By Gabriela Sanchez
Far beyond the usual accessibility features integrated into a game’s UI, game dev Brian Fairbanks, creator of Lost & Hound, offers his expertise in Accessibility integration from a design standpoint. Hosted on the official International Game Developer’s Association- Game Accessibility Special Interest Group (IGDA-GASIG) Youtube page, Brian Fairbank’s “Fusing Accessibility with Game Design” video offers concrete tools and industry insights to aspiring game devs looking to make games for everyone to enjoy.
(Image courtesy of igda-gasig.org)
Laying the foundation for the remainder of the video, Fairbanks explains that really making a game accessible is just about allowing players to customize how communication is sent and received. Unlike other resources that Fairbanks mentions, however, his focus in this video is less on UI integration and more on accessibility integration in game design as a whole. But who is Brian Fairbanks and what gives him the authority to speak on such a complex and storied issue in video game design as an industry?
(Image courtesy of Steam)
Brian Fairbanks is a game developer, self-described “accessibility evangelist” and the creator of Lost and Hound, a project that emerged out of Brian’s own Daisy Ale Soundworks; a sound, music, and software development studio based in Kalgoorlie, Australia. Lost and Hound is marketed as the first fully accessible video game, specifically designed to be playable by gamers with visual, auditory, and physical disabilities. The game features a visually impaired protagonist named Biscuit, a lost dog who must navigate through a series of puzzles to find her way home. Unlike other puzzle games of the same genre, the puzzles in Lost and Hound are designed to be fully accessible to players with a range of disabilities, including vision impairments, hearing impairments, and motor impairments, most of which are built into the mechanics of the game. The game uses audio cues and a screen reader to provide information to players and can be played using only a keyboard.
Lost and Hound has received positive reviews for its innovative approach to accessibility and its engaging gameplay. The game was even a finalist for the Accessibility Award at the 2020 Independent Games Festival and was also featured at the 2020 Game Accessibility Conference.So really, when it comes to designing with accessibility in mind, there are few in the field more qualified to speak than Brian Fairbanks.
“The perfectly accessible game is one that designs accessibility into its core structure, ”iIt doesn’t “add accessibility on as an extra feature” Brian comments to his audience. He goes on to offer a “Cheat Sheet of Accessibility” features of the four types of accessibility; muscular limitations, hearing impairment, vision impairment, and cognitive impairments that impact processing speed. Brian goes through each category of accessibility methodically, identifying points for consideration on part of the designer, while also offering concrete examples of creative slutions to these needs using play footage from his own game and other games including Phasmaphobia, Unpacking, and Rebuild 3.
Beyond the cheat sheet however, Brian introduces an interesting overview of the intersection of game design and accessibility accommodation in a thorough investigation of the three levels of implementation available to designers; (1) explicit deisgn, (2) surface design, and (3) deep-level design. Starting with explicit design, Brian explains how this secondary course of accommodation adds information to the game in order to make the game more accessible to its playership. The critique that designers face in pursuing this route however, is that of treating the differently-abled experience as secondary, or as an after-thought, of the original gameplay design. Next, surface-level design, Fairbanks explains changes the game world in some way, for example, by adding visual cues alongside auditory cues to allow for the hearing impaired to be prompted by the gameworld in an appropriately differentiated manner. Finally, and most profoundly, Brian explores deep-level game design; a radically different approach to accessibility in that it considers accessibility first, making accessibility as a whole integral to the game world. Admittedly there are few titles that offer this level of consideration. In fact, I am pressed to think of even one example outside of Brian’s own project, Lost and Hound.
So what’s next?
According to Brian Fairbanks, the future of accessibility in game design is to abandon retrofitting. In other words, the future of accessibility is design that does not simply consider accessibility, it implements accessibility as it would any other mechanic. The benefit of this level of forethought is that it eliminate the clumsiness of adding accessibility to the periphery of an already finished game. It also spares the player from feeling like she is an afterthought of the game’s design or worse, feeling patronized by the game’s lackluster retrofitting of accessibility features which oversimplify gameplay rather than accommodating the experience for the differently-abled in their audience. Moving forward, we must consider the aesthetics and tone of accessibility rather than its mere availability, and while this is certainly a milestone accomplishment for disabled gamers and representation in the video-game industry, the road certainly does not stop here.
References:
Fusing Accessibility with Game Design
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054350/Lost_and_Hound/
Using accessibility as the core of design is not something that I had thought of initially, but reading this post, as well as the other readings this week, it made me realize how critical that is. For example, if I were to design a game the help somebody hard of hearing to play, designing for accessibility informs me of how to appropriately use strong visual cues. This not only helps impaired players to experience the game, but is beneficial to the design of the game and experience of all players as a whole.
ReplyDeleteI agree that building accessibility into the design of your game from the start is something that's super important but isn't done nearly as much as it should. Accessibility often seems like an afterthought to the design of games, and while that's better than not including it at all, it can make the features feel clunky and less true to the actual experience of the game.
ReplyDeleteI also think that the basic principles of accessibility can improve the experience of the game for everyone by allowing alternate ways to experience the game, making some aspects of gameplay more understandable for beginners, and more.