical discourse analysis tradition with a focus on journalism (or news values) as argued by Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple.⁹ Our corpus of study consisted of articles from three prominent gaming news websites: Kotaku.com, PCGamer.com, and Polygon.com. Discourse can exist at the level of individual words or through broad-strokes conversations across nations. And different methods call for different specificities of attention. In our study, we coded for the overarching subject matter of the articles.¹⁰

The results were clear and more revealing than anticipated (see table 1.1). The sixty articles sorted neatly into six categories accurately describe their subject matter. A complete list of the categorized articles and other relevant information can be found at https://pastebin.com/9MzRwG6H.

1.Gamers with Disabilities. The Gamers with Disabilities category consists of articles showcasing people with disabilities. Half the articles feature prominent members of gaming culture, such as popular streamers on Twitch.tv. The remaining articles in this category feature everyday folks with disabilities, such as a player with chronic pain or a DOTA 2 (Valve, 2013) player with autism spectrum disorder.

2.Games Portraying Disabilities. Articles in this category discussed games that include, or prominently showcase, fictional characters with disabilities. The articles are typically celebratory in tone. While one article in this category takes a broad-strokes approach to the topic by mentioning a variety of games that feature characters with disabilities, the remaining articles focus on a single game or character, such as the titular character in the 2015 game Mad Max (Avalanche Studios, 2015) who uses a leg brace.

3.Game Design and Accessibility. This category includes articles about games with innovative accessibility options or generally accessible design in the development process. Five of the articles report on games winning “Most Accessible” awards, such as Final Fantasy XIV (Square Enix, 2010) winning “Most Disability Accessible Game” of 2013.

Table 1.1. Categories of article topics regarding disability and accessibility

4.Game Controllers and Accessibility. The Game Controllers and Accessibility category addresses a primary barrier to accessibility in games: the input devices. Four of the articles report on Microsoft’s Adaptive Controller, while other articles showcase newly invented or modified controllers meant to increase accessibility for people with disabilities.

5.General Discussion of Accessibility. These articles acknowledge the tension in games culture between the challenging nature of gaming and the increased desire to include players with disabilities in that culture. These are catchall essays that celebrate, critique, or generally inform regarding the state of accessibility in games. Articles in this category have titles such as “Special Report: Accessibility in Games” or “Avoid Barriers to Make Games Accessible.”

6.Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities. This category includes articles that report on individuals and organizations that are advocating for the improvement of games and culture for players with disabilities. Half the articles target organizations such as AbleGamers or Gamers Gift. Two of the articles discuss accessibility game jams, and two other articles describe events created with players with disabilities in mind. One article reports on a talk by the musician Stevie Wonder in which he advocates for accessible games.

Simply categorizing articles proved to be informative: the categories demonstrate primary concerns or interests in gaming culture regarding accessibility and disability. However, perhaps even more illuminating is the analysis of how these themes interact with each other. In other words, are there any metathemes at work here? And what do these themes tell us about disability, culture, and how games as ability machines spark conversations about the nature of ability in interactive media? These themes, when extrapolated, produce four types of discourse germane to these questions and act as a starting point for improving culture’s relationship to disability by defining what disability means in a medium defined by ability.

The first metatheme of discourse is that of self-congratulation, primarily found implicit in the subject matter and the “tone” or “attitude” of various articles. By implicit self-congratulation, I mean subject matter or language that assumes, rather than argues for, improvements in games culture regarding disability and accessibility. The articles seem to be saying: “We did it. We solved disability in gaming.” The articles that carried this tone of self-congratulation appeared mostly in categories such as Games Portraying Disability, Gamers with Disabilities, and Game Design and Accessibility. And it is not difficult to see why. For instance, if articles report on a player with a severe motor disability playing video games, the most eye-catching object in the article—both figuratively and literally in the form of photos taken for the article—is the often elaborate accessibility equipment and controllers the person uses to play the game. Celebrating technological achievements and the person’s grit required to master the complicated controls certainly invites an attitude of self-congratulation among gaming enthusiasts. And so the tone that comes across in these articles is akin to pronouncing (and forgive my sarcasm here): “Look at how far we have come and how amazing games are to allow a person with such pronounced motor disabilities to play the games us normal and regular gamers play!” Put simply, these articles misleadingly suggest that the future will present fewer challenges regarding accessibility.

The articles in the Games Portraying Disability category were particularly rife with this self-congratulatory attitude insofar as the articles reported on games and characters portrayed with disabilities as evidence of game culture’s growing inclusivity. For example, two articles wrote about a dating simulation game wherein all of the potential romantic partners were women with disabilities. They write extensively about how this game marks an encouraging improvement in game culture and how its portrayal of disabilities should be an example for future games to follow. And articles in the Game Design and Accessibility category often laud game developers for including accessibility options in their games.

