  Sighted players gain spatial awareness within video games through sight and
spatial awareness tools (SATs) such as minimaps. Visually impaired players
(VIPs), however, must often rely heavily on SATs to gain spatial awareness,
especially in complex environments where using rich ambient sound design alone
may be insufficient. Researchers have developed many SATs for facilitating
spatial awareness within VIPs. Yet this abundance disguises a gap in our
understanding about how exactly these approaches assist VIPs in gaining spatial
awareness and what their relative merits and limitations are. To address this,
we investigate four leading approaches to facilitating spatial awareness for
VIPs within a 3D video game context. Our findings uncover new insights into
SATs for VIPs within video games, including that VIPs value position and
orientation information the most from an SAT; that none of the approaches we
investigated convey position and orientation effectively; and that VIPs highly
value the ability to customize SATs.
