I am attempting to start a new initiative within the new Game Design SIG and the Game Accessibility SIG. This initiative will focus on using game design to remove accessibility barriers for all types of players, no matter their age, experience or ability. Without accessibility barriers, players will have more fun, less frustration and more games completed because they didn’t get permanently stuck.
The proposal for the initiative is currently titled “Accessible Game Design”, however I am looking for a new name because people may confuse this with focusing on players with disabilities, which is not the case. It’s to help anyone who may be stuck in a game as you will see when you read the proposal. Here are some other names under consideration. Please read the proposal and offer other names you have.
- Inclusive Game Design
- Assistive Game Design
- Barrier-Free Game Design
Proposal begins:
Barrier-Free Game Design Initiative
Vocabulary
- Barrier-Free Game Design – a game design philosophy, which removes barriers that may frustrate players and prevent them from progressing through the game.
- Barrier-Free – free from obstacles that prevent access.
- Accessible – easy to approach, reach, enter, speak with, use, obtain or achieve.
Intended Audience
Game designers who want to make their games as accessible as possible to reduce frustration in players and potentially increase sales because more people can play.
The true beneficiaries of this initiative will be players that have difficulty with anything that stems from game design because they are stuck due to an inability to approach, reach, enter, speak with, use, obtain or achieve within a game.
Our Approach
Research past, present and future implementations of the following:
Player Tailoring
- Players modify game variables to tweak the difficulty, essentially, becoming the game designer. Also includes customizable controls.
Contextual Gameplay Assistance
- Players have access to gameplay mechanics that aid them in overcoming obstacles that they can’t overcome otherwise. Examples are using a magic power on a puzzle to solve it automatically. Or the Auto Hack Tool from BioShock to automatically solve hacking safe deposit boxes. These are in game, contextual gameplay mechanics that assist the player in progressing forward when stuck.
Dynamic Difficulty
- The game uses player statistics to modify game variables that make sure difficulty of the game is never too easy or too hard for the player. Ideally, in perfect balance, even as player become more skilled at playing the game.
Subliminal Hint System
- The game uses player statistics to determine when players are stuck on puzzles and offer what are called “subliminal hints” in an effort to help players create intuitive leaps of logic (logical insights) and solve the puzzle on their own.
Content Navigation System
- Players use a VCR or Chapter based system that allows them to navigate through the entire game non-linearly, skipping to the very end if they desire or rewinding to 5 minutes previous.
Open Questions
Overall
- Which types of players will use the proposed features?
- Cheater
- …
Player Tailoring
- How do you minimize option overload?
- Do not implement in-game costs, punishing players for using the system.
- Less rewards for lower difficulty.
- If players set the difficulty extremely low just to get past a boss fight, clearly they are extremely frustrated and essentially saying, “fuck this!”
- Allow teaks in the middle of game sessions via the in-game menu.
- …
Dynamic Difficulty
- How do you prevent players from “gaming” the dynamic difficulty system?
- Make Dynamic Difficulty an option. Provide it along with typical difficulty settings.
Participating Members
- Michael Lubker
- Reid Kimball
- Teramis
© 2009, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.
Tags: Game Accessibility, gamedesign
I want to be involved.
Thanks Michael, I added your name.
2. Under Player Tailoring?
I had suggested ‘in-game, in-context variability’:
>>Better for us to provide them an “inside” aid, that will keep them in
the game and keep them motivated to continue. This could even be
done with in-game mechanics: use power points to power up and become smarter in order to defeat a puzzle, or more agile, hence not hit or barely grazed by enemy fire in a particular combat, and so on. I.e.
provide tools within the game context to achieve the same
ends. <>Your approach may take more work, to figure
out how to contextual everything. It may not make sense for a game to
give players an ability to decrease enemy shot accuracy through
gameplay choices and power-ups. Instead, might be better to provide a
sub-menu of difficulty settings that does the job. It will depend on
the game and its needs.
I’m not sure what to call that but I think it fits in the initiative.
Assistive Game Mechanic Design?<<
So, I’d like to toss that in the mix under Player Tailoring.
I’ll be commenting on the substantive issues raised above later. But before I do that, please consider my meta-suggestion in next comment.
3. Meta-Issue: online ‘workspace’ for Accessibility (or whatever we call it) discussions
I think it was good to take this kind of “back-room”, preliminary set of conversations off the main list. Yet even though this initiative is in its infancy, I suggest we plan long-term for maximum productivity. That means moving it to a more robust arena we can work in most productively over time, generate archives and have them available to us and others, and so on. Also with easy interface to a wiki, would be good, especially if we are coining vocabulary and definitions as we go (see my #1 comment re naming).
Even if we are just using comments for initial conversations, as those conversations grow this will rapidly become an unwieldy space for collaborative work of this sort. It’s difficult or impossible in a blog to sort various threads, and readily find and reference older material (read, lines of thought and arguments offered) as the body of work moves ahead. Not to mention it is also limited in terms of tools for the non-owner user.
