Entry tags:
Gaming and Accessibility
A saw a rather popular YouTuber say “Not every game is meant to be completed by every player” in respects to game accessibility, and I wanted to know your thoughts on that sentiment.
https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/172173776617/a-saw-a-rather-popular-youtubed-say-not-every
There’s no such thing as being accessible in the abstract. What’s accessible to you may not be accessible to me, or vice versa; everybody’s accessibility needs are unique, and while certainly some features will be helpful to broader or narrower subsets of your target audience, there’s always going to be more that could be done. Unless you have literally unlimited resources to throw at the problem, at some point you’re going to have to confront the question: how accessible is accessible enough?
Some folks will try to twist this around into an argument that since you can’t get it perfect, you shouldn’t even bother to try, and clearly that’s nonsense, but ultimately you will be forced decide where to give up, and there are no easy answers there.
I think about accessibility a lot, and this is a good post on the topic. I'm currently reading Jasper Juul's short book The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, and I'm annoyed by his assumption that all (or even the majority) of players enjoy games solely because they like being challenged. Juul's book was published in 2013, and I appreciate that there's now a more widespread acknowledgement that different people play different games for different reasons. Along those lines, I have to agree with Prokopetz's point that there are different types of accessibility, and not every type is going to be applicable to every audience.
https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/172173776617/a-saw-a-rather-popular-youtubed-say-not-every
There’s no such thing as being accessible in the abstract. What’s accessible to you may not be accessible to me, or vice versa; everybody’s accessibility needs are unique, and while certainly some features will be helpful to broader or narrower subsets of your target audience, there’s always going to be more that could be done. Unless you have literally unlimited resources to throw at the problem, at some point you’re going to have to confront the question: how accessible is accessible enough?
Some folks will try to twist this around into an argument that since you can’t get it perfect, you shouldn’t even bother to try, and clearly that’s nonsense, but ultimately you will be forced decide where to give up, and there are no easy answers there.
I think about accessibility a lot, and this is a good post on the topic. I'm currently reading Jasper Juul's short book The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, and I'm annoyed by his assumption that all (or even the majority) of players enjoy games solely because they like being challenged. Juul's book was published in 2013, and I appreciate that there's now a more widespread acknowledgement that different people play different games for different reasons. Along those lines, I have to agree with Prokopetz's point that there are different types of accessibility, and not every type is going to be applicable to every audience.