Accessibility Gone Wrong

Accessibility has been a pretty commonly brought up topic in the world of vidyerjames relatively recently, with some big names attempting to implement more and more features to make their games more accessible to wider audiences. This is generally speaking a good thing, but alongside these attempts to make games more accessible to a variety of audiences came a lot of really stupid shit getting shoved in under the guise of ‘accessibility’, and that’s the stuff we’re going to be talking about today.

First I’m gonna bring up what I see accessibility as. I imagine this could be a controversial thing to describe, but I’ll give it my best shot.

What accessibility really is

Say you have a girl named Lily. Lily is blind, she cannot see. Lily wants to read Moby Dick, but since she’s blind she’s completely incapable of seeing the words on the paper.

So for Lily, we have braille. She can run her fingers over little bumps, and she can ‘feel’ these words, and she can read Moby Dick. The words you would simply read off the paper correspond to feelings which correspond to what she knows of the spoken word.

But effectively it is still Moby Dick. There’s not significant changes made to the writing itself, it’s simply made to bring the experience to people otherwise incapable of enjoying it properly.

This is what accessibility should be, however it has its limitations. Lily would not be able to properly enjoy films even given the best audio direction, there’s simply too much of an implied visual element to everything. On top of this, Lily would have a significantly harder time even playing video games, let alone enjoying them. Even the easiest titles are made with the expectation that you can see.

There’s the real limitation there. Presumably you could create a film or a video game that’s designed to be enjoyed by the blind, or those who’ve lost limbs, or people who can’t hear etc. but you can’t always make it so that every game can be played by every single person all the time. Even TLoU2, a trashy Walking Dead ripoff masquerading as a videogame that tried to implement countless accessibility features, still fails to address these audiences.

Of course, most people don’t really think about these audiences in video games as a result. Usually accessibility is more minor things relating to color blindness, seizures, or other various disabilities that are less severe but still notable.

These were presumably added first for the intended function of making games more accessible, and then very quickly turned into a checklist asspatting contest among game developers who need things to focus on that aren’t the quality of their titles.

Then they realized that calling something an ‘accessibility’ feature means that you can throw it in as much as you want, and nobody has any right to complain about it because if they did it’d make them a horrible person that thinks people with disabilities should just SUCK IT UP and go work for pennies at the smog factory.

I’ve actively seen people argue like this on Reddit. They’ll bring up many of the things I’m going to bring up now and assume you’re directly attacking paraplegics who wanted to enjoy the new Mario game.

When you’re reading through what I’m bringing up, really ask yourself if any of this makes the game more accessible to anyone, or what disabilities it’s really trying to assist with.

Arachnophobia Filters

A bafflingly specific one to start with. For some reason I thinks starting somewhere with Lethal Company, there’s been quite a few games that have put in settings to completely remove spiders from their games, either by removing their spidery limbs, turning them into green blobs, or replacing them with the word SPIDER.

I had an experience once where I stopped playing a game because I thought its spiders were too spooky. Insects were scary to me because I thought they were going to bite me and make me go all purple or that I’d have some allergic reaction and die. This was because I saw too many cartoons where that happened.

The solution for me was getting the fuck over it.

If spiders are scary, then learn to conquer them. Make videogames the way that you face your fear. Conquering shit is arguably what the overwhelming majority of video games are even about to begin with. Imagine if Link just pussied out after seeing the first chompy plant or some shit, nobody would think LoZ would be a good game.

Adding this option makes you wonder why they even bothered making spiders or spider enemies in the first place. You put spiders in because spiders can be fucking scary if you want them to be. But then WHOOPS, we made the spiders TOO SCARY for certain audiences!

I’m just so confused. Again, please ask yourself what disability this supposedly assists with. Aside from profound retardation, of course.

Story Mode Difficulty

A catch-all term for any difficulty setting that entirely removes all difficulty from the game.

For the record, I don’t mean “very easy”, I mean NO difficulty. No more health loss, no more resource loss, etc… Imagine playing a shmup but you can just casually fly through every single bullet without any sort of problems. Very easy, in comparison, would be giving you an absurd amount of lives and less enemies instead of just completely removing their ability to shoot you altogether.

The stated reason these difficulties get added is because it “lets people just experience the story” which only makes sense if you consider videogames as a series of cutscenes and the gameplay all that lame forgettable shit that happens inbetween. Cough AAA games cough

Thus you turn on the story mode difficulty in order to cut down on all the lame forgettable inbetween shit so you can go back to watching those AWESOME cutscenes! Except this isn’t how videogames work, cutscenes are not anyone’s primary motivation for ever playing a game.

The real reason you see these is because difficulty, in any form, inherently gates people off. Most people buying a title likely aren’t going to end up finishing it. In order to get them to finish it, you remove any and all barriers they might’ve faced.

This is a really big problem even in an optional form because it’s really not an accessibility feature at all. Accessibility features would allow people to play games they otherwise couldn’t, this completely bars people from actually playing the game by completely removing its game features.

