[games_access] games_access Digest, Vol 101, Issue 13

[Dimitris Grammenos]

Hello all (sorry in advance for my lengthy e-mail), 

I would also like to share some of my thoughts about this subject since I disagree with some of the things mentioned in the conversation.

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First of all, accessibility is not synonymous to “people with permanent physical disabilities”  and probably this misconception is the root of most of the problems that we discuss about all of these years. It is not a marginal issue that concerns some niche groups of our society. It is a mainstream issue concerning the majority of people. 

Probably the historical reason for this misconception is that, in the past video game players constituted a rather coherent closed group with little variation regarding their characteristics such as age, skills, interests, even gender. Accessibility was not much of an issue, mainly because if you faced any accessibility problems, you simply would not become a “game-player”.  From this point forward, things begun looking like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since most games were created either by “game-players” or in order to appeal to “game-players”, even when more people (literally) started coming into play, game designers instead of trying to expand their notion of what is a video game and how people can (or like) to play it, continued reproducing the same recipe that was conceived to be appealing to “game-players”. And this is the main reason why currently, although game companies have at their disposal highly advanced software and hardware technologies and vast human and material resources, still fail to considerably expand their target markets. 

Thus, in my opinion,  the biggest mistake of most game development companies is that they try hard to sell more games to the same people, instead of trying to find ways of selling the same games to more people. For example, typically I would not be considered as a person with a particular disability, but still there are several video games (as well as hardware components) with which I (would) face considerable accessibility problems.

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About the “reasonable” approach. My main concern is who decides what is reasonable and by which means. For example, there was a time when it was considered reasonable that blind people should be confined to their home. As most of you already know there are people out there that it is reasonable that there is no reason for a person who cannot use his hands to play a video game. Anyway, I will not get this any further…

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About Ian’s comment that “a game by definition can't be barrier free (without any barriers it's just a toy or narrative rather than a game)”. I think that there is a misunderstanding here between “barrier” and “challenge”. Games need to provide “challenge” not “barriers”. What constitutes a challenge may considerably vary for each distinct player and to some extend it is highly correlated with all previous conversations about game difficulty.

Furthermore, games do not tests skills. Skills are the means that players employ to overcome challenges. In my opinion, games (except in special cases) are mainly meant to provide entertaining experiences. Thus, the means (or skills if you prefer) people employ to achieve that should not be mistaken as their goal. Why should it matter if I play an FPS using Kinect, a mouse, a (virtual) keyboard, on switch, speech commands, mind waves? Or if I play with my eyes open or shut? It is still the same game with the same goal (find the treasure, kill the monsters, steal the cars, ...) 

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OK I will pause here for now, so that some people may actually read it... 



Cheers,

Dimitris