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Games are typically hard for one or both of two reasons: their user interface is awkward or complicated, or their core mechanics are set up to make the challenges difficult to overcome. Let’s look at each of these in turn. If you want to make an action game accessible, either to the handicapped or to the merely thumb-fingered like myself, think very carefully about the user interface, especially button assignments. I won’t touch most fighting games with a bargepole – they require me to memorize a complex sequence of button-presses and to execute them rapidly within a very narrow time window. That might be worth it if I got a big bang out of beating people up, but I’ve never found fisticuffs rewarding in any case. I prefer shooting them with powerful long-range weapons. There’s growing interest in what are called single-switch or one-switch games: games you can play with a single on-off button. These are particularly suitable for mobile phones, which have a larger consumer demographic than, say, the PlayStation 3 does, and need to be simpler. Personally, I feel that designing under hardware constraints is a good exercise for any designer. Sure, it’s lovely to have 8 buttons, two analog joysticks, two pressure-sensitive triggers and a D-pad to play with, but all those features also allow designers to create sloppy, overly complex interfaces. Sonic the Hedgehog worked great with a D-pad and one button, even though the Genesis actually had four. Keep it clean and keep it tight. Likewise, avoid huge amounts of mouse movement, because it can cause repetitive stress damage. Moving back and forth from the center of the screen to menus around the edge all the time is a bad idea – popup menus reduce the amount of movement required. I designed Dreadnoughts to have settable sensitivity and a “disconnected” mode so the player (who was presumed to be pointing with her head, remember) could relax from time to time. Most commands were voice-activated. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds; the Game Commander system is a $75 software add-on for the PC that enables players to turn any keyboard command into a voice command.
With respect to the mechanics, they’re not that hard to adjust either. Reduce the speed at which enemies move and the frequency at which they arrive (or at which they attack). If the enemies have periods of invincibility, make those periods short; if they have periods of vulnerability, make them long. Reduce the total number of enemies generally. And perhaps above all, if the player fails at a task, don’t require her to go a long way back to try again. One thing I hate about a lot of action games is that if you miss a jump and fall down in a canyon (assuming you survive), you have to hike all the way back up to the top, typically repeating several more jumps along the way, before you can try again. Once again, that just punishes the player who’s not very good, without providing any compensating benefit to players who are good. This brings up the issue of landscape design. While we can easily adjust hit points, powerups, enemies, and a large number of other internal variables to make a game easier, we typically supply only one landscape. But the landscape is often the biggest problem. It’s the source of the infamous Twinkie Denial Condition “You must stand on exactly the right pixel in order to succeed at this jump.” Long sequences of jumps that must be executed perfectly, and even worse, under time pressure, really penalize the poor player. But there are even workarounds in landscape design. Offer two routes, an easy one and a hard one. Give extra rewards for taking the more difficult route, but don’t actively penalize the player for not taking it. On the higher difficulty settings, lock off the easy route; that’s fair, because the player chose that setting. Now, you may be thinking, “Who cares about disabled players? Who cares about players who suck? Why should I mollycoddle people I can’t respect as gamers?” If that’s your attitude, you’re a bad game designer – you’re basing your design decisions on your own abilities as a player rather than a desire to entertain other players. There’s no excuse for it. I’m not saying every game has to be accessible to a three-year-old. But at the moment, even the minimum physical requirements are set much too high, and far too many games offer no support for the disabled player. It does a disservice to our audience, our games, and our industry. For more information about game accessibility, check out the IGDA’s Accessibility SIG, where you’ll find pointers to a number of useful resources. |
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