What We Got Wrong About Accessible Esports (And What Worked)
We spent three months planning the most accessible gaming tournament in Tampere. Here's what I learned from watching it fall apart in places we didn't expect.
Running an accessible gaming event is not the same as running a gaming event and then adding a ramp.
That was the first thing I got wrong. When I started designing Over the Barriers — a fully accessible gaming tournament we ran at Nokia Arena in Tampere in spring 2025 — I had a mental model of accessibility as a checklist. Physical access. Controller adaptations. Sign language interpretation. Check, check, check.
What the ethnographic work I did before, during, and after the event showed me was that accessibility is mostly about assumptions — and that the people who design events are, almost by definition, not the people whose access needs are most likely to be overlooked.
The planning phase: what we thought we knew
We had support. Xbox came on as a sponsor and gave us adaptive controller hardware. Nokia Arena gave us a venue with good physical access. We had a volunteer team who were enthusiastic and genuinely committed. We ran user research sessions with gamers who had physical, cognitive, and sensory disabilities. We thought we had covered the ground.
The research revealed some things we’d missed immediately: the registration form assumed all participants would arrive and leave independently; the schedule assumed a pace of play that would be exhausting for players managing fatigue conditions; the social programme we’d designed assumed a specific kind of participation that excluded players who found crowd environments difficult.
We fixed those. Or we tried to fix them. What I couldn’t fully anticipate was how the unplanned moments — the gaps between the programme — would create access problems of their own.
The day itself: the things that surprised us
Three things surprised me on the day.
The noise. Nokia Arena is a large, echo-prone venue. We had noise-cancelling headsets available, but we hadn’t thought carefully enough about where sensory overwhelm would first hit players — not during the matches, but in the queue to register. The first twenty minutes of the event, before anyone was seated, was the loudest and most chaotic point of the whole day.
The waiting. Between matches, players had blocks of unstructured time. For players with cognitive disabilities or anxiety, unstructured time in a busy venue with no clear guidance on what to do next was its own kind of barrier. We hadn’t designed for the gaps.
The help-seeking friction. Players who needed assistance found it easy to ask volunteers for help with tasks they’d anticipated needing help with. They found it much harder to ask for help with things they hadn’t expected to need — because asking itself required recognising a problem, then identifying who to ask, then having a social exchange that might feel stigmatising. The easier we made it to ask for help, the more people asked.
What this means for the paper
The Academic Mindtrek 2026 paper I’m writing from this experience focuses on event design methodology — specifically, how you build adaptability into the structure of an accessible event rather than trying to anticipate every individual need in advance.
The core argument is that accessible event design needs two tracks: a designed track (the things you plan for, the hardware, the physical access, the explicit accommodations) and an adaptive track (the structures and processes that allow the event to respond to unanticipated access needs in real time, without requiring the person experiencing them to perform a high-friction help request).
We got the designed track mostly right. The adaptive track is where the real work is.
What I’d do differently
A few concrete things:
Build a quiet room in from day one, not as an afterthought. We had one, but it was added late and volunteers didn’t know about it consistently.
Design the registration queue first. It’s the most chaotic moment and the first impression. If you get that wrong, players arrive at their seats already depleted.
Give unstructured time structure. Not programming, but orientation — a clear map, a clear “you are here”, clear wayfinding. The gap between matches shouldn’t be a puzzle.
Train volunteers on the difference between anticipated and unanticipated help requests. The second kind is more common and harder to catch.
The tournament worked. Players had a good time. We’re doing it again. But the ethnographic record is honest about what didn’t work, and that honesty is what makes it worth writing up.