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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
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.
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.
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.