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Your Problem(atic)s Are Faves: access and representation in games
pooka
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Sekiro is the latest to prompt this sort of discussion.
- Do developers have an obligation to reach a broad audience?
No. - Would they generate more profit by integrating accommodations & prioritizing greater diversity from conception, for comparatively little cost/time, encouraging a wider variety of gamers to enjoy their product?
Yeah, probably. - Should they compromise their "vision" by diverging from it in order to satisfy their fans, or potential fans?
I mean, maybe, good art comes from personal growth and learning from pertinent criticism.
There's also some mystical value in a unique perspective unswayed by outside influence, the allure of the auteur.
...Depends on where the desire for profit, and community-mindedness, and self-expression, and challenge, and the obligation of bowing to corporate overlords, and the desperate scramble that is professional games development all overlap, I imagine.
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Or is this about the difficulty
Unless there's some fundamental part of your game mechanics that would require a serious overhaul of the game to implement a more accessible mode, I don't see why it's such a big deal to at least make an attempt, to at least turn some dials on damage or combat speed or respawns or whatever.
People didn't really mind Super Meat Boy didn't have an easy mode
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
It's a bit like this puzzle or challenge you're attempting with other players
I completely get the people though who would like to play this for the setting and can't or people who don't enjoy having to put in the work
Maybe someone can make a mod which reduces the difficulty, I'd be very interested in seeing how it plays and how long it takes to the end of the game (because you would take away a lot of the things I mentioned)
i feel very strongly that a huge thing preventing this discussion from really maturing is that people only really get stirred up about it when a difficult AAA game comes out
it's hard to feel like it has actual teeth or passion behind it
hey, it's SE++, you can talk about whatever you want, i just set up the venue
this is just general thoughts, not a direct response to anyone.
that said, framing it with intersectionality seems useful to me. difficulty/accommodation are separate but related concepts, and addressing it hearkens to discussions around ableism and ability privilege.
the people asking for accommodations or difficulty options seem to be asking for representation, albeit not the kind that's typically been discussed when addressing racism or sexism, eg artwork, playable characters and such. they want to participate to various degrees and engage with the things that the assumed majority enjoy as the default audience.
hacking a solution together with software or physical mods is something people already do. but to circumvent that effort, suggesting improvements that benefit anyone who might need or want them, or asking for developers to consider the needs of part of their audience is hardly an unreasonable request.
BlindWarriorSven is 100% blind and is busting ass in street fighter by sound alone, he is now ranked in the top 5% of players online
broly plays street fighter competitively with his face, and is the number 1 ranked chun-li player in SFIV
bringing disability into this discussion makes a lot of assumptions about the capabilities of physically handicapped people who play games
(more at his twitter)
of course, people who also dont want anything to change have used handicapped people successfully completing dark souls as an argument for why no accessibility changes need to ever happen
which is really more about them wanting it to stay the same than actually caring
It's difficult for most people
i do think making more games accessible for more people, without relying on who 'needs' accommodation or not, is a decent goal. disability can certainly be a factor, but an inclination towards 'accessibility' tends to benefit everyone in the long run.
celebrating the people who overcome challenges without fetishizing them, and without also stigmatizing those who cannot succeed in those same venues is something that a lot of communities struggle on; people aren't symbols, but we frequently try to make them represent a singular facet of that whole person.
Oddly enough, what I keep coming back to in this discourse is literature. I think the "difficulty" conversation intersects with the "are games art?" conversation in a really difficult way.
There are novels that are absolutely impenetrable to a whole swaths of people. There can be barriers of entry from languages, to points of reference, to "time commitment" that are untenable for a whole lot of people. People with learning disabilities, reading disabilities, attention deficits - there are works rendered inaccessible by these. But I haven't seen (in my personal, anecdotal experience) people advocating for making challenging novels "easier."
My half-cocked theory on the disparity is that literature has a culture AROUND the active consumption that is recognized as valid and vibrant. Essays, criticism, and discourse are more commonly regarded as part of the experience and whole of the novel (depending on who you talk to, I guess). In video games, that peripheral content (streams, essays, criticism) is still considered just that - peripheral. Reading about, watching, listening to discussions about a game is considered a lesser, more-stigmatized experience of a work, because you aren't actively doing. You are inherently LESSER, not getting the pure hit.
Which supports a view of games as an ACTIVITY, rather than works of art. Something that needs to be done, rather than experienced/digested secondhand. Some art is, by design, inaccessible. Meeting it on its terms is a (not only) point of it. I think that it's valid criticism to say, "Your complicated book sucks and you suck for writing it." But when the criticism becomes, "You are BIGOTED for writing a complicated book," I think that's... Less valid? It casts a negative light on the people who enjoy putting time and energy into a hard work that they find rewarding.
