33% of Gamers Are Disabled
news.sky.com
news.sky.com
Not the title of the article, not a claim made in the article, not a factually supported statement about distribution of disabilities among gamers.
There is no reference to the source of that information however.
Basically, it's only true if you really cherry-pick the data. The 30% includes mental health issues (which are not relevant to this type of accessibility at all) and if you also include anyone who ever played a mobile game in their life (which is something most people do, but they wouldn't classify themselves as gamers)
This is a really common misclassification when making surveys about "gamers" - if one includes anyone who ever played a mobile game in their life, the dataset will not consist of what you'd think of gamers, but will consist of a slightly skewed sample of the general population instead.
(source: https://newzoo.com/resources/blog/newzoos-gamer-sentiment-di... and https://resources.newzoo.com/hubfs/Factsheets/Factsheet%20-%... ) Warning: this is just straight up propaganda.
> "If done properly, AI can open up whole new methods by which games can be made accessible. You know, imagine a video game that could automatically adapt its mechanics and adapt its difficulty to a player's individual abilities and skill, no matter what the disability."
What's interesting is that this doesn't seem related to any of the recent AI buzz. I cannot imagine an LLM performing this task, nor any of the computer vision or image generation stuff. In fact, adaptive difficulty has been a (controversial) thing in games for awhile. So maybe it means "AI" in the same sense that a computer player in Street Fighter is an "AI"?
There must exist more than just a few popular games that do not disadvantage or exclude anyone. It's not that developers don't care about accessibility, but that some aspects cannot be implemented as optional features and fundamentally change a game design.
Many action games come to mind. Subtitles, minimum contrast ratios, and colorblind filters are one thing, but addressing low mobility or blindness might make them completely different. As cool as it sounds being able to play an FPS without a screen, has anyone figured it out and was it any fun?
On the flip side, if you are disabled, what pressures would you face that make you more likely to interact with games than the general population?
The article needs at least one clear peer-reviewed citation.
(1) https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/disability-e...
And I strongly resonate... the last time I'd really identify as a gamer was during youth and studies, maybe. Now I lack the time and rarely game. But I had good times still, especially with an egoshooter clan first and also kind of addictive MMORPGs, and always think: when I'm on pension, or something bad hits that isolates or disables me and there is not much more to do and I'd be despaired, I'd try to find my way back into such a community, for the social aspect as well as entertainment, gives me some hope for that unthinkable situations .