Optimism for current improvements or future inclusivity can be infectious. But this type of “toxic optimism” is at least worthy of monitoring (if not openly critiquing) because it reduces the need for further problem-solving and design around accessibility issues. Self-congratulation is rarely, if ever, helpful for any traditionally marginalized group. A feeling of accomplishment exaggerates what has been achieved while underestimating the obstacles that persons with disabilities continue to face. In combination with the discourse of fetishization, self-congratulation informs a surprisingly insidious way of talking and writing about disability and accessibility in that it incentivizes attitudes that are less scrutinizing toward game culture. In other words, it punishes individuals who continue to advocate for change by suggesting that change is no longer needed.

The second metadiscourse is fetishization. The term “fetishization” comes from the social act of imbuing particular ideas or objects with power, but I use it here in a more theoretical way, defining it simply as the act of commodifying something.¹¹ Discourses that fetishize identities describe those identities as a fascinating “other” and an unnatural cultural phenomenon.¹² If I am being generous, fetishizing identities appears as an unintentional yet extremely harmful act. The Gamers with Disabilities discourse fetishizes people with disabilities by first treating their existence as newsworthy, unlikely, or unexpected and second by communicating an exuberant fascination with how they play games. It is a sort of “how do they play games at all?! How quaint!” tone. Fetishization emerges most prominently in articles that showcase a person with disabilities and delve into how they hold their controller, describe the personal challenges they have faced, or publish photos of players playing games differently than others. Bonus points go to articles with photos that have exaggerated camera angles, subject-camera distances, or focal lengths that further “otherize” the person with a disability. Simply an overeager photographic focus on accessibility equipment is enough to tip the image into fetishization territory, such as showing a player controlling gameplay with their mouth. For instance, one image consists of a close-up of a player controlling a computer mouse with his chin with special attention paid to framing the player’s head away from their body, an extreme otherizing image. It is not difficult to photograph people with disabilities: the basic rule is to photograph them as people instead of contortionists or medical oddities.

Such fetishization can be expected, at least to a degree. The inherently physical nature of gaming seems to invite this identity commodification. The article titles alone are often enough to convey the fetishization inherent in the article itself:

“How a Gamer with a Disability Speedruns Some of the World’s Fastest Games”

“Meet Rocky NoHands, the Paralyzed PUBG Streamer Who Kicks Ass Using Only His Mouth”

“Even with One Hand Paralyzed, This CS:GO Player Continues to Kick Ass”

“How the CS:GO Community’s Compassion Changed the Life of a Disabled CS:GO Streamer”

Look to the last example listed to see fetishization in its most egregious form: the “compassion” of the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Valve, 2012) community (read: “normal,” not “disabled” players) found it in their hearts to lift a player with a disability up and change their life forever! The condescension is real.

The balance between visibility and fetishization is always tenuous and particularly evident in the history of queer representation in cinema.¹³ Showcasing players with disabilities is certainly welcome because it provides a means for people with disabilities to negotiate a variety of “social meanings.”¹⁴ However, the articles’ focus on the mere existence of players with disabilities as being newsworthy, combined with how the articles often offer extraneous detail as to how a player somehow manages—again, please detect my sarcasm here—to play games, contributes to a cultural understanding of disability as not only being abnormal but also a subject of corporeal fascination. These players’ bodies are treated as anomalies rather than a part of the spectrum of human experience.

The third meta discourse is awareness as advocacy, meaning that the articles in all six categories demonstrate a tone of advocacy while informing the reader about disability and accessibility. The language used in the articles emphasizes the importance of naming and discussing issues of disability in gaming culture, and with this emphasis comes the language of advocacy. This attitude of raising awareness appears in articles stating that, as one example, “there are simple things that every developer can do to make games accessible to the majority of gamers. So, why don’t the big companies do them?”¹⁵ Another example: “Many games still don’t take physical disabilities into account. A new project hopes to increase awareness about how and why accessibility considerations can add to a gamer’s experience and increase the audience.”¹⁶ While these are specific examples, almost every article produces language implying that readers should become more aware of disability and accessibility. There is nothing inherently wrong with increasing awareness or encouraging advocacy about issues in gaming culture regarding disability and accessibility: that is, as long as the discourse avoids fetishization, as discussed above. Continued discussion regarding these topics will aid in justifying the need to address these challenges across the wider spectrum of game culture, from game development to journalism.

The fourth metatheme of discourse is problem-solving. Unlike “raising awareness,” which is a somewhat impotent avenue of advocacy—useful and necessary but not as concrete in its outcomes—four of the original categories include articles that propose specific solutions to the challenges faced by game players with disabilities (e.g., game design options or material design changes). This style of article appears in the categories Game Controllers and Accessibility, Game Design and Accessibility, Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities, and Gamers with Disabilities. This meta theme should not be surprising: of course any discussion of accessibility would include a pragmatic approach to improving the lives of people with disabilities. Accessibility by definition is pragmatic. Any journalist who writes about modified controllers or accessibility options in video games would, almost by necessity, speak to issues germane to making practical improvements in gaming culture regarding disability.

