Matt Knutson, University of North Dakota – Arcade Games and Accessible Sport

Accessible competitive gaming is a growing industry with a long history.

Matt Knutson, assistant professor at the University of North Dakota, fires up the games to find out more.

Matt Knutson (he/him) is an assistant professor at the University of North Dakota, where he directs the academic program in esports. His research focuses on the temporality of competitive gaming and the pre-history of esports.

Arcade Games and Accessible Sport

Maybe you have seen those big esports competitions – you know, the ones with about ten young people on stage looking intensely at computer screens until one group erupts in victorious shouting as confetti falls. Esports, organized competitive video games, have been appearing in high schools across the country as an after-school activity that offers many of the same benefits of traditional sports. There could be an esports team at your local high school that you could check out.

If you already knew all that, maybe something that hadn’t been obvious at first was just how accessible esports are. People with disabilities can access video games in a staggering number of ways, including customizable controllers from both Microsoft and Sony as well as oral interfaces in which players control on-screen characters with their breath.

My research shows that accessible competitive gaming has a surprisingly long history. In fact, people with disabilities were playing in tournaments for arcade and pinball forty years ago. A pair of brothers, Rob and Gary Marince, are the focus of this research, which was assembled from newspapers, games industry trade publication coverage, and a documentary short that aired on PBS. After an auto accident paralyzed Rob at the age of 17, his brother Gary began designing numerous technological accommodations for him, including a “sip and puff” oral interface that enabled Rob to play pinball and arcade games.

The tournaments Gary organized for Rob and other people with disabilities testify to the power of gaming to transport players to new places and to provide a sense of accomplishment. Moreover, they demonstrate some of the unique capabilities of gaming to create new opportunities for sporting and community-building. Accessibility in today’s gaming industry is still a project very much in progress, and thinking through its history offers us reminders about what doing accessibility right means.

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