About

In my mid-twenties, I sustained a life-changing injury to my right arm. At the time, I was a music teacher, pianist, and performer—an identity and career path that suddenly required deep reassessment. During the long period of recovery that followed, I found myself struggling to engage with video games in the same way I had throughout my life. That experience revealed a critical gap: the difference between a game being merely playable and being genuinely enjoyable.

One of the more difficult realizations during my research on this project was that even the best accessibility options in mainstream games often allow players to only lightly engage, rather than fully experience them. I never wanted to compromise design by building an entirely separate kind of game for players with different physical abilities—I wanted to create a bridge to the kinds of experiences that define mainstream games.

While audio games offer a meaningful creative space with their own challenges and triumphs, they are often perceived by broader audiences as too quaint or niche to serve as true analogs. However, I came to understand that because games have only recently begun to prioritize audio—due in part to past memory and hardware constraints—the only real path forward is to take those foundational steps now and build upward from them.

I’m not sure if games will ever be able to fully address their own limitations, but maybe blackout—and games like it—can begin a conversation about the limitations we assume are inherent to these experiences.