Who gets to play? Physical and conceptual accessibility in video games

Join us in the DH Game Lab events series for this talk from visiting PhD candidate Nadia Di Leo!

This lecture focuses on my PhD research, which asks who gets to play videogames, examining two kinds of accessibility. Physical accessibility concerns whether players can perceive and operate a game, for instance whether it has subtitles or allows them to remap the controls. Conceptual accessibility concerns whether they feel represented by the game and welcome in the culture surrounding it.

The first part draws on the Game Accessibility Guidelines, the main reference in the field. In an audit I conducted, even the five games nominated in the Innovation in Accessibility category at The Game Awards 2025 fell short of many advanced recommendations, and each documented fewer than half of their features on their website.

No equivalent guidelines exist for serious games, which are designed to teach. My doctoral project addresses this gap through Minecraft Education, which I have used during experimental lessons in Italian schools. I began by evaluating the game against the existing guidelines: it fully meets 37% of them and partly meets a further 38%. To assess its reception beyond the classroom, I analysed 27,036 app store reviews, where most complaints concern sign-in issues, licences, and crashes. I also tested Minecraft Education's learning efficacy in classroom settings across a variety of subjects and lessons.

The second part turns to conceptual accessibility: how players represent themselves, and how games represent them. In a qualitative study, I interviewed 19 gamers about gender representation and inclusion in gaming. Some described female characters becoming more complex, but also recounted experiences of women muting their microphones or adopting male usernames online to avoid abuse. Following publication, a Reddit forum created during GamerGate (a 2014 harassment campaign targeting women in gaming) mocked the female participants, reproducing the very hostility the interviewees had described.

Across these studies, access is negotiated in many places: settings menus, school licences, voice chat, online forums. The talk concludes with a reflection on how both quantitative and qualitative data from the gaming world can inform the development of holistic accessibility guidelines for games in educational settings.

Speaker’s Bio:

Nadia Di Leo is a PhD student in Education, Development and Learning Sciences at the University of Foggia (Italy), where she also works as a Teaching Assistant in Special Education and Instructional Design. She is a steering committee member of DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) Italy and a Minecraft Education Ambassador. Her research focuses on game studies, learning sciences, and digital humanities, with particular attention to game accessibility, the representation of gender in video games, community dynamics in online spaces, and the educational potential of game-based environments. She has presented at international conferences including DiGRA, Games & Literary Theory, and AAATE, and her work has appeared in Postdigital Science and Education and the Italian Journal of Educational Technology.