With that in mind, then, I make the following proposals:
1. That we establish a “home page” base at Google Sites. This would be a front door for ourselves and the public (or just the game design public; however accessible we want it to be). We can include links there to discussion forum and wiki. It is also conveniently ‘co-located’ with Gdocs, which is a great tool for collaborative iterations of a document. I imagine we’ll have need for such a tool soon.
2. Propose we continue this present discussion and all future ones in a discussion forum. I mean, a forum specifically – not a groups-type mailing list. By their nature forums allow for topically organized conversations, and can permit newcomers to easily read or comment (to whatever extent we decide to allow) on discussions past and present. Of course, it’s also possible for members to choose to have thread posts emailed to them, so in that sense it provides the same ‘push’ availability of information as a mailing list.
3. Wiki. Indispensible. We could use a google wiki, or something more robust although that would take some tailoring to set up.
If there is interest in moving in this direction, I offer to host the forum and can set up a wiki in phpwiki as well. I can run SMF forum and php wiki at one of my websites, make it a GDSIG thing exclusively, and give admin rights to Reid and whoever else seems appropriate. I also volunteer to take care of the admin housekeeping of initial forum organization echoing topics already established, and copying over relevant post/comment content as archival material. I could get the forum online in a couple of hours. It wouldn’t be fancy til I have more time to fine-tune it, but it would certainly be functional.
(I suggest the creation of a google sites home page should await our decision on an initiative name, since it would be great to incorporate that name or its acronym as the site name.)
Or, of course, I’m open to alternatives. My objectives here are to facilitate robust conversation supported by good user tools and supportive of an historical archive of the work we’re doing. I’d like to see us establish that foundation soon before we generate a lot of content in some other format.
Dang, looks like my first post got et.
#1. Names
Inclusive Game Design – don’t care for this. “Inclusive” has some connotations about disabled services in the same manner that ‘accessibility’ does.
Assistive Game Design – possible, but the semiotics of “assist” bother me. This creates a subtle psychological subtext wherein those who “need assistance” are a “special case”. To draw attention to a set of users as being “special cases” brings its own complications. The largest of these is the inevitable economic decision: are we designing a game for the majority of players, or will we put resources into serving those special cases who need assistance? If it is strictly an optional matter, the latter will always lose. There is also an undercurrent of disability with this term which again bleeds into the “accessibility” realm of thinking.
Barrier-Free Game Design. I like this. It’s a broad charter. Anyone – even normative players – would like to not have barriers to enjoyment in their play.
Only problem I see is that in practical use it does not semantically lend itself to descriptive talk : ‘barrier-freeness’ does not work as adjective or adverb, so going with this name necessitates we use other vocabulary for descriptives. We would need to define that co-extant descriptive vocabulary (adaptiveness, accessibility, assistive X all fall in this category). This is a non-trivial exercise, because the words we use here potentially define the vocabulary for the industry and shape how people think about the issues in this initiative.
My own suggestion: adaptive game design, or game adaptivity, although perhaps that can be confused with other things. (?) Or perhaps not. What do you think?
Advantages: covers broad territory, no subtext of disability-specific focus, already lends itself to descriptive use. Weakness: perhaps too ambiguous.
So, my votes are for:
adaptive game design, or
barrier-free game design, with the caveat that we standardize the descriptive vocabulary that accompanies it.
Once you have settled on the name and the proposal, I can stick it up on the Google groups files.
Sande,
Thanks, hopefully it won’t be much longer.
Teramis,
1. Most designers will think Adaptable Game Design means adapting the game design to the player’s play styles and what kind of game they want to play. It’s a better name for your “smart-game” initiative.
I want to go with Barrier-Free Game Design and define related vocabulary as you suggested Teramis. My goal is that the terms barrier-free and accessible will eventually be interchangeable within this context. Initially, I want to avoid using Accessible Game Design for fear of turning away designers who don’t want to make games for the disabled.
2. I added your idea as “Contextual Gameplay Assistance”. We can change the name, but at least it’s in the proposal and can be refined.
3. I agree. A homepage base, forum and wiki would be great. Can we leverage anything the IGDA or Game Design SIG already has? I would think they’d want to keep everything “in-house” and I don’t want outsiders thinking we are separate from the GD-SIG. If we can’t leverage wiki’s and forums already, then I’ll take you up on your offer to start those.
1. cool with the name. sounds good and I agree with your reasoning.
2. re contextual gameplay – got it.
3. I have no idea what’s in-house for resources. Certainly if we can go with IGDA related facilities that’d be best. Let me know if you need the alternative I offered.
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I’d be interested in participating.
To me “Barrier-free game design” doesn’t say very much about what should be achieved. Also it doesn’t say whether it’s the game that is free of barriers or the design process.
If I understand this correctly the idea is to study how we can make games more accessible and appeal to players with little patience for barriers without dumbing them down.
“Game Design for usability” – “Game design for ease of use” or something similar would sound more logical to myself.