Keeper of Monsters & Mysteries

>we just got a letter

>we just got a letter

>i wonder who its from

> be me

> have a dog

> forced to do some detective shit every day finding three clues just to figure out what she wants to eat

"oh, did you make the font bigger and more legible?"

"no we're just doing the next edition in D&D5e"

"we're making our video game more accessible!"

"oh did you add an option to remap the controls?"

"which part? what did you make accessible?"

it is a very popular trend right now to add, like, features that skip the engagement with an interactive work of art, such as skipping combat or making combat impossible to lose in a combat-focused video game, or in the scene of TTRPGs making your TTRPG completely dumbed down or just hastily and mindlessly making it a D&D5e hack "because people already know how to play D&D5e and I want it to be accessible" instead of expecting people to actually read and learn and engage with a set of specific rules, and call all of that "accessibility" instead of adding "accessibility" features that would actually help disabled people access the "meat" of whatever the interactive art is.

If it's a combat-focused video game, some examples would be helping them engage with the full depth of the combat by allowing the controls to be fully remapped to something easier for their hands(or lack of hands), or the option to disable flashing lights or reduce the intensity muzzle flashes on the guns or something.

I think I have come up with a good example to illustrate this point. Let's say there is an FPS where you shoot aliens. Pretend it's, like, Halo but not specifically Halo.

And let’s say there’s a group of disabled gamers who are excited for this video game.

Missing Finger Guy, Deaf Guy, Colorblind Guy, and Poor Eyesight Guy.

Missing Finger Guy is missing at least one finger that corresponds to the Dodge button, he can’t reliably press it especially on short notice when aliens are coming at his character. So, he can’t really play the game because dodging is required to beat the levels. The game devs provide an “acccessibility” easy mode that turns off combat or makes the enemies do so little damage that he never needs to use the Dodge button. So, Missing Finger Guy can play the game now, right? Wrong. Dodging enemies *is* the game, and he still never gets to play with the Dodge button, or engage with any of the other elements of the game that are watered down by making enemy attacks not matter. To make the fun gameplay of dodging enemies accessible to this player, the answer is to allow remapping the Dodge action to a button that he can reach.

Deaf Guy

The game expects the player to rely on audio cues to know when enemies are sneaking up behind them or when a grenade lands at their feet or when an enemy is about to do a specific attack. Obviously the deaf player can’t hear these and can’t play the game because he’ll just die all the time to attacks which are literally impossible for him to predict. Again, this could be “fixed” by a mode that makes it so it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t hear a grenade land at his character’s feet by removing the consequence of death for failing to notice the grenade, or you could add the option to turn on subtitles for both story dialogue and sound effects like “[grenade beep]” and “[screatchure scream].” One of these allows the deaf gamer to play on roughly the same playing field as other players and react to threats the same way that hearing people can do that he can engage with the meat of the game, and the other doesn’t.

Colorblind Guy

The video game features enemies that are identifiable by their red and blue armor. Red aliens throw red grenades that you can catch and throw back, and blue aliens throw blue grenades that explode by proximity and you just have to fully avoid. Obviously, a colorblind player cannot reliably tell these apart, and would either have to try to throw back grenades at random and hope for the best, or just avoid all grenades to be safe. You could “fix” this by removing the consequence of death for getting exploded by a grenade, or you could fix it by adding a togglable colorblindness mode that switches the color distinction to something visible or adds some other distinctive feature besides color to one of those grenade types. One of these allows the colorblind player to engage with the intended gameplay of the game by taking informed risks by trying to throw back certain grenades, and one of them doesn’t, making it just not matter what decision he makes.

Poor Eyesight Guy

You get the formula by now. The *actually* accessible feature would be allowing him to adjust the text to be more readable instead of making it not matter if he can read the directions that tell him how to get through the minefield safety by removing the consequences for stepping on a mine.

A mode that simply removes consequences for failing to engage with and react appropriately to the threats the game presents is, at best, appealing only to people who don’t actually *like* the gameplay in the first place, while still shutting out the people who *want* to engage with the full depth of the gameplay but can’t because of some disability that prevents them from doing so as intended.

Because the gameplay isnt just seeing the cutscenes and getting a “level cleared” achievement, it is dodging the enemies, throwing back the grenades, listening for the screatchure screams, etc..

If there is an enemy who is super tough from the front and will kill you if you can’t get around behind him, you don’t make the game more “accessible” by making him so weak from the front that it doesn’t matter where you shoot him, or making his attacks so weak that you can shrug them off long enough to whittle him down from the front, youve actually removed this enemy from the game by making him just like the common enemies that can be shot from the front. You have actually made the element of the gameplay provided by this enemy inaccessible by doing this, because the quick thinking and tactical usage of the game’s features required to get behind him *is* the gameplay.

I'm at a Gender Determination Party where we're competing to determine a baby's future gender.

