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Actually, It's About [Accessibility In Gaming]
WACriminal
Dying Is Easy, Young ManLiving Is HarderRegistered User regular
Dying Is Easy, Young ManLiving Is HarderRegistered User regular
Inspired by some chatter in the E3 hype thread, I thought it might be fun to put together a thread dedicated to discussion of accessibility in gaming -- recent developments, ongoing barriers, etc. But first, some framework!
What is accessibility?
Accessibility is, most generally, “the quality of being able to be reached or entered”. When we talk about whether a specific thing (a building, a movie, a game) is accessible or not, we’re typically talking about whether it has been designed in such a way that disabled individuals can make use of and/or enjoy it.
Before I go any further, I want to talk a little bit about what I mean by “disabled”, because it’s different from what folks usually mean by it, thanks to a little thing called The Social Model Of Disability.
TL;DR: It’s society’s responsibility to make itself accessible to marginalized people, not the responsibility of marginalized people to overcome society’s inaccessibility.
I want to talk specifically about the state of accessibility in gaming, of both the digital and tabletop varieties. This OP is by no means intended to be comprehensive, and will (by virtue of personal experience) be heavily slanted towards discussion of disability due to blindness. But all kinds of disabilities are important, and I’d be glad to edit in more information as the conversation goes on, especially from disabled forumers.
Video Games
Video gaming in general is a wildly inaccessible hobby. Its reliance on visual feedback, the focus on fast-paced action, and an increasing move towards forms of gaming that require physical activity (VR) and/or high-speed internet (online-only games and digital-only distribution) conspire to disable many people who would otherwise greatly enjoy video gaming. Nevertheless, there are some bright spots:
Common Accessibility Features
Notable Products
Notable Barriers to Accessibility
What is accessibility?
Accessibility is, most generally, “the quality of being able to be reached or entered”. When we talk about whether a specific thing (a building, a movie, a game) is accessible or not, we’re typically talking about whether it has been designed in such a way that disabled individuals can make use of and/or enjoy it.
Before I go any further, I want to talk a little bit about what I mean by “disabled”, because it’s different from what folks usually mean by it, thanks to a little thing called The Social Model Of Disability.
The Social Model of Disability posits that people are not disabled (that is, prevented from accessing experiences, locations, or services) by their physical, mental or social variances, but rather by society’s failure to accommodate those variances.
That is to say, a person who is blind doesn’t have difficulty finding a job because they are blind, but rather because society refuses to hire blind people, even for jobs that they are fully capable of performing with the proper equipment and training.
Or, more generally: Consider a major city which refuses to properly invest in its public transit infrastructure, opting instead to invest that money into things like sports stadiums, tourism campaigns, and tax breaks for the wealthy. Individuals who rely on public transit then have greater difficulty getting around town -- they have been disabled. Given that the city had the resources available to prevent that, can we truly say that their disability is inherent to their own physical, mental, or social variance? Is it not much more accurate to say that their disability is the direct result of the city’s failure to design itself in a way compatible with their needs?
In short, disabled people are “disabled like wifi, not disabled like broken”.
Accepting this definition/framework for understanding disability will do a couple things for you:
It will make you mad. Just, like...mind-blowingly, intensely furious anytime you see public resources (or the resources of a mega-corporation like Nintendo or Microsoft) being spent frivolously while a marginalized community’s needs go unaddressed.
It allows us to discuss categories of experience that a lot of people don’t think about in this context. Being poor isn’t a disability, but people can disable you due to your poverty. Race isn’t a disability, but people can disable you due to your race. Moreover, something that can lead people to disable you in one area might not lead them to disable you in another area. Example: An autistic person may find themselves unfairly blocked out of certain lines of work, while their autism may be considered an advantage in other professions or activities. But for the autistic person who wants to work in, say, a sales position and is not hired because their autistic behaviors are “off-putting”, the fact that they are advantaged in other areas does not prevent them from feeling disabled in this instance.
So when I talk about a “disabled person”, I don’t necessarily mean someone with a physical variance from the average person. In this particular context, it can apply just as easily to someone who is autistic, or someone who is poor, or someone who is located in an area with poor internet infrastructure, or someone who is a member of a racial minority not often represented in video games.
When we talk about accessibility, there is room for considering all these factors and more.
That is to say, a person who is blind doesn’t have difficulty finding a job because they are blind, but rather because society refuses to hire blind people, even for jobs that they are fully capable of performing with the proper equipment and training.