No one would say a game of checkers where one side is incapable of getting any of its pieces captured is good, nor would anyone say that any board game would be made interesting if one side was immediately declared the winner based on whether or not they went first.

Games befuddle this by having non-game elements thrown in depending on what you’re playing, usually to make the pacing better. It can be exhausting to constantly play for hours straight, so breaks like this are thrown in. But it’s not these breaks that make your story, at best they set up elements that are expanded upon in the gameplay.

One such game that has this problem is The Cult of the Lamb. It’s a roguelite dungeon crawler where you have to balance out gaining resources from excursions against the needs of your cult, with you usually racing against the timer in order to get back before people get too hungry and discontent but also trying to not get your head cut off by heretics.

Now imagine how fun this game would be if your cult never complained, time never moved forward, and you were effectively immortal. Wow, what a great game that would be. But, bafflingly enough, the game developers put all of this in as options that you can choose under the accessibility section of the options menu.

This doesn’t make the game accessible. This makes it entirely inaccessible. You are not playing the game as its mechanics are, you’re playing a goofy sandbox game where you press buttons to watch things happen.

Granted I’m arguing the design against the people who made it, so they could theoretically retort with “we intended it to be that way :)” if they were big on reading obscure static website blogs, but really cheating people out of the story elements that dungeon crawling and managing your cult provides is dreadfully cheap, especially for a game that is otherwise written very straightforwardly.

Or what, would you have actually read that pulpy trash if it was just a novel or something? CotL’s story is basically just another four heavenly emperor shounen story. You go to each emperor to kill them. Wowee.

Creating a mode that removes the difficulty entirely also makes people who do take on the challenge feel like morons for having done so. You could’ve just ticked the box to remove it, dummy. Now your achievements are little more than an attempt at spite.

It ruins the gameplay, it effectively ruins the story, and it’ll always hang over people’s heads when they’re enjoying the game. Don’t put it in.

Of course, we all know the real reason they put it in is because games journalists are notoriously shitty at their jobs and will actively lower the score on your game if they face a challenge too difficult.

Controller aim assist

Arguably less of an accessibility feature but where else am I gonna find a place to bitch about this?

Since some guy on Gamespot’s forums talked a little too much shit and got his ass handed to him in a Quake duel, controllers have generally been regarded as inferior for FPS gameplay. Of course, this was controllers at the time and nowadays you can pretty much just use a unique control scheme with gyro controls and a flick stick to make up the difference as far as aim goes.

That being said, how many people actually play like that? Most people are camera stick users, and since roughly the first Halo game a little feature known as ‘aim assist’ has been getting more and more popular overtime. In Halo, your marker slows down as you aim it over an enemy to allow you to make precise shots with the incredibly imprecise camera stick, a feature that might not mean much if it wasn’t for what came later.

People took inspiration from Halo’s aim assist features, especially games that use aim down sights mechanics such as Call of Duty. Eventually this got really, really egregious, you could be meters away from someone’s face, press the ADS button, then still manage to snap in perfectly for a headshot with tracking so precise it would challenge some of the top LGers.

And then, crossplay got added to a lot of games. Notably, Halo itself. Now, Microsoft had two options: they could either take the training wheels off of the controller players and let them really see how poor their ability to aim was, turn on auto aim for both parties which would invariably end with keyboard and mouse reigning supreme anyways… or they could just turn on aim assist for the console users, and give absolutely nothing to the PC users.

They did the lattermost one. While keyboard players have to make up every last bit of tracking with their own ability, console players basically get an aimbot that does all the heavy lifting for them. As a result, the overwhelming majority of competitive players end up as controller users because if you’re not playing with a controller you’re actively gimping yourself.

It should also be mentioned that there was a way for keyboard players to fake their inputs as controller ones, granting aim assist. This is considered cheating. It’s considered cheating when the keyboard player has aim assist, but not the controller player. This is kind of like letting your own countrymen take steroids in the Olympics but barring it for everyone else.

This also affects pretty much every other game that relies on controller aim assist, a lot of them also being supposedly ‘competitive e-sport’ games that essentially force people to cheat to win. They’re cheating so hard, cheating is baked into the rulset. It’s egregious.

It should go without saying that if controllers were so great, they would dominate every single primarily keyboard/mouse game. Controllers had no problems keeping up in fighting games once people got used to them, it should be the same here.

Like I said before, controllers can still work if you’re willing to change the scheme that you’re using but at that point you’re essentially asking a controller player to make the same exact leap from controller to keyboard, which is tough for the developers who are making these dopamine addict games to do.

If devs want their games to be taken seriously as E-sports this bandage needs to be ripped off sooner, rather than later. The bandage will be ripped off never because fuck you, except for Nintendo games of all things. Imagine that, bing bing wahoo incorporated makes more legitimate digital sports than EA.

Conclusion

Don’t use the disabled as an excuse to shit up your game thanks for coming to my TED talk.