It would be reductive to consider the PC as simply a platform for gaming. A PC is much more, and used completely differently for each person, family, office and school. For some a PC is their gateway to entertainment, for others it collects dust in the corner of the living room and only gets used when someone needs something printing, whilst some see them as tools they can’t wait to escape when their work or school day is over. The PC and computing has revolutionized human history, as the entire structure of the human lifestyle has shifted around screens and buttons in the age of technology. PCs contain endless complexity and possibility, and few limitations as machines. This, however, is what makes them so good for gaming.
I’m a disabled gamer, and many of us likely know by now that PC is a great way to engage in the world of video games with any kind of physical condition or mobility issue. It’s customizable to our needs, with many ways to find workarounds that would be far more difficult or impossible on a traditional gaming console. What I find even more fascinating though is how the PC and its ability to infinitely accommodate accessibility isn’t just a disability-related solution. If you’re a PC gamer I can almost guarantee that you’ve used an accessibility function of your PC without even noticing – and I’ll explain exactly what I mean.
Firstly, what makes PCs so good at being accessible? Their modular nature makes them very easy to build specifically to your needs, which can be a plus when we’re talking about traditional “accessibility” in relation to disability. A PC can be wired to have the power button in a more accessible place for the user, they can be made in a compact form factor or a large one depending on what’s needed, and the ability to add as many connection ports as you’d like means that many different assistive devices can be used all at the same time.
That’s what makes the PC so accessible in a traditional sense related to disabilities. They don’t have any technical limitations outside of the person building it and the budget/parts they have available to them. In this day and age, almost anything is possible when building a PC, and so many devices can be connected with cables or even wirelessly. It’s a machine of endless possibility to accommodate those with disabilities – but it goes even further. What I’d like to shed light on is how the PC, for me, is a far better gaming system than any other because its accessibility uses go beyond just traditional disability accessibility.
Let me give an example: Mother 3. Yes, the Nintendo game. This 2006 RPG for the Game Boy Advance marks the final entry in the iconic Mother series – and it never got released outside of Japan. However, just two years later in 2008, the Starmen.net online community released a full fan-made translation of the game, where a patch could be used on the ROM file of the game so that it could be played entirely in English. The conclusion to the beloved Mother franchise was inaccessible to the millions (or billions!) of English-speaking people in the world, and the PC as a gaming platform was able to make it accessible to us all. It went even further, as now Mother 3 has other language mods such as Spanish, Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese. The PC’s gaming use made that happen, and expanded the reach of a fantastic game to billions more than it had at launch, with this only being a single example of the use of fan translations. Part of the definition of accessibility from the Oxford Languages dictionary states that accessibility means the “quality of being easily understood” – and a fan-made translation project that makes a game understandable for billions of people surely counts.
Accessibility in relation to geography doesn’t stop there though – the PC is also incredible at working around region-locked content. On consoles, games can have physical releases that are locked to certain regions. This may be an older and perhaps outdated point now, but there was a time when European games wouldn’t work on American systems, and vice versa. Even now though, sometimes modern systems can still have geographical restrictions on their digital storefronts. The tools the PC possesses though can circumvent geographical gating, from VPNs to pretend to be in another country, to just straight up direct downloading of a game’s files or mods to patch out the regional locked content. This also applies to games that may have been censored in certain regions, but the PC gives players access to any version of a game they want.
Moving on from geographical accessibility, the way PC games are executed and can be scaled to your hardware results in a sort of financial accessibility. Everyone has different budgets for how much they can spend on a piece of technology, but when we’re talking about gaming consoles they come with high prices and restricted content. An Xbox Series X retails for around $500, with a paid online service for some titles to connect to the internet, and without any access to PS5 exclusive titles – even some third-party ones – or backwards compatibility with non-approved games. A budget PC, whilst limited in what it can do, can be purchased or made for under $300. Sure, you won’t be able to run modern AAA games particularly well, but you will have access to an incredibly adaptable, modifiable and accessible machine, without paying for an online service either. Bump the budget up a little to match an Xbox and you’ll have even better performance that could exceed the console.
Hardware scalability, as detailed above, is a feature that makes PCs accessible that almost every gamer will have used at some point in their PC gaming journey. We all tweak our settings to match our rigs, whether that’s through a benchmark making the decision, clicking ‘default’ or fine-tuning every little detail to our needs. That’s an incredibly unique feature that consoles still barely have, instead only offering presets to prioritise frame rate or resolution. The PC’s modular nature means games almost have to be built with everyone in mind – an accessibility-focused mindset! This results in releases where we can drop everything to its lowest for our budget or older gaming set-ups, or push it all the way to the limits of gaming tech with more premium and modern rigs. It’s accessible for our finances, meaning whether we’re strapped for cash or approaching Scrooge McDuck levels of excess money, our PC will give us the performance we can afford.
Overall, you can see a dividing line between PCs and gaming platforms such as Sony or Nintendo in their business models. That is, the PC doesn’t have one, as it’s just a broad piece of technology made up by yourself. Sure, the parts within a PC such as an operating system or the graphics card are made by business with profit-driven mindsets, but once you get the purchase and set-up done of making the PC, that’s it. There’s no additional online subscription to pay outside of your internet bill, there’s no warranty that dictates what you can and can’t do with your machine (in the case of custom builds), and there’s no purchasing platform such as the PlayStation Store or Nintendo eShop that decides what you can or can’t play in whatever way you choose to.
Platforms are built for continual profits for everyone involved. Online services cost money, with more expensive tiers throwing in games you can borrow (but won’t own!) for added temptation to pay them more. Those same online services made to gate off your engagement and spending can crash out and leave you unable to play anything, as Sony demonstrated recently. Even the peripherals of a console are limited, with first-party controllers being tied to their platforms and shut out by the others to keep consumers buying their controllers specifically, or resorting to third-party. The Xbox controller won’t work on a PS5 despite their buttons being effectively the same, because even after you buy the console Sony still wants your money. The PC doesn’t care who manufactures your controllers, or where you choose to buy your games from, or what games in what languages you want to play. Though sometimes the solutions may be convoluted or require technical understanding of certain processes, the PC does not limit you beyond that.
The accessibility of PCs doesn’t just mean helping someone with a motor, sight or hearing issue adapt their gaming to their needs. It’s a practically boundless piece of technology that will serve to meet your gaming needs in any which way you require. It tears down the “you need to meet these conditions” barriers of gaming wherever they may be found, be they biological, geographic or financial. Whether you’re an amputee that needs assistive technology to control a mouse, or entirely able-bodied and just want the freedom to play certain games with your own specific hardware, the PC accommodates and makes gaming accessible; for everyone, anywhere, any time. I may have gotten into PC gaming for the accessibility it offered for my condition, but it remains my platform of choice in how it makes long-lost games, hardware-demanding games and any input method more accessible to me.
