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Design Considerations for Gaming With a Disability
By Cameron Sorden | April 28, 2008
I wanted to take a moment and point out this latest Massively article I wrote, just in case you don’t watch that feed. I think it’s an important story for a number of reasons, and I think that it’s something to think about for both players and designers. It was a really eye-opening experience to talk to Mark, Tim, and Stephanie, and I’m very happy with the way the article turned out.
I know a number of designers stop by here occasionally, so I just wanted to reiterate that a big part of the message that may not have come across very clearly in the article is that the considerations required to make your game more disability-friendly are minor tweaks, largely interface-based, and can be offered totally optionally in most cases. I also wanted to splash the suggestions for things not to do from the article that Mark pointed out:
- Drag and drop interfaces: Both Stephanie and Mark mentioned the extreme difficulty of trying to work with a drag and drop interface for someone who lacks fine motor skills. When it’s difficult to even click a mouse button, the daunting task of clicking, holding, and moving the cursor all the way across a screen can be just too much for some players. Since many games use this system for setting up a hotbar, it can be very frustrating for a disabled gamer to use all of their skills effectively.
- Double clicking on small areas: Again, double clicking in rapid succession, as small as it seems, can be very challenging for disabled gamers. This often comes into play with crafting and harvesting interfaces or activation items. Something Mark suggested as an easy alternative was to allow players to activate environmental objects with a keystroke instead of (or in addition to) a mouse click.
- Putting items on menus: While EverQuest 2 was described as a very disability-friendly game, the right-click activation menus (similar to the dialogs that pop up in Windows) were specifically mentioned as something not to do with your game. Especially when you have to move through the menu options quickly or risk having the menu disappear, interaction with such menus can be very challenging for disabled gamers.
- Controllers: Modern console gaming is immensely difficult for gamers with disabilities, due largely to how controllers are designed. As MMOGs make a shift to become more console-oriented, developers can be cognizant of that fact and offer alternative peripherals and changeable key bindings for their games.
Other easy-to-implement suggestions included closed captioning and avoiding pure audio cues (for deaf gamers), and camera angles which are easily controlled via keyboard commands (as keys are much easier to use than moving the mouse around for many disabled gamers).
While it’s not something you should dwell on, the truth is that none of us knows what life might have in store for us and anyone could become disabled. I would hate to have to stop playing games or doing other things that I enjoy because of it. It’s not hard to accommodate disabled gamers as a designer (they do almost all of the heavy lifting themselves), and you open yourself to a sizable group of players in the process who otherwise wouldn’t play your game because it’s too frustrating (see Tim’s comments about Guild Wars).
Besides, even if the only thing that you accomplish is that one more person is able to play your game, maybe that one person gets an immense amount of joy and excitement from being able to play in your virtual world. Isn’t that a good enough reason?
Topics: community, game design, massively |
April 28th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
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May 6th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Thanks for the article.
One of the most personally moving aspects to me about working on MMOs has been meeting gamers with various physical disabilities who have told me how much being able to play in a game world means to them. For these folks, an MMO is a way to forget about the challenges in their lives for a while and just enjoy themselves. I take the responsibility I have to these gamers very seriously, and I try to keep their needs in mind as we plan our features and gameplay.