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Gaming Group Seeks Volunteers To Create Accessibility Guidelines For Tabletop Games (meeplelikeus.co.uk)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the very-classic-games dept.

Meeple Like Us is a group of gaming academics, developers, hobbyists and enthusiasts with a keen interest in board games, tabletop games, video games, and all things in-between, co-founded by long-time Slashdot reader drakkos. Today he reminds us that accessibility "has become an increasingly visible part of video game development." It's even become something of a selling point for many games, with Naughty Dog's focus on the accessibility of Uncharted 4 gaining it pages and pages of enthusiastic support across the industry. Tabletop games, despite being much older an entertainment format, lag behind video games in many respects.

Meeple Like Us has for the last year been working hard to identify the accessibility issues in tabletop gaming, and is currently recruiting for volunteers for a working group aimed at developing v1.0 of the Tabletop Accessibility Guidellines.

2 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Re:OH, FFS... by godrik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Does EVERYTHING need to have a layer of PC-based "everyone must be able to do everything" applied to it?

    Well, I don't think it is about having everything doable by everyone. But I think it can be about making sure that you do not prevent a fraction of the population from playing your game simply because you did not think of a way to make it easier on people.

    I give you an example, I am colorblind. Some games can be difficult to play for me: Starcraft (the original) was quite difficult on games with many players because I could not tell the difference in color on the mini map. But that can be solved. For instance, frozen bubble used to be impossible for me to play, until I found there is a colorblind mode.

    Magic the gathering also relies on a color scheme, but added an icon which makes telling the different kind of magic easy even if you can not tell colors apart.

    Don't think of it as bing politically correct, but rather as enabling the most people to play your game without significantly altering the game mechanics.

  2. Re:OH, FFS... by rjforster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's not just those who are colourblind who have trouble telling colours apart. If you're playing a boardgame in a dimly lit pub then the colours of the pieces can sometimes be really hard to tell apart. Examples I've seen in games are Black vs Brown vs Dark Purple or Yellow vs Bare Wood. What might be easy to distinguish in an designer's office isn't always the case where you actually sit down to play the game.
    Then there's the problem of the clumsy gamer, finding dark dice or meeples on a dark carpet in a pub isn't always so easy. There's a guy in my gaming group who I will lend glow-in-the-dark dice to because he is the most likely to drop things on the floor.

    Ingenious is another good example game where there are icons for each colour.

    Don't think of it as being politically correct, but rather as enabling the most people to play your game without significantly altering the game mechanics.

    Couldn't agree more.