Game Interfaces as Disabling Infrastructures

Game interfaces have been described as grounds for creating and cementing new forms of machinic subjectivity, with players asked to conform to the demands, requirements, and affordances of game software and hardware. When player bodies are unable to conform to these demands, however, such interfaces are experienced as hegemonic, disabling, and marginalizing, embodying normative models of the body that create the category of the disabled gamer, excluded by the design of the interface. The recent push for accessibility in video games involves a growing articulation of the incompatibility between game interfaces and player bodies, revealing the ways standard interfaces position disabled gamers as non-consuming subjects, willing but unable to participate in the process of buying and playing games. Disabled gamers are therefore described as underexploited resources that value could be extracted from if only interfaces would be designed to be compatible and adaptable to their bodily affordances.