Who Can Play? Rethinking Video Game Controllers and Accessibility

This chapter draws on diverse literature and autoethnographic data (i.e. personal experience as a disabled gamer) to consider how controllers and their design have impacted disabled players. As most disabled gamers play at home (Beeston et al., 2019, Characteristics and Motivations of Players with Disabilities in Digital Games. arXiv. Cornell University. Retrieved March 2, 2022 from https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.11352), the focus is on home consoles and a key distinction can be made. If, outside of the mainstream at least, there have been a considerable number of accessibility-focused technologies (hardware and software) for home computers, consoles have remained largely ‘closed’ ecosystems and resistant to these kinds of modifications and additions. Notions of incidental fit and the precarious nature of access are explored. Recent approaches to accessibility and subsequent design solutions are also discussed. These are seen to address only some limitations of earlier solutions but provide numerous possibilities for future work.