Or, more generally: Consider a major city which refuses to properly invest in its public transit infrastructure, opting instead to invest that money into things like sports stadiums, tourism campaigns, and tax breaks for the wealthy. Individuals who rely on public transit then have greater difficulty getting around town -- they have been disabled. Given that the city had the resources available to prevent that, can we truly say that their disability is inherent to their own physical, mental, or social variance? Is it not much more accurate to say that their disability is the direct result of the city’s failure to design itself in a way compatible with their needs?
In short, disabled people are “disabled like wifi, not disabled like broken”.
Accepting this definition/framework for understanding disability will do a couple things for you:
It will make you mad. Just, like...mind-blowingly, intensely furious anytime you see public resources (or the resources of a mega-corporation like Nintendo or Microsoft) being spent frivolously while a marginalized community’s needs go unaddressed.
It allows us to discuss categories of experience that a lot of people don’t think about in this context. Being poor isn’t a disability, but people can disable you due to your poverty. Race isn’t a disability, but people can disable you due to your race. Moreover, something that can lead people to disable you in one area might not lead them to disable you in another area. Example: An autistic person may find themselves unfairly blocked out of certain lines of work, while their autism may be considered an advantage in other professions or activities. But for the autistic person who wants to work in, say, a sales position and is not hired because their autistic behaviors are “off-putting”, the fact that they are advantaged in other areas does not prevent them from feeling disabled in this instance.
So when I talk about a “disabled person”, I don’t necessarily mean someone with a physical variance from the average person. In this particular context, it can apply just as easily to someone who is autistic, or someone who is poor, or someone who is located in an area with poor internet infrastructure, or someone who is a member of a racial minority not often represented in video games.
When we talk about accessibility, there is room for considering all these factors and more.
TL;DR: It’s society’s responsibility to make itself accessible to marginalized people, not the responsibility of marginalized people to overcome society’s inaccessibility.
I want to talk specifically about the state of accessibility in gaming, of both the digital and tabletop varieties. This OP is by no means intended to be comprehensive, and will (by virtue of personal experience) be heavily slanted towards discussion of disability due to blindness. But all kinds of disabilities are important, and I’d be glad to edit in more information as the conversation goes on, especially from disabled forumers.
Video Games
Video gaming in general is a wildly inaccessible hobby. Its reliance on visual feedback, the focus on fast-paced action, and an increasing move towards forms of gaming that require physical activity (VR) and/or high-speed internet (online-only games and digital-only distribution) conspire to disable many people who would otherwise greatly enjoy video gaming. Nevertheless, there are some bright spots:
Common Accessibility Features
Colorblind modes -- Colorblind modes are becoming increasingly common across a wide variety of video game genres. These modes can be crucial in helping colorblind players quickly parse the flood of visual information many games require the player to interpret and respond to during gameplay. Read a colorblind player’s experience here. Unfortunately, some attempts are better than others; Overwatch’s colorblind mode has been notoriously plagued with inadequacies.
Difficulty settings and assistive modes -- Many issues of inaccessibility can be mitigated by simply bumping the game’s difficulty down a smidge. Give the player more lives. Let them jump higher. Remove the time limit. By incorporating a game mode which explicitly removes certain barriers to gameplay, it is possible for game devs to grant their game a wider appeal and userbase. Some devs take this so far as to include assistive modes like Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze’s “Funky Kong Mode”, targeted specifically at children and disabled players.
Configurable Control Schemes -- Players with physical variance often find that they can more easily enjoy games by utilizing non-standard control schemes. Games which allow the player to modify the control scheme, then, are much more accessible than games which do not. Although it is far from universal for games to do so, gaming culture has (largely for reasons of convenience, not accessibility) come to see configurable control schemes as standard. “Where’s controller support????”
Subtitles -- These days, virtually any video game with significant dialogue will contain the option to display subtitles. This, as you might expect, opens up lots of doors for gamers who cannot hear, have difficulty hearing, or have auditory processing disorders that make it much easier to absorb written text instead of spoken dialogue. Very few games, however, have taken the extra step to include on-screen captions of auditory cues, like Minecraft has.
Difficulty settings and assistive modes -- Many issues of inaccessibility can be mitigated by simply bumping the game’s difficulty down a smidge. Give the player more lives. Let them jump higher. Remove the time limit. By incorporating a game mode which explicitly removes certain barriers to gameplay, it is possible for game devs to grant their game a wider appeal and userbase. Some devs take this so far as to include assistive modes like Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze’s “Funky Kong Mode”, targeted specifically at children and disabled players.
