#extended post

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

Unlike other forms of media, gaming isn’t necessarily about giving every user as equal an experience as possible, because people don’t all play games the same way. But then that begs the question: how do you create fun and challenging games for the player without sacrificing accessibility in the process?

I think it comes down to each developer looking at every aspect of their game and asking what the objective is.

Take a puzzle as an example. Puzzles in games are naturally going to take some players a lot longer than others to complete; one person might get past a block sliding puzzle in 5 minutes because they’re just really good at working out that sort of thing. Another player might take 15-30 minutes to complete that same puzzle because they’re not as good at it, and keep working themselves into a corner. And that’s fine, that’s how it’s supposed to work!

What you need to ask yourself as a developer is how you want people to be struggling with your puzzle. If you’re looking to potentially make the player frustrated, what do you want that to look like? What is your primary objective?

Was your objective to have players struggle for 15-30 minutes trying to get through your puzzle because they can’t figure out the correct order of steps to slide all the blocks into where they need to be? Sure, why not. But there might be several other reasons it took that second player 15-20 minutes that you did not intend for. It could be because:

They had to make a lot of guesses because the audio cues that provided key information for the puzzle had no visual indicators, and the player can’t hear those cues.

They made a lot of mistakes about which block had to go where because you color-coded the location of the puzzle pieces, and the user is colorblind.

They had to stop to break every couple minutes because the only way to move the blocks is pressing and holding a button, which causes that user extreme pain to do continuously for more than a very brief time. 

They had to look away from the screen every time the blocks moved since motion blur can’t be turned off, and they’d rather miss some critical information during that animation than give themselves a migraine watching it. 

If your intention is to make solving the puzzle satisfying for the player, all four of those alternative situations are even less ideal, because they’re not going to make it fun or satisfying to complete the puzzle. 

But what if it’s not supposed to be fun or satisfying? What if the objective is to make the player feel helpless?

Again, you have to go back to your specific objectives with each obstacle. Was the objective to make the player feel helpless because no matter what choice they made, it still resulted in failure? Maybe. But was the objective to make the player feel helpless because they had to get up and find someone to read your inaccessible text to them every few minutes? Probably not.

It’s also worth asking yourself if every puzzle or battle you make is absolutely crucial to the story and/or experience of the game. Making some segments skippable isn’t always a bad thing (though that shouldn’t be a substitution for making them accessible). 

92 notes • Posted 2021-04-10 19:23:38 GMT

#4

See the full post (which includes the rest of the images and the full image description)

186 notes • Posted 2021-06-25 02:21:36 GMT

#3

[Image Description: Anakin and Padme meme. Anakin says “I made some new content.” Smiling Padme says “and it’s accessible, right?” Anakin stares silently at her. Padme asks the same question again, no longer smiling. End Image Description.]

218 notes • Posted 2021-07-11 05:29:04 GMT

#2

[Image Description: Bugs Bunny in a Tuxedo meme reading “I wish all people who add addendums to my image and video descriptions to include details that I missed a very pleasant evening.” End Image Description.]

244 notes • Posted 2021-04-03 17:27:29 GMT

#1

Gentle reminder that your work-arounds for these tag issues should not include replacing letters with numbers or other symbols that will make the words illegible to screen reader users.

6883 notes • Posted 2021-12-27 00:23:46 GMT