Providing Access

The chapter departs from an evaluation of the status quo of inclusive gaming: Despite the achievements and efforts in accessible game design and development along with the ongoing economic and sociopolitical trend toward inclusive gaming, most commercial games still lack the much-required adaptive infrastructures and individual reconfigurability. Additionally, the chapter alludes to the complicated relationship between copyright laws, legal free access to telecommunication technologies, and the necessity to (sometimes illegally) alter protected hard- and software as a means of enabling individuals to play. In doing so, she discusses to what extent workarounds or hacks can be considered a violation of rights or a representation of the right to ‘access the technological self,’ demonstrating that the legal aspect of accessibility can also become an ethical issue. Consequently, this raises the question of the legal clarification or even definition of ‘accessibility,’ which might be misleading, as accessibility or rather enabling gaming has from the very beginning been a process of creativity, adaptability, and playfulness and should resist outdated hierarchical and one-dimensional notions of the same