I think where I'm landing on this is, "If second-hand experiences are legitimized and destigmatized, 'difficulty as means of artistic and thematic expression' becomes a more defensible argument." I fucking suck ASS at war games and strategy games, which makes me want to not play them. But I still love hearing, say, Rob Zacny talk about them. And I'm pretty okay with that?
Again, I'm just sorta rambling and feeling out my thoughts. If I've struck any third rails or inadvertently hurt anybody, I apologize in advance, and would love to hear where my thinking has gotten fallacious or veered into damaging.
I've had problems in the past where people have been angry at my performance in games like PUBG and while I think stuff like hit indicators would help me, I wouldn't really want them since not having them makes me feel more immersed
Vidya games sit at this weird intersection of art and engineering, but ultimately the artistic vision is one that needs to be engineered to be put into practise, and therefore I'm probably going to come down more on the accessibility side than the "oh noes my arts" side. Also Beavs pointed out on twitter that anyone who thinks that a game can go from "initial vision" to "creation" without going through 800 billion compromises is certifiably nuts - there are ALREADY choices being made about what can actually be done or implemented, there is no inherent purity that is somehow being sullied.
But more generally I was having a conversation a few weeks ago with an architect and designer about the H.A. Simon view of design (this is old school stuff, mostly from the 60s). He divided the world into "nature" and "design" - everything that isn't just "passively accepting the world as it is" has a design element, and therefore we should always approach any active decision we make in any field from the perspective of "I am engaged in changing the world - by my choices here, I am moving the world from the state it currently is to a new state, closer to how I think the world should be" (ie. this world should be one which contains my game!).
Approached like that, every design decision becomes a tradeoff between various aspects of your ideals. I want this game to contain a certain experience, but (hopefully) I also want as many people as possible to have this experience, so how can I best optimise for these two goals? I don't know if this dichotomy is always resolvable to everyone's satisfaction, I guess ultimately (in this imperfect world) the best I can hope for is for people to at least be thoughtful about the choices they're making, and recognise that they are choices, and that they are making these compromises even if they don't realise it.
I mean if it's too hard, then it's not enjoyable. If it's not enjoyable then why would you want to play it?
because there are things about a game that can be enjoyed and experienced beyond the gameplay
dark souls has a killer aesthetic, lore, and a type of atmospheric storytelling that exists almost nowhere else
tons of people have watched videos to experience that second hand because they lack the ability to clear the games challenges
This ties into the shit I was wondering about - is that experience, indeed, lesser-than? If so, why?
Knowing that you could've just knocked the difficulty down a few notches and strolled right in saps much of the satisfaction from the accomplishment.
There's something to knowing that you've done something or progressed somewhere that others couldn't.
because actually navigating the game world is different than watching someone else do it
lets use a less enigmatic example
say you cant handle the gunplay in mass effect
you can watch someone paly through it, sure
you can even watch all the diffwrent branching paths
but its not "your" shepherds story
you havent gotten the experience of creating a character out of living through the series of choices theyve made
its a hard to pin down experience, but I had so much more of an immersive time playing through dark souls than i did just watching someone play through bloodbourne because I couldnt deal with that game
i felt much less connected to the world when it was third hand
A lot of markets, and video games especially, have essentially locked certain people out and it's going to take time, effort, and investment to open those up properly. Chasing exclusively the white male grognard with more money than social skills market or gacha whale market will continue to be more profitable than making games with minorities or folks with disabilities in mind, but it's vital to society that we demand those things anyway.
I'm not a game developer, obviously, but maybe having some kind of changeable system that will alter the difficulty based on your performance in a tutorial style level, or even as the game went on
I mean yeah, the easiest implementation is probably just letting the user pick Easy Mode, but an adaptive mode could be a neat solution to the problem of the game needing to be challenging to get the developer's intent across while being more accessible to varying reaction times, etc
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enjoyment derived explicitly because youve experienced something other people cannot is something I dont think we should endorse
thats fundamentally a bad concept
fighting games do this and its amazing but they have such a relatively restricted number of behaviors that it seems much easier than other genres
But is "less connected" inherently bad/invalid?
I'm colorblind - there are movies that are never gonna resonate with me "right." My experience of, like, anything by Terrence Malick, or Baz Luhrman, or Wong Kar Wai, is inherently gonna be "impure." But I can read essays, I can watch analysis, I can participate in the discourse. I am removed from it, but I can see what other people get out of it, and build a bridge towards understanding.
