Twitch removes 'blind playthrough' tag in response to feedback from disabled players

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'First playthrough' and 'no spoilers' suggested as replacements.

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(Image credit: Twitch)

Blind people can still play videogames, as proved by Zoe Espinoza, the blind Mortal Kombat badass. But that's not what the "blind playthrough" tag on Twitch highlighted. Instead, it was used to collect streams where players went into games ignorant of their mechanics and story. That's now changed, and the tag has been deleted. As Twitch's director of community and creator marketing Erin Wayne tweeted, "You can still use “First Playthrough” or opt to use it in combination with "No Spoilers" for the same sentiment."

Steve Saylor, who runs the YouTube channel Blind Gamer and is also the media editor of the Can I Play That? videogame accessibility website, explained that "Changing the term "blind playthrough" is not SJW's being super sensitive. I've said this before, "first playthrough" is a better description anyway. I personally am not offended by it, but I do think it's a term that can go away. Language changes over time, so let it."

Steven Spohn, chief operating officer of the AbleGamers charity, had mentioned this and other uses of disability terms in different contexts in a thread, saying that, "Just as we used to say "gay" when something was bad, using disability terms as an alternate word for a negative situation or feeling is common in today's language But just as we stopped saying gay to mean bad, we can stop saying these words too".

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Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.