I am planning to create a video game-themed YouTube series geared toward and

accessible for people with disabilities. I came up with this idea after noticing that there was very
little recent YouTube content on gaming regarding disabilities especially regarding neurodiverse
and autistic people who play video games and want to watch content created by people with
these disabilities. I was inspired to make this series after watching Cinemassacre’s The Angry
Video Game Nerd on YouTube and I decided to make a similar project but geared around
disability accessibility and representation in the medium of video games. I am calling my project
The Azoic Era as a play on words as azoic means lifeless and I want to show that people with
disabilities have lives and hobbies such as playing video games.
While most YouTube gaming content is “R” rated due to copious amounts of swearing I
am trying to keep my series closer to the “PG” to “PG-13” range as it would allow me to reach
more audiences. Having the ability to reach more audiences will be very helpful in my mission
of expanding game accessibility awareness. As a person with autism, I am hesitant to include
live action footage due to having trouble making eye contact with cameras, but I feel that that
will eventually be necessary as it would make my video content more interesting for viewers.
YouTube gaming content has to be interesting to attract viewers and content should have
enough diversity to appeal toward viewers. The problem with this is that much of the content
on YouTube is reliant on gaming fads and I feel by focusing on accessibility that this problem
can be avoided. Many gaming YouTube content creators focus on just one game. This is a
problem for my channel as gaming accessibility is “system-wide” and would require me looking
at multiple games and discussing accessibility and representation for and of people with
disabilities. My plan for looking at games is to have videos on both older or “retro” games and
newer recent releases to show how accessibility in gaming has advanced over the last four
decades of mainstream video games and to alternate between time periods on a video-by-
video basis. The pattern I plan on following release-wise is to alternate between retro and
recent in that order repeating for each video release.
The retro-themed videos will largely focus on the inaccessibility (or accessibility) of
video games from the first two decades of video gaming’s mainstream popularity between the
years 1980 and 2000. The prerequisite though is that the game must be available on modern
platforms specifically on the Microsoft Xbox Series S. The reasoning behind choosing this
platform is twofold as it features the most accessibility options of any console for people with
disabilities and also has a massive amount of backwards compatibility with previous consoles in
the Xbox line through the Microsoft store digital marketplace. The backwards compatibility
features of the Xbox series line give access to a large amount of games both old and new
especially when combined with the Xbox game pass service which provides over 100 video
games for a monthly subscription fee. My videos themed around newer games will be closer to
a “Let’s Play” format with elements of comedy in order to maintain viewer interest with a focus
on making newer games accessible for people with disabilities using the built-in software
options and adaptive hardware. I feel that this YouTube series is a way that I could advocate for
game accessibility in my own unique way.