Amelia Mitchell | 2025 I.S. Symposium

Name: Amelia Mitchell
Title: How Controller Designs Affect Video Game Accessibility and User Experience
Major: Computer Science
Minor: Studio Art
Advisor: Asa’d As’ad

The video game industry has vastly expanded in recent years, especially in entertainment. With the popularity of video games, various issues have also followed, particularly, accessibility in the design of these games. Since video games joined mainstream entertainment, garnering a huge amount of success the formulas for creating video games became somewhat uniform in style, specifically with controller design. Due to this uniformity, this study explores different controller types (i.e., keyboard and mouse, Xbox, voice control, and head tracking) to analyze to what extent controller type contributes to the user experience of video game play and its accessibility. This is examined by creating a simple game that consists of 4 scenes each with a slightly different task. Those tasks help users test the functionality, usability, and user experience each controller provides. The experiment had a total of 23 participants who completed a short demographics section, expressed how they viewed functionality, usability, user experience, and accessibility, and then tested each controller while filling out corresponding sections of a survey. The survey was then analyzed to see if game controllers affect user experience and accessibility, how user experience, accessibility, usability, and functionality are connected, and how familiarity plays a role in the users’ opinions of both user experience and accessibility.

Posted in Symposium 2025 on May 1, 2025.