This attitude of problem-solving arises at every level of game culture, from individual players to large game companies. For instance, look to the Game Controllers and Accessibility category to find articles featuring people solving accessibility challenges through the redesign of controllers:

“Microsoft Announces New Controller for Gamers with Disabilities”

“The Xbox Adaptive Controller’s Package Design Is Just as Accessible”

“Rock Band Accessibility Mod Makes Wheelchair Rockin’ Possible”

“Nintendo Switch One-Handed Joy-Con Adapter Opens Up the Console to Everyone”

Articles about accessibility also tend to focus on specific players with specific gameplay challenges, all accompanied with how individuals or companies are addressing those challenges. For example, some articles write about how game developers patched Uncharted 4 (Naughty Dog, 2016) with additional accessibility options after launch, such as removing button-bashing (quick, repetitive button presses). Other articles target colorblind modes. And some articles speak to issues of improving accessible design by showcasing excellent examples, such as Celeste or Splatoon 2 (Nintendo EPD, 2017).

Publicizing solutions to accessibility problems benefits everyone: often the only barrier to improving accessibility is knowing what solutions are in place or have been implemented in the past. For example, as I continue to learn about how other designers are improving the accessibility of their games, I can implement the simplest of those solutions in my own game design such as in my game D.Personal (2018) in which I added a mode that removes the requirement to click with a mouse for people with fine motor disabilities. And the articles’ varying subjects also demonstrate the difference between accessibility options and accessible design thinking in game development—an essential lesson to learn for designers interested in improving accessibility. Four articles addressed how accessibility was built into the fabric of the design logic of particular games such as Celeste, Risk System (Newt Industries, 2019), and Dawn of War 3 (Relic Entertainment, 2017). Universal design is a beneficial approach as it removes the “othering” that can occur by focusing on specific disabilities. Instead, the goal is to allow as many players as possible to engage in the most similar gameplay experience (by including accessibility options and adaptations) rather than certain players having to remove elements of gameplay.¹⁷

Game Culture, Accessibility, and Disability: Where Are We Going?

The research described in this chapter targets accessibility as a flashpoint in game culture’s relationship to disability, and it puts forward a discourse-based paradigm for approaching disability in games culture. A legal paradigm, which suggests a legislative approach to advancing accessibility in video games (as it has with other media forms) and a design paradigm, which outlines best practices for game developers to improve accessibility, both have their place. My goal with this study was to grasp what accessibility means to gaming in its broadest possible sense. Gaming bumps up against design, intention, and ability in such overt ways that it is impossible to engage with accessibility without firmly grasping how gaming culture conceptualizes it.

Games are ability machines in design—a topic addressed in other chapters—as well as cultural productions: games make us talk about and reconsider abilities. One way they do this is by inspiring conversations about accessibility. My study demonstrates how gaming culture or society more broadly continues to contend with ability in terms of access. And two areas of contention require remedies: self-congratulation and fetishization. Many of the articles studied engage in a discourse of self-congratulation that evokes a toxic type of optimism, implying that there are no more problems that need to be solved. Self-congratulation is comforting. Over-celebrating successes lets us off the hook. But it also squelches critique and stymies the critical changes necessary for game culture to improve its relationship to disability. The neighboring issue of fetishization overfocuses on differences. It positions disabilities as anomalies instead of a “normal” part of culture. Fetishization further reifies that there are “normal” bodies instead of describing disability as a part of the spectrum of human experience. The remaining two meta themes—advocacy and problem-solving—make me hopeful for continued, beneficial engagement with accessibility and games culture.

In our original article, my coauthor and I suggest four items to further improve game culture’s relationship to disability, based on our findings. The following are those four items along with additional considerations for advocacy.

1.Cultural change in the norms around designing for accessibility. A topic that continued to arise in the articles was accessibility “options,” or the settings in game software that players can manipulate to manage their levels of access to the game. Several articles describe how said options appear in updates to some games well after release. We advocate for building accessibility logic into the foundation of the game design process. By thinking about accessibility at the beginning of the game development process—instead of tacking it on as an afterthought—simply allows for faster, cheaper, and more meaningful additions to accessible design. Take for an example button re-mapping, a design feature explored further in the chapter on accessible design practices. Building button re-mapping into a game—allowing players to change which buttons perform what actions—as a late-stage addition is a complicated affair: how much code needs to be altered to effectively eliminate any potential bugs introduced from such a fundamental change (at the level of game input)? However, if designers build button re-mapping into the logic of the game from the get-go, the actual coding and designing process is quick, and no retroactive fixes are required. It is a corollary to accessible architecture: how much time and money does it cost to add a wheelchair ramp or an elevator to a building versus simply designing it into the building at the very start of the project? Norms in the design process will dictate how games approach accessible design more than retroactively changing games.