For there to be a level playing-field for me on film enjoyment, everything would have to be black and white. And I don't want to take away color from the people that resonate with it, I just wanna see where they're coming from and feel like I can come closer to "getting it." My secondhand experiences aren't "pure," but I don't think they're invalid. I've still learned something new, experienced something new, just on different terms.
Also, could you run me through how you're defining "third hand?" I'm not sure where the extra degree of remove comes in - wanna make sure I'm not misinterpreting.
but you can still experience those things
people who cant play souls cant
i think playing it os fundamentally different than watching someone do it
its like reading the cliffs notes. you still get things from it, but youre not reading the work
watching something in the wrong color set is a actually decent metaphor for this
sure youre playing it on an easier setting than designed, but you still experience it and thats not less valid
"third hand" was me trying to say youre watching another person control a character in 3rd person
so its a character that theyre controlling that youre watching
I dont know if thats the right term but it made sense in my head
It embraces the design decision that certain people will never be able to complete the game, and says that's ok.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
i don't think it's necessarily comparable, because even if you don't get the same sensory experience, you can still watch the whole movie through to the end. Anybody who wants to can experience a movie start to finish. video games are fairly unique in that they just won't let you see parts of the work unless you reach a certain level of performance. Dark Souls is, in theory, a story about wandering through a dying world, confronting the hubris and tragedy of the people trying to hold it together, and contemplating the divine forces that manipulate everything. But, for a lot of people, it's actually a story about getting killed by a dumb minotaur guy over and over until you get bored and quit.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
I again think this is bad because Souls became notorious as an outlier and people flocked to it because they were curious about a specific experience
It isn't and wasn't representative of larger market trends
mmm, no wait, i take this back partially
not everyone can experience a movie start to finish. if you're both blind and deaf than you can't really. I guess you could read like, a braille transcript? but that's at least as different as watching a let's play would be
even then though it's still not quite the same thing I don't think
http://www.audioentropy.com/
but the thing is
transcripts and the like exist to attempt to help people who couldnt otherwise experience movies to do so
additional accessibility options in video games would be toward the same goal
People want to be their own Olympians. Human nature makes us strive for things just outside our grasp and ignore the nutritious low hanging fruit.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
But reading Cliff Notes is experiencing the work, yeah? There aren't difficulty sliders on Moby Dick, but you can still read summaries, essays, discussions. You can get what it's going for, interact with the themes, see how it fits into culture as a whole and other works in specific. There are means of absorbing what Moby Dick does without wading through a hundred pages of tedious and inaccessible whale biology text, if wading through a hundred pages of tedious and inaccessible whale biology text isn't something you are capable of/interested in doing.
I think that limiting the definition of "experiencing" a work to "actively, personally moving through it" does a disservice to the many other functions of art - the way art intersects with other works, the way it comments on or interacts with the world, the capital-D Discourse that springs up.
To stick with the color palate thing, if I watch a black and white movie when everybody else watched color, I'm still gonna need the supplemental/peripheral material to connect with people who watched it "right." The bridge to their context is built by outside works, since I am physically incapable of having their context. And if I'm dependent on that context anyway, I don't... Really see what I lose by focusing on that?
If the gameplay of something sucks for you, but it does other stuff well, I don't see the harm in removing the sucky part entirely and consuming a thing in other ways.
(Just to reiterate, since we're a few replies deep: I am not trying to argue you into thinking differently, I'm just asking you the questions I'm asking myself as the discussion around all this swirls. I think it's all interesting, and I ain't trying to, like, "win" or anything)
that's exactly why the series has become such a flashpoint for this kind of discussion though
its image is entirely built on "only the Chosen Few get to enter this walled palace"
when really, adding lower difficulty options and deeper accessibility wouldn't do anything to diminish the experience.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
so i cant speak for everyone
but for me, personally, I get almost nothing out of lets plays
in most cases, id rather not experience it at all
thats not to delegitimize them, but they dont work for me
so i need other options in order to experience them
there shouldnt be one alternate way to experience something when there could be multiple that help different people
I think it would diminish the experience and I don't think the elitism was ever really that strong inside the community or really emphasized in marketing outside, "this is a challenge and you will die a lot"
Thinking about how to make competitive games more accessible is hard because a lot of the things to make it easier in a single player game are basically hacks online. Auto aim? Increased damage? Damage immunity? I'm not sure how to give those to only people who genuinely need them to get to a remotely competitive level, although I'm not against it. The adaptive controls being put out are really cool, and I hope firmware continues to support them.