Autistic Fukunaga Society

"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 like difficulty levels, sometimes I don't enjoy a specific aspect of gameplay or I just want to blast through from cutscene to cutscene, and being able to toggle a zero-consequences baby mode is a nice option to have.

Option to hold or toggle buttons for running

Quick Time Events on a toggle, or not involving quick, successive button presses (just one press)

Ability to change the colour, font and size of subtitles!

Ability to re-map buttons

ABILITY TO USE A NONSTANDARD CONTROLLER

Ability to change brightness, colour saturation, lighting intensity and filtering

ABILITY TO TURN OFF FLASHING LIGHTS OH MY FUCKING GOD

Volume control that lets you turn up the dialogue and atmospheric sound but turn the music down

Ability to turn off camera shake and blur

And you might ask 'well how is x an accessibility feature'

But consider:

People who have issues with their hands (muscle weakness, missing fingers, impaired reflexes)

Folks who are hard of hearing or have other hearing issues

I hate them so much. I honestly think that Genshin Impact caused nerve damage (it was while I was playing it regularly that my migraines developed a new feature of hemineuralgia! But we didn't realize that was connected to migraine and the other migraine symptoms weren't cropping up. Do not recommend.)

My reflexes and hand-eye coordination are shit and you know what I loved so much? Mass Effect 1. Pause, aim, and then shoot. Oh my word. Life changing. I basically never play first-person shooters but I could handle that. Even with the other games, there were enough strategies that didn't rely on needing really good hand-eye coordination and I love it so much.

As a reminder, he's suing Caroline Wallner, one of his accusers, for breaking her NDA. Not for libel. He's saying she shouldn't have told anyone about it, not that she lied.

He doesn't need the money. He's risking the Streisand effect. He is punishing Caroline, he's trying to intimidate other victims who have signed NDAs to scare them into continued silence.

He is no friend to women, to the LGBTQIA+ community, to anyone quite frankly unless he thinks they are of value to him.

And then it's really funny to think of like Eridian scientists getting mad and embarrassed as hellll that it was ROCKY of all people to make first contact.

Except ☝️when a combat SecUnit or combat bot shows up

We are shown over and over again throughout the Murderbot Diaries that humans are mistreated just as badly as (or sometimes, in MB's own opinion, even worse than) bots and constructs. We see humans stripped of their rights, reduced to corporate assets to be bought and sold, sent into suicidal situations, abandoned and discarded as things. We see humans trapped in multigenerational labor contracts -- people born into an indentured servitude that requires them to pay back their food and lodging to the same company that will not let them leave.

None of these are hypothetical scenarios. These are all things that happen to real people in our world today.

And that is a huge part of why it resonates so much. The overarching theme of "capitalism is hell" actually means something because it isn't only applied to the fictional dynamic of bots vs humans. The theme is constantly reiterated through the humans themselves.

And that's also why it's so important that MB demonstrates empathy for and solidarity with humans who are themselves victims of the system. Because ultimately, that's one of the main things the series is about. It's about what it's like to be simultaneously a product, and victim, of a corporate hellscape.

emotion check: platform decay was good