An Open World

Let's talk about accessibility in gaming. Accessibility is the practice of making something simple to do for everyone, especially for people who live with some form of disability. Gaming is the practice of doing fun things because life is dumb, hard, and boring.

Since both of these things are important subjects to me- accessibility because I am visually disabled, and gaming because it's rad and fun- I was blown away by this documentary I found on YouTube by NoClip Documentaries. Give it a watch, and then we'll chat.

I think that the film's most powerful benefit was in changing the way we think about accommodations in gaming. I've combined some of my biggest takeaways below with my own experiences and some research. I hope you found this all to be as eye-opening and inspirational as I did.

1. It doesn't have to be expensive.

In my day job, I work in a warehouse in the quality assurance department. My job is to go through our inventory and make sure stuff is where it's supposed to be. It costs us pennies to receive, stow, and quality-check an item when it comes into our facility... if it's done right the first time. If we make an error and then have to go back and fix that error, our cost to stow an item jumps by over 1600% per item. No, I'm not exaggerating and yes, that's the correct amount of zeros.

What does this have to do with accessible gaming? The lesson here is that good things don't have to be super-expensive, and they aren't if they are dealt with at the start of the project and not after the fact. A lot of easy "gimme" additions that make games more accessible are simple to implement as basic design choices at the start of a project. They can just be a part of the conversation, a line on the meeting notes that becomes something great as development continues.

If a developer only thinks of a thing after the fact? Now we've got to pay the community team to find out what players want in the now-finished game. And we have to pay the design team more to figure out how to retrofit the game to make these things happen. And we have to pay coders, artists, etc. to bring these ideas to life. You get the picture: the price tag jumps sky-high when this stuff has to be patched in later.

Most companies don't bother with accessibility considerations at this stage, and to an extent I can't blame them. But it doesn't have to be this way. Much like how an RPG player plans their skill tree  before they commit skill points, a bit of consideration at the start of pre-production will save a lot of time, money, and frustration later.

2. Most accommodations are what mainstream gamers want, too.

* Subtitles allow people who are deaf or hard of hearing to follow a game's story, and are a mainstay of gaming.
* People who have red-green deficiency- the most common type of colorblindness- are helped by the ability to alter team colors in Gears of War.
* If you are a PC game developer, you are a laughingstock if you don't allow a player to map their own key bindings. This function lets people who have a severe bodily disability (cystic fibrosis, dismemberment, cerebral palsy) to remap their controls to specialized controllers that allow them to play.

An argument against the mindset that I'm supporting here is that "If you do that, it will dumb down the game for everyone just to help a few people." The next section should show that we're not talking about "just a few people," but everything I have listed above is a simple design choice that most games already have now. Mainstream gamers have already accepted all of these modifications, they certainly don't break a title, and everyone enjoys having these options whether they get personal use out of them or not.

Not sure where to start? There are many disability advocacy groups at the national and state levels in the US. I'm sure that most of us also know at least one friend or family member with a disability. Drop any of us a line. Most of us would be happy to take a look at your project and give you some ideas.

Here's a personal example of how options like these affect gameplay experience. I love the Mass Effect series by BioWare. It's one of my all-time favorites across any platform. There is one thing that has been a growing problem throughout its life for me. And no, it's not the gameplay, or the story, or the animation. It's the text size.

Mass Effect launched in 2008, back when 1080p high-definition was still "the wave of the future." The developers had less screen to work with, and their game text looked larger as a result. But as the series grew, as its resolution grew, the text did not grow with it. Take a grain of rice and put it into a teaspoon, and it takes up a decent portion of the spoon's surface area, right? But put that same grain into a measuring cup, and suddenly that rice doesn't seem so big anymore.

And this is what happened with Mass Effect's game text. It's to the point where I'm straining to read anything in Mass Effect: Andromeda with its 4K graphics. If you don't proportionally increase text size to match the resolution you're working with, the same text font and size that was fine ten years ago looks microscopic on modern screens.

A simple oversight like this can make an otherwise wonderful game unplayable. And in the cases of other games like The Elder Scrolls: Legends and Titanfall, it did exactly that for me.

3. This is a HUGE potential profit center for developers and publishers.

I am not naive enough to think that anything as "soft" as morality would ever get a corporation to do anything differently. I do not agree with the mindset that profits have to come before everything else, but I do understand that companies have it and their rationale. And one of the most common arguments that I hear against anyone doing anything for the sake of a person with a disability is "Well, who's gonna pay for it? I sure won't!" So let's talk about that bottom line.

The Pew Research Center lists the number of Americans living with disabilities as of 2015, according to the US Census Bureau, at roughly 40 million people. That's about 12.6 percent of the entire US population. Not all of these people have disabilities that completely prevent them from playing video games and are already playing, like me. Others might just not be interested in gaming, and even with assistive technology, some people just won't be able to play no matter what. So for the sake of the argument, let's cut that number in half to 20 million people who would like to play games but can't.

If each of these 20 million people are now buying one of your $60 games (most gamers buy more than one title per year, but let's keep the math easy), that amounts to 1.2 BILLION DOLLARS annually that is being completely ignored for no good reason. The profit potential increases drastically the more games you create with these people in mind.

Let's be really pessimistic here and say that only a quarter of Americans with disabilities would buy in on this. I don't know about you, but I would sleep pretty soundly with an extra $600 million in my pocket.


A friend of mine is very knowledgeable about business practice. He's one of the smartest people I've ever met. A manager at a small business in North Carolina, he approaches everything with a practical and analytical mindset. At work, when anybody proposes a new idea, he asks them to frame it like this:
1. What's the action?
2. What do we stand to lose if we don't take this action?
3. What do we stand to gain if we do take this action?

So let's do that here.
1. The action: Make alterations to future titles to make video games more accessible to as many people as possible, especially people who live with disabilities that make gaming difficult or impossible for them. These can range from basic to advanced, and many are alterations that most existing gamers want anyway. We can minimize their cost by adapting them into our game design process during pre-production, and make them practical and optional so that everybody gets the experience that suits them best.
2. If we do not take this action, we are leaving money and market share on the table to be taken by our competitors and limiting our customer base for no good reason. In doing this, we miss out on the chance to be pioneers in the future of our industry. Also, people who already have severe limitations have fewer opportunities to enjoy life which is intrinsically a bad thing.
3. If we do take this action, we can stand to realize a potential 12.6% annual sales revenue increase, increase our market share, receive positive press which will increase customer loyalty to our brand, and drive new customer acquisition aside from this action's target demographic. Also, people who have severe limitations have more opportunities to connect to their loved ones and enjoy life, an intrinsically good thing.

Having more accessibility options in video games is good for existing gamers, good for people with disabilities, and good for developers and publishers provided it's done properly- like everything else in game design. Why wait? Let's have some great new experiences together!