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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.
Come on, this isn't about being "PC" or "everyone must be able to do everything." It just seems to me that if a game can be made more accessible, why not extend that courtesy? Of course it isn't possible for "everyone to do everything." But extending a helping hand where feasible? What can be wrong with that?
I have some vision issues myself, and in some games, just having the option to make the text larger is really useful and greatly appreciated.
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.
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.
Why do some people always start whining about requests to make things slightly better for anyone who isn't them?
How does asking the designer to consider colour blindness hurt you? Why do you get so angry that other people care enough to listen and improve their games?
Maybe it's me, people keep saying I'm some kind of "SJW", but if someone said to me "hay, can we have icons next to the red and green lights because they look the same to me", I wouldn't piss myself with rage in response.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
That's fine; I believe that 3rd person shooter tabletop games are rare enough that I doubt too many people are going to be concerned about the accessibility issues.
Log in or piss off.
"How do you make Unchartered 4 "accessible"? A blind person is never going to able to play an 3rd person shooter (or any shooter), no matter what you do to it, any more than he could play tennis."
Straw man argument. Really. There is more one accessibility issue and some of them are applicable to games like uncharted.
Simple stuff though. Red / green colorblindness isn't that uncommon. So if your forest setting shooter game has a red targeting reticule over predominantly green background.
Or the red heading berry powerup looks identical to the green berry powerup. .. those are the sorts of things that can make a game unplayable. Or you put red text on green background...
All you'd need to fix is give multiple reticule options, and give the green berries its own model so that the only distinction isn't color, and put the text on black and white...
Same sort of tips to address blue-yellow blindness, or complete color blindness.
I like to play a lot of games on the big screen TV in the living room. There were lots of games that played well enough, via controller or steam controller but which didn't work well due to the text being not quite legible at couch distance on a 52" 1080p set. Some games had bigger text, or allowed you to increase... others not.
Hell, I like to have windows set to 'larger fonts' just to make navigating the desktop at couch distance easier and THAT setting screws up a lot of games. (They usually screw up their own magnification somehow and all you can see is the top left quarter of the game taking up your entire screen.) Simply designing your game to not choke when windows accessibility features like that are turned on would be a plus.
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.
Yup. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a pile of strawmen reduced to absurdity after falling down a slippery slope. Forever.
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.
You realize that the subject here is a set of guidelines?
It's literally just some helpful guidance? There's no laws here at all.
And you think others are the psychopaths. How about you argue with this subject instead of your imaginary boogeyman?
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.
"hay, can we have icons next to the red and green lights because they look the same to me"
Growing up I remember there being a pair of intersections along a major road in my home town, one had green over red, the other had red over green. Every time I was near there, I wondered "How many people have gotten hurt because a colorblind driver thought a red light was green?"
Shouldn't the lights at least always be in the same order so that colorblind can just know "the top one is red" (or "the bottom one is red")
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Cognitive Accessibility is an important aspect because some people have cognitive disabilities and it's helpful to have games rated toward them if you're buying for somebody with such disabilities. Which may include buying for onerself -- not all cognitive disabilities are the same. I work with a woman who was recently struck with Multiple Sclerosis. Much to her distress, the memory cognitive accessibility aspect would be important to her, while fluid intelligence would not be a problem.
For ages theme parks have included weight, height, and age restrictions, and people didn't generally imagine that these things were ultimately going to lead to theme parks that only have rides that cater equally to the healthy young adult, newborn, and geriatric.
I actually think it's great that it breaks these things down so that people who care (who are mostly people who have to care) can look at the dimension important to them.
I was not familiar with many of the games they rated, but I note for instance that it rated the 2016 version of Blood Bowl very highly, 4.5 stars. And it's accessibility? Shitty in every category. Clearly these accessibility ratings are not actually standing in the way of a good score to those who do not have these disabilities. Interestingly, in the comments they recommend the video game version for people with disabilities.
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.
Accessibility is really unimportant... until someone you know and love is dealing with BS solely because they can't see. Then it becomes CRITICAL.
Just to give you an idea... my GFs blind daughter goes to movies with us. Because they now have "descriptive audio" where she can wear headphones that play an audio track that describes what's going on. "Movies for blind people" sounds like a really stupid PC idea, UNTIL YOU SEE IT IN ACTION. That it makes perfect sense.
In other words, expand your horizons a little.
There are standards for traffic lights - both the ones that hang vertically (red on top) and the ones that hang horizontally (depends on the rule of the road - right-hand-side countries use red-yellow-green, left-hand-side countries is green-yellow-red. Or, red is towards the center of the road, just like drivers sit towards the center of the road to see oncoming traffic). Even then, they can have shapes added to make them even easier.
Green on top should be something you call out the town to fix - because it is a safety hazard - even for those without red-green blindness (you'd assume the top light is red, so if it's glowing, you'd think to stop, but if it's green, then... confusion. Sure if you're not red-green blind you can resolve it with a blink of the eye and a double-check, but if you're not paying so much attention.... (say, on your phone...).
And yes, games can have terrible accessibility - I played one where you dealt with colored cubes... yellow, red, green and brown cubes. Naturally color is important. I can't imagine someone with red-green blindness understanding what was going on, despite the game being quite fun to play and very quick (you finish your turn, and seconds later it's your turn again). A simple fix would be to use different shapes to help differentiate the cubes - spheres, pyramids, cubes, and "spiky" would work just as well, and be even easier to identify. You would have to change the symbology on the cards since they were all colored cubes as well, but colors and shapes would turn it from a nightmare to very accessible with little effort.
Hell, some games just seem designed to be against people with low vision as well. I know one of my escape room games uses slight variations in shading to clue you in but it also made it hard to decipher it until I put it down and looked at it. Here, you can use that, but what made it harder was the use of the low-density printing process which meant everything was halftoned using variable sized dots similar to older style comics. Using a more modern high DPI printer might have made it just as hard to see, but easier to understand once spotted.
Why do some people always start whining about requests to make things slightly better for anyone who isn't them?
I could propose several explanations, but I don't really want to be unkind. I think in many ways, people are to be pitied, if their lives are so void of meaning that they object to helping others, even when takes nothing away from themselves. I wonder what they would feel about it, if somebody designed a game that was incredibly cool, but which was designed to specifically work for, say, blind people, so that it would be a distinct disadvantage if you are used to rely on sight?
Maybe it's me, people keep saying I'm some kind of "SJW", ...
You should feel proud if you stand for social justice. It means you have a conscience, that you care - those are the traits that make us human.