Configurable Control Schemes -- Players with physical variance often find that they can more easily enjoy games by utilizing non-standard control schemes. Games which allow the player to modify the control scheme, then, are much more accessible than games which do not. Although it is far from universal for games to do so, gaming culture has (largely for reasons of convenience, not accessibility) come to see configurable control schemes as standard. “Where’s controller support????”
Subtitles -- These days, virtually any video game with significant dialogue will contain the option to display subtitles. This, as you might expect, opens up lots of doors for gamers who cannot hear, have difficulty hearing, or have auditory processing disorders that make it much easier to absorb written text instead of spoken dialogue. Very few games, however, have taken the extra step to include on-screen captions of auditory cues, like Minecraft has.
Notable Products
DISCLAIMER: I have not actually played this game, for reasons I’ll discuss later. Nevertheless, I think it’s worth noting as a somewhat successful attempt to make a game entirely accessible to blind players. The game features no video at all. The player takes on the role of a blind knight who sets out to rescue his kidnapped wife, with the help of their (sighted) daughter. All necessary information to play the game is communicated to the player by sound cues. Gameplay is quite simple, mostly revolving around combat via timing puzzles, but the important thing here is that the developer dared to imagine that video games as a medium could be something more, that it was possible to produce a game that was both accessible and fun.
I can’t speak to whether the intention was accessibility or mere convenience, but it has been noted by fans of Earthbound that it is easily possible to play the entire game with one hand, given that the L button duplicates the function of the A button, and that Select+L duplicates the B button. I mention it here not as, like, a paragon of accessibility or anything, but merely an example of how accessibility concerns can be incorporated into a game’s design without “compromising” the final product -- few would argue that Earthbound is anything but a classic, after all.
This is not a commercial product, but rather a set of homebrew Lua scripts that can be run in conjunction with an emulator to allow screen-reader software to narrate the contents of the screen during Pokemon Crystal gameplay. It isn’t perfect, but it’s damn impressive. If this is what some rando can make in a cave with a box of scraps at home with an emulator, why the fuck hasn’t Game Freak incorporated something even more robust into their actual games?
The masterpiece that inspired the conversation that, in turn, inspired this thread! God I am so in love with everything about this controller (except maybe the price). It’s designed specifically to enable multiple input styles without needing to engineer entirely bespoke equipment for each disabled player. Need larger buttons? Hook up some larger buttons to the universal ports on this baby! Need a horizontal joystick to operate with your mouth? Just plug it in! (Mostly) gone are the days of buying expensive, unique controllers. Accessible control schemes have moved one enormous step closer to DIY with this release.
...for XBox. Nintendo and Sony could not be reached for comment.
...for XBox. Nintendo and Sony could not be reached for comment.
Notable Barriers to Accessibility
1) Lack of audio interfaces -- You saw the video of Pokemon Crystal Access. You saw that shit, right? Imagine I inserted the “why aren’t we funding this?” meme right here. So many games (especially turn-based ones) could be 100%, entirely accessible for blind gamers if devs would utilize the technology that already exists, coupled with a little bit of the ingenuity that allows them to be designers in the first place. In many cases, it is essentially a solved problem...that we as a society simply choose not to solve.
2) Move towards VR and motion controls -- While many gamers (myself included) are excited about the possibilities of virtual reality and motion controls, it’s important to remember that these are not necessarily steps forward in the context of accessibility. For every person who complains about how “I don’t want to get off the couch to wave my controller around”, there’s a very real accessibility concern for gamers who can’t stand up/wave their arms around/dance/whatever. The more the gaming industry moves towards these technologies, the more it leaves disabled gamers behind.
3) “Always online” and digital-only delivery -- Let’s say you’re a poor kid in rural Mississippi. Or some other country entirely. The point is, you live in an area where internet access ranges from “slow” to “non-existent”. Or maybe you do have reasonably fast internet, but it’s got a low monthly data cap on it. Or maybe it’s satellite internet, so in the rainy season you are just perma-fucked. Or maybe you live in a major city, but due to financial limitations you can’t manage both a console and a fast, reliable internet package? As more and more games move to digital-only sales, or always-online DRM, how’s gaming looking as a hobby for you? Not so great, probably. That’s before we even get into Microsoft’s original plan for the XBone to be an entirely “always-online, digital-only” console.
4) Toxic culture -- There are a number of common features of “gamer culture” which contribute to inaccessibility. Misogyny, transphobia, skill-based elitism, ableist slurs, and racist characters...we’ve got it all, folks. That’s not to say that there aren’t many, many positive gamer communities. I’ve found this forum to be generally quite healthy, for example. But John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is alive and well in video games and their userbase, and that isn’t going to change unless we make it change. Until it does? Every woman who gets shouted down or propositioned in voice chat, every trans player who grits their teeth through an entirely unnecessary transphobic questline (LOOKING AT YOU, NINTENDO), every gamer of color who finds himself represented most often as a nameless villain, they all represent normal people who have been disabled by our behavior.
