A Wall Built Out of Sound

I checked audiogames.net again last week. I hadn’t been there in a while, and I wanted to see what was new.

Most of what I found fell into two groups. Dedicated audiogames. And accessibility mods for mainstream games, built by people who bolt a screen reader onto a visual game and try to turn the whole thing into an audiogame. A lot of the mod makers don’t try to make the actual game work for me. They translate it into something else.

The translation is the problem.

An audiogame is spatial audio. Sound cues stacked on top of each other. Pitch and volume shifting to show how far away something is and what direction it’s in. A world made out of sound, standing in for what a sighted player sees. That’s the medium. And that medium assumes a specific kind of brain, one that can follow a dozen sounds at once and turn them into a map of a room.

My brain can’t do that.

I have topographical agnosia. I can’t build a mental map of a space from where sounds seem to come from. I also have auditory processing differences and the sensory side of autism. Too much sound at once doesn’t give me information. It gives me noise.

So a game built on spatial audio walls me out before I’ve played a minute of it. The thing that’s supposed to make it accessible for me is the thing that makes it unplayable.

The Idea Nobody Says Out Loud #

The blind gaming community runs on a quiet assumption. Sighted games are visual, so accessible games have to be aural. Sound is the natural stand-in for sight. Text is what you settle for when you can’t handle the real thing.

I think that assumption is backwards.

Immersion comes from information, not from the senses. A good MUD hands me a whole world: geography I can reason about, systems I can learn, choices that build on each other, a community that knows my name. A game that surrounds me with sound doesn’t give me more of any of that. It just delivers the world through a channel my brain can’t read.

Text is a medium, the same way sound is a medium. MUDs have been doing depth for decades. They’re still running because text doesn’t break when a patch ships, and it doesn’t demand one particular kind of brain.

“Accessible” Usually Means One Sense #

Spatial audio works for a lot of blind people. If you can parse where a sound comes from, a well-made audiogame is genuinely good. I’m not arguing with that.

But a lot of the community treats audio as the universal answer, and it isn’t. It’s one sensory channel. For someone with topographical agnosia, or auditory processing trouble, or sensory overload, that channel is shut. A game built entirely on spatial audio is the opposite of accessible to me.

When a community decides audio is what accessibility means and builds nearly everything around it, it stops making games for blind people. It makes games for one kind of blind person.

I don’t want to tear down spatial audio. It does real work for the people it serves. But accessibility that locks onto one sense and calls it universal leaves the rest of us out.

Why I Care #

The games that hold my attention are MUDs and Dawncaster. A MUD is text by design, so I’m playing the same game everyone else is, not a translation of it. Dawncaster shows the board as a list I can move through. Neither one asks me to reconstruct a soundscape. Both hand me information as words and structure. That’s why they work for me.

This is why I built Everrealm. It’s a game that is not an audiogame on purpose. No spatial grid. No distance cues. No layered sound. Just structure and text a screen reader can read in a line. I built it because I couldn’t find it, and everything that already existed assumed I wasn’t the audience.

Text games are how I play. MUDs, Dawncaster, Everrealm. They’re the games that let me in. I want more of them to exist.