A History of Disability and Voice-Enabled Gaming from the 1970s to Intelligent Personal Assistants

This chapter addresses a blind spot of gaming history and game and disability studies: voice games or voice-enabled gaming as a means of access to digital gaming. Spöhrer focuses on such devices, techniques or workarounds that require the players to (mainly) use their voice as a mode of input instead of their hands. While research on (digital) voice recognition technology as a means of accessibility has been conducted since the introduction of personal computers to the mainstream, the link to digital gaming is a fairly underrepresented subject. Spöhrer sketches the problematic history of voice-enabled gaming from the 1970s to the present not only from the side of technology but also with respect to the enabling practices that these (precarious) innovations allowed for their users. Spöhrer shows the differences in the PC and home console market in relation to ‘hands-free gaming’. As Spöhrer concludes, the current ubiquity of voice technologies (intelligent personal assistants, smartphones, etc.) correlates with an increase in voice-enabled games, which prognoses a potential factor for diverse accessible modes of play and a newfound interest in voice-enabled gaming.