From Checklists to Playability: A systematic mapping of player reviews to the Game Accessibility Guidelines

This study examines how accessibility frameworks intersect with disabled players’ evaluations and deployment. We mapped accessibility reviews from the “Can I Play That?” website written between 2019 and 2025 onto the Game Accessibility Guidelines through coding and scoring, then conducted a heuristic evaluation of Minecraft Education as a case study. The analysis showed that reviews foreground basic hearing, motor and visual provisions such as subtitles, remapping and legible text, while advanced guidelines remain largely absent. Minecraft Education satisfies basic and intermediate items across domains yet leaves gaps. Taken together, the study interrogates whose accessibility counts in contemporary game design and deployment. The annotation framework is replicable and open, in an effort to create a new practical resource for the gaming community.