I think what really bothers me about video game difficulty discourse is the way that it equates "inaccessibility" with "artistic choices that may alienate certain disabled players."
like, okay, speaking as a musician and an autistic woman: there are certain sounds that I am simply not going to enjoy, right? I don't like music that's too heavy on the high end, because it sounds shrill. I've listened to music that had so much Stuff Going On at once that is literally made me feel sick from overstimulation. But that doesn't mean that music shouldn't exist, or that the creators should make a hypothetical pared-down remix just so I specifically can enjoy it. There's other music out there which I like! It's fine! I'll listen to that instead!!
and, idk, it bothers me because there are a lot of legitimate accessibility features that I think every game should have. there's no reason for a puzzle game to be inaccessible to colorblind people. there's no reason that an execution-heavy game shouldn't allow you to set up alternate control schemes. but the solution is not "make the puzzles easier" or "make the bosses do less damage" any more than the "solution" to a complicated piece of writing is "create a version where everything is written using simpler language." idk! it just feels like a refusal to engage with art as art and not Product.
That last bit about writing is particularly on-point right now, because this is take is going around:
So yeah there are people who genuinely believe that "accessibility" means only making things that are unchallenging. This is incorrect in any form of art, whether it's popular media or something more traditional. Accessibility in writing means printing in larger text, use of readable fonts and formatting, translation into Braille, and recording in clear audio. Accessibility in gaming should mean colorblindness filters, toggles to deactivate strobing in cutscenes and environments, scalable text, custom keymapping, and the ability to modify graphical settings including framerates, motion blur, fixed versus free camera, and so on.
To truly engage with any form of art, one must at least be willing to be challenged. To claim that challenge is by its nature inaccessibility is at best ignorance to the purpose of accessibility, and at worst a gross infantilization of people like me who actually have disability-related struggles that could be mitigated with some fairly basic control of settings.