2) Move towards VR and motion controls -- While many gamers (myself included) are excited about the possibilities of virtual reality and motion controls, it’s important to remember that these are not necessarily steps forward in the context of accessibility. For every person who complains about how “I don’t want to get off the couch to wave my controller around”, there’s a very real accessibility concern for gamers who can’t stand up/wave their arms around/dance/whatever. The more the gaming industry moves towards these technologies, the more it leaves disabled gamers behind.
3) “Always online” and digital-only delivery -- Let’s say you’re a poor kid in rural Mississippi. Or some other country entirely. The point is, you live in an area where internet access ranges from “slow” to “non-existent”. Or maybe you do have reasonably fast internet, but it’s got a low monthly data cap on it. Or maybe it’s satellite internet, so in the rainy season you are just perma-fucked. Or maybe you live in a major city, but due to financial limitations you can’t manage both a console and a fast, reliable internet package? As more and more games move to digital-only sales, or always-online DRM, how’s gaming looking as a hobby for you? Not so great, probably. That’s before we even get into Microsoft’s original plan for the XBone to be an entirely “always-online, digital-only” console.
4) Toxic culture -- There are a number of common features of “gamer culture” which contribute to inaccessibility. Misogyny, transphobia, skill-based elitism, ableist slurs, and racist characters...we’ve got it all, folks. That’s not to say that there aren’t many, many positive gamer communities. I’ve found this forum to be generally quite healthy, for example. But John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is alive and well in video games and their userbase, and that isn’t going to change unless we make it change. Until it does? Every woman who gets shouted down or propositioned in voice chat, every trans player who grits their teeth through an entirely unnecessary transphobic questline (LOOKING AT YOU, NINTENDO), every gamer of color who finds himself represented most often as a nameless villain, they all represent normal people who have been disabled by our behavior.
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I’m not going to say that tabletop games are more accessible than video games. The challenges are certainly different, and so are the tools available.
Common Accessibility Features
Colorblind-conscious design -- Many games feature color-coded components like Meeples, coding which can be impenetrable or simply difficult for colorblind gamers. Fortunately, some game designers build around this pitfall by making sure to pair colors with symbols. For an example, check out Magic: The Gathering’s mana symbols.
Variant rules and editions -- Some boardgames include multiple rulesets, often classified by experience (beginner, advanced, expert). This can be handy for players with learning, memory, or attention disorders. Some games choose to publish their “beginner” or “junior” editions separately. There’s probably a conversation to be had about the relative merits of the two approaches, but either one is better than nothing.
Rule reminder cards -- Providing a board for each player which includes the basic steps of each turn can go a long way for players with attention deficit disorders. Additionally, representing the rules symbolically (for examples, consider the player boards from Takenoko or Photosynthesis) can help gamers with reading disorders to fully grok the rules by reducing the textual burden on them.
PDFs and online rulebooks -- So maybe you can’t publish a Braille copy of your RPG sourcebook. Can you publish a PDF format or an online SRD? If so, your game is immediately much more accessible to blind gamers, and also probably much more affordable to gamers with low financial resources.
Notable Products
Notable Barriers to Accessibility
2) Obsession with complexity -- Somewhat related to #1, large swaths of tabletop gamer culture make the mistake of equating complexity with quality. This can pose barriers to entry for players with attention or learning disorders, in addition to resulting in board states that are difficult to parse for blind gamers. There is nothing wrong with complex games if that’s your thing, obviously (it’s kinda MY thing), but we should never equate that complexity with quality.
3) Booster packs -- Buyable loot boxes have become a blight on video games, but at least over there people generally acknowledge that they’re a blight. In the tabletop world, we just call ‘em booster packs and build entire genres around them. Gamers with few financial resources get priced right out of those games entirely. Fortunately, CCGs have given rise to LCGs, which allow much of the same gameplay experiences without the cost-inflating acquisition gambling of booster packs. Even in CCGs like MtG, players have come up with innovative formats like Pauper and Cube (or Pauper Cube!) that can reduce the cost of participation.
Intersectionality And Accessible Design
Intersectionality is 1) the idea that people can be privileged/marginalized in some ways, while not being privileged/marginalized in others, and 2) the principle that accessibility efforts should not merely focus on one type of disability or marginalization without paying attention to others, because such efforts can in fact make things less accessible for some users. In addition, many disabled people are disabled in multiple different ways that overlap, so a secondary disability may not allow them to utilize the proposed accomodation for their primary disability. Finally, games may be impressively accessible in some ways, while entirely failing to take other areas into account at all.
