Enabling the Disabled Gamer
With the growing popularity of video game discourse in mainstream media, a new Microsoft accessory is raising awareness for players with limited mobility to the wider gaming community.
As Steve Spohn, the Chief Operating Officer of the North American-based disability gaming charity organisation, AbleGamers, tells me, there are one billion people worldwide who identify as having some form of disability, and assumedly, more than 33 million of them enjoy some form of gaming. In this way, the gaming development community and non-profit charity organisations are working together to improve the quality-of-life and enjoyment of these players with more accessible gaming equipment.
“A standard controller has about 20 different inputs — the thumbsticks, D-pad, A, B, X and Y buttons… — and is designed primarily for those with full use of their hands and fingers,” Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft, Navin Kumar, explains during a presentation demoing their Xbox Adaptive Controller at E3.
“Many people who game differently, or who don’t have full use of their hands and fingers, have to modify this device, sometimes mount it in their chin or put it by their feet, which is not how this is designed nor creates the best play experience.”
Gaming as the great equaliser
20-year-old Bradley suffered from a stroke when he was 16, which left him with a left-sided weakness, making it very difficult to experience the outside world and play games. As he explains to UK charity organisation Special Effects, the six customisable hotkeys on the side of Razer’s Naga mouse, allowed him to experience linear gameplay but didn’t enable him to fully enjoy the real-time tactical gameplay of MMORPGs until he had a step-board for his right foot.
As he continues, gaming has allowed him to learn to accept his disability and do things that his disability prevents him from in the physical world.
“A game is a fantasy,” he explains. “You are emerged in that character so the bounds of your physical body are not apparent in that universe.”
“It’s no longer the limitations of me. I can kind of run but I can’t run to the level I could before, whereas in a video game, I no longer have that limitation.”
In this way, Bradley sees gaming for him as a form of rehabilitation.
“Both mentally and physically, it’s pushing the boundaries and getting [myself to a] top performance where [I] could compete with fully able-bodies.”
“It’s easier to participate in a world where you can fully interact,” Spohn explains. “The real world is physically challenging for people with motor disabilities but in a video game, if you have a mind that’s willing and a body that’s unable, you can run, jump and soar just like anyone else.”
Even then, Spohn tells me that there’s more that affects gamers with limited mobility besides their own physical limitations. Being known as someone with a physical disability can potentially lead to being excluded and alienated because of ignorance among able players in the gaming community.
“When you are behind an avatar, no one knows your disabled unless you want to reveal it,” Spohn explains. “When the disability is revealed, it’s up to the individuals how they react to the news.”
Although some may see this as an illusion of acceptance given that disabled users are accepted only when they exist as an avatar, for many disabled people, it’s a level of freedom they don’t often experience. Learning to overcome the feared alienation or discrimination they receive in the physical world is an issue that transcends the gaming community, and as Spohn echoes, is less likely to occur from other gamers because of the shared interest in video games and understanding of social exclusion as an outcast.
“While there are always going to be some people who discriminate, the majority of people you meet online get to know you aside from your disability, and that helps people who aren’t necessarily comfortable with how medical things may appear,” He explains. “Many people who may be intimidated by a breathing apparatus or other machinery can look past that when they see their friend. It’s a good educational and outreach opportunity.”
“Build for one, design for many”
According to Evelyn Thomas at Microsoft’s Inclusive Technology Labs, there is a design philosophy among the gaming development community to build for one purpose but design for many. Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller is designed to assist limited mobility players and make their gameplay experiences more accessible and enjoyable, but the ability to customise a controller to various external buttons, such as step pedals or switches in the context of a fighting game, has potential in the able-body and competitive communities.
Yet as Evelyn Thomas at Microsoft’s Inclusive Technology Labs admits when asked if Microsoft would provide pre-made builds for some of their first party games, the company is merely a facilitator enabling disabled players to experience the same emotional engagement as able players.
“We can’t assume to know what’s going to work well for somebody that has Cerebral Palsy but the Cerebral Palsy Foundation certainly does,” She explains. “They’ve volunteered to actually create videos and profile ideas for games based on the level of Cerebral Palsy that someone might have — ‘possibly a great setup for someone playing Call of Duty if you have CP stage 2’, that type of thing.”
But what of the implications this could have on other everyday activities made difficult to disabled-body people? Given that modding community members, such as YouTuber Ben Heck, curate video tutorials on how to redesign a controller for single hand or split use, surely there’s potential for hardware like the Adaptive Controller to be used in other non-gaming contexts, like operating machinery.
“That’s certainly an interesting idea,” admits Spohn. “Video game joysticks and wheelchair operated joysticks often lean on technological advancements made in either field, so it’s entirely possible that something like the XAC could lead to or inspire the next greatest technological advancement for people with disabilities in fields other than video game entertainment.”
While technology is becoming more disability-friendly, it’s clear that there is a lot more to the struggles of the disabled gaming community that extend past the physical bounds of their playing experience. Even then, as Bradley shares, video games are becoming a great equaliser because they allow disabled people to realise the limitations of their body do not define them.
“I can do whatever anyone else can do,” He admits. “I am normal.”