2.Further communication between developers and players with disabilities. Each game is different. Each game imagines abilities, input, actions, and play in specific ways. How can game developers know how their particular game would benefit the most from which accessible design choices? We suggest building communication with players with disabilities into the norms of the game development process. The social model of disability teaches us that disability is intimately subjective: how one person relates to their disability will differ from a person with a similar medical diagnosis. Reaching out to players with disabilities to playtest games, give feedback, and work with developers to innovate accessible design will do more to improve the accessibility of any one game than broad-strokes accessibility standards. Look to the development of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017) as an excellent example of this practice: the developers continually invited players who experience psychosis to provide feedback on how the game tackled that topic. A similar approach could easily apply for accessibility by inviting a diverse group of players with disabilities to provide iterative feedback, starting with the prototype phase.

3.Advocacy for sharing best practices and standards. While direct collaboration with people with disabilities is ideal, a systematic shift in baseline expectations for accessibility is a good place to start. For example, many games include subtitles, a widely applauded accessibility feature. However, there are not standards across different game development companies, or even between design teams in the same company, that apply to subtitles in games. While this topic is explored in the chapter on accessible design features in games, the following is a quick example of a design standard for subtitles: subtitles should be large, use an unceremonious typeface, keep within approximately forty characters per line, and show only two lines on a screen at a time. A technique should be employed to differentiate the subtitles from the game graphics to make them readable: a block box, outlines, or shadows for the text. Subtitles should distinguish between speakers by using names or text colors. Similar standards may be adopted for a wide range of accessibility issues, such as button re-mapping, colorblind modes, etc. These baseline expectations should be standard across the entire global game development industry, and they should be legally mandated if needed (similar to standards of accessibility applied to movies or TV broadcasts).

4.All players benefit from greater accessibility. Players should recognize that accessibility benefits everybody. When Ubisoft shipped two games with subtitles turned on by default, only 5 percent of players turned them off. Why? Because subtitles are just good design. Players might miss a word of dialogue or they might need to turn down the volume on their TV so their baby can nap (speaking from personal experience). Maybe the player is learning how to read, and the subtitles provide a fun opportunity to practice. Or maybe it helps some players to pay attention to the game’s story. Regardless of the reason, subtitles—or at least the option to use subtitles—benefits all players. The same could be said about most accessible design features in games: I know that when playing Nier: Automata (PlatinumGames, 2017) I quickly used the game’s amazing button re-mapping system to make for a more comfortable playing experience. I do not have a fine motor disability requiring that I re-map my controls, but that feature’s inclusion still benefited me. As games culture continues to alter—and hopefully improve—its relationship to disability, everyone may benefit from accessibility. And such a perspective on accessibility requires a paradigm shift: accessibility is not about fixing issues for people with disabilities. A new paradigm would recognize that everyone’s abilities fall onto a spectrum, and all of our abilities transform and magnify with improved access to games.

In other words, access defines ability.

Notes

1. The terms game/games/gaming culture are used interchangeably throughout the book. The terms games/gaming journalism are also used interchangeably.

2. Anderson and Schrier, “Disability and Video Games Journalism.”

3. Powers, Nguyen, and Frieden, “Video Game Accessibility.”

4. Powers, Nguyen, and Frieden, “Video Game Accessibility,” para. 1.

5. Grammenos, Savidi, and Stephanidis, “Designing Universally Accessible Games.”

6. Grammenos, Savidi, and Stephanidis, “Designing Universally Accessible Games,” 25.

7. “Accessible Player Experiences (APX),” Accessible Games, accessed September 25, 2023, https://accessible.games/accessible-player-experiences.

8. Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change, 226.

9. See Gunn, “Discourses that Silence” for an excellent example of critical discourse analysis as well as the journal Critical Discourse Studies. See also Bednarek and Caple, “Why Do News Values Matter?”

10. Glaser and Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory; Strauss, Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists; Strauss and Corbin, Basics of Qualitative Research.

11. See Schroeder, “Fetishization.” See also Shumway, “Fetishizing Fetishism.”

12. Wagman, Dee, Tipton, and Whisman, “Constructing Sexuality and Fetishizing Women in American History.”

13. Russo, The Celluloid Closet.

14. Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, 169.

15. Griliopoulos, “Special Report,” para. 14.

16. Cox, “Gaming Accessibility Project,” para. 2.

17. Grammenos, Savidi, and Stephanidis, “Designing Universally Accessible Games.”