Description
This book explores the opportunities and challenges people with disabilities experience in the context of digital games from the perspective of three related areas: representation, access and inclusion, and community.
Drawing on key concerns in disability media studies, the book brings together scholars from disability studies and game studies, alongside game developers, educators, and disability rights activists, to reflect upon the increasing visibility of disabled characters in digital games. Chapters explore the contemporary gaming environment as it relates to disability on platforms such as Twitch, Minecraft, and Tingyou, while also addressing future possibilities and pitfalls for people with disabilities within gaming given the rise of virtual reality applications, and augmented games such as Pokémon Go. The book asks how game developers can attempt to represent diverse abilities, taking games such as BlindSide and Overwatch as examples.
A significant collection for scholars and students interested in the critical analysis of digital games, this volume will be of interest across several disciplines including game studies, game design and development, internet, visual, cultural, communication and media studies, as well as disability studies.
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Gaming (and) Disability
Katie Ellis, Tama Leaver, and Mike Kent
Part I: Representation
2. A History of Disability in Video Game Character Design
Jennifer Dalsen
3. Dis/abling Androids: Gaming, Posthumanism, and Critical Disability Studies
Mark A. Castrodale
4. Outliers as Heroes: Disability, Representation, and Inclusion in Blizzard’s Overwatch
Kai-Ti Kao and Denise Woods
5. The Dis/ability of the Avatar: Vulnerability Versus the Autonomous Subject
Simon Ledder
6. Crashing Through Capitalism: Happy Wheels, Debilitation, and Disability Representation
Leanne McRae
7. A Missile to the Face: Scarred Characters in Mass Effect 2
Gabriele Aroni
8. Representations of Ability in Digital Games
Diane Carr
Part II: Digital Access and Design
9. A Spectrum of Real: Augmented Reality and Social Scaffolding
Craig Smith and Heath Wild
10. Towards Inclusive Game Design
Patricia da Silva Leite and Leonelo Dell Anhol Almeida
11. The Ultimate Medium for People with Disabilities? Re-Centring the Human in Virtual Reality Visions of Play, Care, and Empathy
Marisa Brandt, Mitchell Reddan, and Morgan Kiryakoza
12. The Sociological Accessibility of Gaming
Michael James Heron
13. A Life-Course Analysis of Third-Age Digital Game Players in China
Chen Guo and Katie Ellis
14. Gaming with Blindness in Audio Virtual Reality: Making BlindSide
Mike Kent, Michael T. Astolfi and Aaron Rasmussen
Part III: Inclusive Communities
15. A (Dis-)abling Gaming Model for Playful Inclusion: Playing (Digital) Games with Persons with and without Learning Difficulties and Dis/abilities
Gertraud Kremsner, Alexander Schmoelz, Michelle Proyer
16. Online Games Players in Darkness: A Study of the Blind Gaming Community Tingyou
Huan Wu
17. Pokémon Go and Urban Accessibility
Kathryn Locke and Tama Leaver
18. Crip Twitchology: You’re Already One of Us
Katie Ellis and Lachlan Howells
19. Minecraft as an Online Playground: Reframing Play and Games in a Minecraft Community for Autistic Youth
Kathryn E. Ringland
