Dis-/Ability, Accessibility and Video Games: Chapters in the Context of a Research Overview

In this introductory chapter, Markus Spöhrer and Beate Ochsner give an overview of the research areas, topics, and blind spots within various academic disciplines that focus on dis/ability and digital gaming. By discussing publications that deal with these topics, they argue that gamers who identify as dis/abled are still an under-researched demographic within media studies, cultural studies, game studies, and disability studies. Furthermore, digital gaming research lacks, for the most part, a critical perspective on the problematic dichotomies that guide numerous publications on game design, therapy, and education. In contrast to this dichotomy, they suggest a conceptualization of dis/ability and digital gaming that does not presuppose or predefine gamer subjects according to their supposed in/abilities. Instead of asking ‘Which bodies are disabled?’ or ‘Which devices make games inaccessible?’, they intend to look at how individual practices and conditions of access configure, arrange, act and react upon the relationships between (non)human actors and en-/disable digital gaming. From this perspective, that which is usually presupposed as ‘normal gaming’ is just one stabilized practice of access among many.