Examples:
Example #2: Having been warned about the cost of their plan from the first example, the board game publisher instead opts to publish separate accessibility kits alongside the core game. This allows them to produce the core game more cheaply. However, the game is now even more expensive for blind players than it was before, which means that players who are both blind AND have low financial resources (a statistically probable correlation) are even more screwed than before.
Example #3: The same game publisher, disheartened at the difficulty of making their game accessible to blind players, decides to settle for making it accessible to players whose sight is limited, but not gone. As part of this effort, they raise the font size on all the game’s printed text, resulting in a need to bump the size of their cards up a bit. This has the unintended consequence of making the game more difficult for players who have difficulty holding large hands of cards -- whether due to loss of limbs, or reduced motor control.
So those are some general cases. What about a specific example?
Let’s talk about a game I mentioned earlier, publisher Dowino’s A Blind Legend.
I’ve played video games and board games my entire life. They’re a huge part of my background and personality, as I imagine is the case for many others here. My partner, however, who lost her sight as a child, hasn’t ever gotten into them very much due to the general inaccessibility described above. We thought it might be fun, as a way of getting to know each other, to play a video game together, so I did some research and found A Blind Legend, which claimed to be fully accessible for blind players.
As part of that research, I watched a brief snippet of a Let’s Play of the game (you know, to see if it was actually any fun), and discovered that the player character is physically abusive to his daughter. The player is not given a choice to refrain from the physical abuse, or warned at all before it occurs. From what I could tell on Google, the abuse itself is never really acknowledged or condemned by the game’s narrative.
After discussing this with my partner, we decided that this wasn’t the game for us for a variety of emotional and mental reasons. A perfectly good game, ruined (for us!) by an insensitive approach to a common issue.
So, is it possible for a game to be 100% accessible for everyone?
Honestly, who knows? Have we really tried, as a society? Universal accessibility could be possible!
In short, non-chance games are games precisely because they test something about the player’s capabilities. The goal of accessibility is to account for people’s differing capabilities, and as such in many cases it stands to reason that a game which relies entirely on testing a particular capability cannot be made accessible to someone who lacks that capability -- at least, not without making itself into an entirely different game.
Universal accessibility is an ideal. However, if we cannot reach universal accessibility, it may be better to think in terms of ubiquitous accessibility. Are we at all times seeking to make society open to as many people, and as many different kinds of people, as possible? It may not be that we can make any one thing 100% accessible, but 100% of things can be made more accessible than they already are. For instance, we’ve established that Memory is intended to test your memorization and retention. It’s not, however, intended to test your manual dexterity, so a version of the game accessible to people with reduced motor control should be very easy to make! (And possibly already exists, don’t @ me it’s just an example.)
So, what’s this thread about?
Whatever (accessibility-related topics) you want it to be about! But specifically, some things I had in mind:
1. Are there any designers, developers, or publishers you know of who have put forth significant efforts in the area of gaming accessibility? Any particular games we should know about?
2. Similarly, have there been any recent technological or scientific advances that are relevant to gaming accessibility? Let’s talk about those, they’re always SUPER COOL YOU GUYS.
3. What did I miss? Something that should have been included in this absolute wall of text?
4. What are your personal experiences with gaming (in)accessibility, if you’re comfortable sharing those?
5. Who do I need to sleep with to get Netflix to add audio description to Breaking Bad? Like holy shit it’s only one of the most successful and acclaimed shows ever, and you’re only the most commercially successful streaming platform ever, where the actual fuck is the audio description y’all?
But don’t you think it’s more important to talk about (insert other area of accessibility/a specific disability I didn’t explicitly mention) than (insert thing I talked about)?
M...maybe? I dunno, man. This post is already 4000 words long, I couldn’t cover everything. That’s where you come in, I guess? Let’s talk about what you want to talk about?
Further Suggested Reading:
”Can’t Get There From Here” by Emma Sarappo - Not gaming related, but talks about the responsibility of society to make things accessible.
Story about a disabled CS:GO streamer getting bullied on Twitch.
”Why Game Accessibility Matters” by Richard Moss - 2014 Polygon article about the topic in general.
Able Gamers - Charity organization that provides services and accomodations for disabled gamers.
”Zelda, Mass Effect and Horizon all struggle with introducing their trans characters” by Laura Dale - Talks about various aspects of recent attempts to include trans characters in video games.
This list is super open to additions.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/