Monday, March 27, 2023

"Gamer Words": A Prime Example of Excused Racial Hostility in Gaming Culture

 The gaming atmosphere gives many gamers of privilege an avenue to extend institutional prejudices and marginalization. Issues regarding racial prejudices are no exception. In many game-centric platforms, from video games themselves to avenues in which gaming is integral such as Twitch, racial marginalization is found to be extremely prevalent. This causes the identity of “gamer” to be exclusive to the “default” of the straight white male and hostile to any “deviant” identification. This is demonstrated in the more recently popularized term “gamer word” and the frequent usage of such words and defense of their usage in gaming culture.

Picture courtesy of Google Images.

The term “gamer word” is a phrase used solely to describe hateful or discriminatory language in the context of gaming environments. The precise dictionary of “gamer words” is comprised primarily of slurs, exhibiting hostility towards marginalized groups of all sorts. Most commonly, the sole “gamer word” is the n-word. By baking these slurs holistically into the dialect of those who identify as gamer, the title of gamer itself is blatantly made exclusive to those not harmed by such words and not welcome to those who it does harm.

Although the use of these “gamer words” may seem very blatant and discriminatory to most individuals, especially those to whom these slurs are directed, an article by Kishonna L. Gray demonstratess how privileged individuals justify this for themselves. In the article, Kishonna categorizes similar practices as  “new racism”, a more “subtle” form of racism that disguises blatant marginalization as an excusable norm. As Gray writes, “It’s a way to talk about racial minorities without sounding like a racist.” This attitude shows marginalized individuals that the environment they have full right to occupy and flourish in is not friendly to them, as hostility is fully baked into the culture and can be simply excused as such.

Even considering this, it would reasonably be surprising to some that directly using racial slurs in a derogatory and hostile way could in any way be “subtle” or come off as sounding not racist in any way. Kishonna writes about an example of this phenomenon in citing the “PewDiePie” incident in which he used the n-word on stream. I believe this scenario dispels all doubt to the fact that individuals will utilize this “new racism” in extreme ways. While many reprimanded his actions, many equally excused them. One twitter user wrote, “Not like Pewds [PewDiePie] ACTUALLY did anything wrong except say a gamer word once during a video game.” The prior quote perfectly encapsulates exactly the extent to which the tag “gamer word” on extremely hurtful language is used to excuse such acts as the norm, allowing for the further punishment of all marginalized and “deviant” individuals within the gaming community.

Picture courtesy of Google Images.

    While the case with PewDiePie is well documented, well known, and debatably atoned for to my knowledge, many similar cases go undocumented, unapologetically. As much as marginalized individuals may continue to make their way into and hold higher positions gaming atmospheres such as content creation and game development, and representations of minority figures become more common in video games themselves, it continues to be extremely difficult to completely iradicate the discrimination that seems so integral to gaming as a whole.


Sources:

Daniels, Jessie, et al., editors. Digital Sociologies. 1st ed., Bristol University Press, 2017. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1t89cfr. Accessed 28 Mar. 2023.

Gray, Kishonna L. “19. Black Gamers’ Resistance.” Race and Media, 2020, pp. 241–251., https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479823222.003.0023.

Monday, March 6, 2023

Designing for Accessibility

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://igda-gasig.org/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054350/Lost_and_Hound/

https://gameranx.com/updates/id/342478/article/lost-and-hound-is-a-game-built-around-blind-accessibility/