Slashdot Mirror
Gaming Group Seeks Volunteers To Create Accessibility Guidelines For Tabletop Games (meeplelikeus.co.uk)
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.
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.
Well accessibility can be a lot of things. It is not uniquely being blind.
You could have bad vision (make the text bigger), colorblindness (make sure important color schemes have symbols associated with them), deafness (make sure there are subtitles), deafness to particular sound (make sure they are not critical, or if they are, add a visual cue).
Note that there have been FPS for blind people.
Because this is the first step taken in the direction of it becoming MANDATORY. How do you think the handicap accessibility laws were implemented?
I have no problem with options being added to games to make them more useful to certain minority sections of the population. But when the cost to do so becomes greater than the added profit generated by opening up a new market segment, that's where the model fails.
People with handicaps need to just understand and accept that they cannot and will not be able to do everything that normal people do. It's pretty much comes with the territory. If you can work hard and figure a way to do something, fine. Forcing the rest of society to expend massive amounts of money and effort to support a few edge cases is simply selfish.
The concept of Universal Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is what should be aimed for. So well integrating "accessibility" into the core of the design of the environment (or game) that it just works, and works better for all. Curb cuts on sidewalks is an example: yes, they help people in wheel chairs, but they also make life just a tad better for folks pushing baby strollers and kids on skateboards.
Agreed. This is not being "politically correct". I'm about as far from the typical bleeding heart type as is possible, but I was very inspired as a videogame maker myself when I saw some of Naughty Dog's videos about this topic, and it got me thinking about what I can do in my own upcoming videogame to make sure it's as accessible to as many people as possible, even if there's no likelihood it will ever pay off financially.
For instance, my game already has a scaling UI system, ranging from small to very large, ensuring people with poorer eyesight have an easier time reading the text and in-game HUD, while still not forcing others to read giganto-text.
I'm also looking into adding some development-mode shaders that simulate various common types of color-blindness, to help make sure everything in the game is still legible by those who don't see color like everyone else. Maybe there's a way to add a high contrast mode or something as well.
Another idea I had was trying to figure out how to partially automate the game to allow people to control it with just a mouse (currently requires either kb+mouse or gamepad). Essentially, I'd need to build a custom AI system to help interpret where the player wanted to navigate just with mouse aiming hints and in-game context. I'd also have to figure out what to do about some mini-games that are keyboard-only at the moment. I doubt there are a lot of action games one-handed gamers have access to, so it would be nice to make that possible. It may not happen, as my time is very limited, but I think it's at least worth considering to see if it's possible.
Anyone who whines about small efforts to help improve the lives of people who have it hard enough already can piss off. I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do, not because I'm trying to virtue signal something to someone. I'll advertise these features solely to inform people who require them that they're available. If generating some positive buzz for the game encourages other devs to do likewise, so much the better.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Giving free advice and guidelines on how to make tabletop games more accessible for some is bad because it might lead to laws? Holy hell what a terrible argument.