Disability and Video Games: Practices of En-/Disabling Modes of Digital Gaming

This collection intends to fill a long overdue research gap on the praxeological aspects of the relationships between disabilities, accessibility, and digital gaming. It will focus on the question of how Game Studies can profit from a Disability Studies perspective of en-/disabling gaming and issues of disability, (in)accessibility and ableism, and vice versa. Instead of departing from the medical model of disability that informs a wide range of publications on “disabled” gaming and that preconceives users as either “able-bodied,” “normal” or as “disabled,” “deficit,” or “unable to play,” our central premise is that dis/ability is not an essential characteristic of the playing subject. We rather intend to analyze the complex infrastructures of playing, i.e., the complex interplay of heterogeneous human and non-human actors, that are en- or disabling. 

Dr. Markus Spöhrer is a Postdoc research associate in the project “The Interactive Gaze: On the Status and Ethics of Surveillance Images in Digital Games” at the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW, University of Tübingen,Germany). He studied American Studies, German and English literature (University of Tübingen), and Media Studies (University of Miami). He has a doctorate in Media Studies from the University of Konstanz, Germany. His main research areas are dis/ability and digital Media, digital games, and Science and Technology Studies (STS).

Prof. Dr. Beate Ochsner is a Professor of Media Studies at the University of Konstanz. Before, she was an assistant professor at the University of Mannheim and a guest professor at the Universities of Innsbruck, Basel, and St. Gallen. In 2002, she habilitated with the thesis DeMONSTRAtion. Zur Repräsentation des Monsters und des Monströsen in Literatur, Fotographie und Film. Also she is spokesperson of the research unit “Media and Participation” and principal investigator of subproject 2 “Techno-sensory processes of participation: App-practices and dis/ability.”