'hey we've been spying on you and tracking your every move. it's a culmination of state of the art technology and an unprecedented invasion of consumer privacy. a room full of men with made up jobs bent their will toward decades of constructing this system, defending it in court, and tirelessly innovating new ways to aggregate more data about you'

and the end result is

'yeah so uh we saw that you recently bought a car. so here's an ad for that car'

if you live in any city in america, however, there are homeless people. they are the social problem that cannot be disappeared so easily. drive along a freeway outbound from the urban center to the suburbs and look into the trees. you’ll see tents, tarps, evidence of human habitation. walk through a downtown, even in coldest winter, and you’ll see bottles that weren’t there yesterday and clothes inexplicably abandoned. people tend to either not look at these things or to look at them and name them garbage. eyesore. they don’t consider what it would be like to carry everything you own on your back. how little energy you would have for recycling or cleaning up after yourself if you had been kicked out of your shelter at 7am that morning and now had to find a nook to hide out in to escape a -5F windchill. maybe you can go to a local public library, but maybe you can’t because you twitch or smell bad or talk to yourself and people only look at you out of the corner of their eye so they know what description to give the armed security guard at the front desk.

when i’m talking about looking at your unhoused neighbor, i’m talking about looking at them first. i’m talking about smiling and waving and maybe striking up a conversation. i’m talking about offering to grab lunch. i’m talking about indulging them even when they make you uncomfortable.

on memory care floors in hospitals you often encounter the problem of nurses who have been taught how to engage patients with memory issues but who do not give proper patient care because it makes them uncomfortable. they don’t want to lie or play pretend or do anything that takes them out of their very rigidly defined reality. an old man wakes up and tries to get out of bed because it’s time to feed the cows. he wonders where his wife is. it would make his nurse uncomfortable to tell him that his wife knew he needed some rest so she went out to feed the cows, so they tell him that his wife died five years ago and he doesn’t have his farm anymore. they break his heart rather than allow him to live in a better time for a little while longer.

back in december a man sat across from me on the train who was clearly struggling. i started a conversation with him about his art he was holding, which he told me were illustrated children’s books in a language he had always known. it was a syllabary i certainly didn’t recognize, and the illustrations weren’t anything i’ve seen in children’s literature, but we were suddenly both artists on the train. i showed him my journal and he complimented the pasting job on some of my collages. then he started to talk about angels. about his angel specifically, who had died and left him behind on earth. he missed his angel so much that he planned to commit suicide before christmas. i talked to him about his angel, and about love and grief and pain, all of which we could share. he began to call me jesus. i could have told him he was wrong, that i wasn’t even into the abrahamic religions, etc., and it would have broken his heart. instead i walked with him up from the train station—and got him through the armed transit cops who tried to stop him because he didn’t have a ticket—and gave him a picture of a loving savior, and a world that would be better for having him in it. instead of hugging some faggot, he ended up hugging a jesus that loved him. it was an odd situation. it made me a little uncomfortable. it may have been one of the few instances of kindness that he got that day. it may have been the first time in a while that someone who wasn’t unhoused or working the bread line actually started a conversation with him.

imagine if no one ever looked at you. don’t say some cute shit about “oh, i wish no one ever perceived me.” no you don’t. you wish you could control people’s perception of you. but what if people weren’t only not looking at you, but they already thought they knew you. you’re twitching so you’re on something. you’re staring at nothing so you’re dumb. you’re asking for money or food so you’re a leech on society. you’re talking to yourself so you’re dangerous. they don’t look at you but they know you. so they don’t speak to you bc they already know what they’re gonna find.

two and a half weeks ago my mom was found dead on the streets of san antonio. she’d been homeless there for about 12 years. i’d only just gotten stable enough to reach out to her. the woman i contacted at the day home she went to every month to get a haircut, her nails done, and to wash her clothes said she was doing well, that she was clean, that she was very polite, that she was smart. she had two dogs that she’d cared enough about to have microchipped. their names are fin and sophia. having those dogs probably made it so she couldn’t get permanent housing, because most housing programs for the homeless don’t allow them to bring pets. a lot of people choose to keep their pets rather than give them up as a condition of securing housing.

in denver, colorado i once met an unhoused man who had a master’s degree in geophysics. his thesis was on magnetic wells and their affects of satellite orbits. he was a birdwatcher.

when you refuse to look at homeless people, or the things they leave behind (often are forced to leave behind by cops), you are actively participating in the disappearance of a population. do you think you wouldn’t lose part of yourself if safety concerns made you nocturnal? if every time you got enough stuff to set up a good camp some suburbanite called the cops on your tent? would you not talk to yourself if no one else was speaking to you?

a lot of talk goes into the problem how easy it is to become homeless. one medical bill, one missed paycheck and your life is imperiled. well, there are a lot of people who are stepped over every day who already live your worst case scenario, and the simple fact is that the majority of people in the u.s. are too scared of having an uncomfortable or even perhaps scary interaction with an unhoused person to look at them. but i need y’all to know that you are not special. it isn’t just the dirtiest, most addicted, most mentally ill homeless people who are left to die on the streets alone. it is all homeless people. people who won’t leave behind beloved pets, people who couldn’t survive in academia, people who think they’re being gangstalked, people who have jobs, people who have families. if you are one missed paycheck from homelessness, you’re also one catastrophic tragedy, one spark that catches in the apartment on the other side of your building, one chance encounter with the drug that just won’t let you go. not one goddamn person on this earth is better than the unhoused person they step over on the way to get their morning coffee, and i hope to fuck y’all figure that out before you find yourselves disappeared too.