Als ein Beispiel für Spiele, welche der Krankheitsbewältigung dienen, wird im Artikel der Titel Cafe Sunday von IJsfontein genannt. Dieses VR-Videospiel wurde entwickelt, um Menschen mit Depressionen, begleitet von ihren PsychotherapeutInnen, durch bestimme Situationen zu führen. Ziel ist es, durch das Design des Spiels, in möglichst vielen Patienten Gedankenspiralen auszulösen, um diese zu erkennen und in geschützter Umgebung zu behandeln. (1)
“Die Umsetzung des in der Therapie Gelernten in die Praxis stellt dabei einen wichtigen Teil der Therapie dar.”
(Thiele-Schwerz, Sauer, 2020, S. 370)
Die Nutzung des Spiels innerhalb einer Therapiesitzung bringt gleich mehrere Vorteile mit sich: Einerseits ist es dem Patienten möglich, mit einer gewissen Distanz an bestimmte Alltagssituationen heranzugehen. Ziel einer kognitiven Verhaltenstherapie beispielsweise ist es, die eigenen, negativen Gedanken zu erkennen und langfristig durch positive Gedanken und daraus resultierende Verhaltensweisen zu ersetzen. ‘Cafe Sunday’ hilft Patienten durch diese Distanz zur virtuellen Welt die eigenen Gedanken besser zu beobachten ohne der, als gefährlich oder unangenehm empfundenen, Realität ausgesetzt zu sein. (1)
Der zweite Vorteil ist, dass die PsychotherapeutInnen die PatientInnen gezielt führen und begleiten können. So ist es ihnen möglich, die Situationen zu steuern und sie auf die Entwicklung des Patienten abzustimmen. (1)
Ein weiterer Aspekt ist, dass das Spiel sich der motivierenden Wirkung von Videospielen bedient. Wie bereits oben erwähnt, ist die Übung der gelernten Strategien essentiell für eine erfolgreiche Therapie. Das Medium bietet die Möglichkeit und ebenfalls die Anforderung, durch eigene Interaktionen das Erlebnis aktiv zu beeinflussen und zu durchleben. Diese grundsätzliche motivierende Eigenschaft von Videospielen gilt es gezielt für Health Games einzusetzen.
Es erfordert eine besondere Auseinandersetzung mit der Zielgruppe, um nicht ausschließlich ein Spiel zur Unterhaltung zu designen, sondern einen Mehrwert für die Gesundheit von Patienten zu erzielen. Im nächsten Eintrag beschäftige ich mich daher mit der Frage, welche (weiteren) Aspekte müssen für die Gestaltung eines Health Games beachtet werden?
(2) Thiele-Schwez, M.; Sauer, A. (2020). Wunderpille Games?! Mit digitalem Spiel gegen reale Krankheiten. In: Görgen, A.; Simond, S.: Krankheit in Digitalen Spielen: Interdisziplinäre Betrachtungen. Bielefeld: transcript 2020, S 367 – 386.
_We recently started a small game called DECAY in UNITY, a horror-exploration game set in an abandoned bunker facility.
_While we were hard at work building the game, we thought about implementing future, rather simple accessibility options; like making collectibles easier to see and find, adding an optional item counter to help you keep track of your needed collectibles and maybe some kind of colorblind mode (yet we weren’t sure how to implement such a feature in such a game with it making sense). But the easiest and nicest solution we came up with, besides a difficulty setting which would influence the time it would need for the game to result in a game over in certain moments, was the idea to optionally remove enemy encounters entirely from the game, so one could explore to their hearts content, since we poured a lot of love and detail into level itself, like little micro-narratives and so on. Finally, since the music can get creepy sometimes (as it should in a game like that) we considered if would be available to influence the game music, e.g., adjusting the volume or turning it off completely. Yet we are still on the fence on these topics, since we try to decide what is needed for our game to function in its core and what can be made more easily accessible.
_The thought came across my mind, how does accessibility handle in online and competitive games? In an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), how can these games accommodate accessibility features, just besides a colorblind setting or UI scaling? Turns out, there is a limit of accessibility in these games, because some issues just can’t be worked around.
Some examples, where some things can be addressed do exit though:
_Any customization, which do not add any unfair advantage to the game for some users. Like reconfiguring your controls, customizing colors or sizes of UI elements, or even change little details in the game, like in shooters, change the color of the reticle – like in APEX LEGENDS.
_Entry barriers on lower levels of play can be helpful in many games, like matchmaking of similar ranked players, say by level or skill. Yet the later, also known as SBMM (skill-based match making) often leads to more frustration than satisfaction with players due to it’s basic logic: if you play very good in some games in a row, the algorithm deems you more skillful and matches you with people which it thinks are equal to you now – yet you might have just gotten a lucky streak, and now you actually are being paired with players which are way more invested in the game and proceed to walk all over you for some rounds. Only for the algorithm to realize its misinterpretation of your skill level and putting you back to the rather less invested people – which you best again with ease and the cycle begins anew. The system might work in theory, but in the practical world its just an awful up and down rubber banding. Matching people by level often can go awry if the game allows an easy access to a new account, giving the opportunity to a frowned upon practice called ‘smurfing’. Here a player of a very high level of play creates a new account and abuses the system, which deems them as a new player, a beginner, and matches them with other – often real – beginners. This leads to the player absolutely destroying the fun for the beginners with the massive skill gap between the two parties and leaving the new one rather unsatisfied with their performance, which is immediately projected onto the game and the dissatisfaction with the game itself drives new players away.
_Other ways to lighten up entry barriers in games can be features which help players in lower levels of play but in higher levels of play turns out more than a burden and disadvantage. For example, aim assist, which helps new players acquire targets more easily by slightly adjusting their aim to stay or snap to targets can be beneficial to them, while in higher levels this slow, and less accurate method is easily bested and faster with a player manually aiming. Actually, in these high levels often the slight and trailing adjustments by the algorithm leads the players unintentionally loosing their aim on the target, because an adjustment which had to be done several milliseconds ago, which was already corrected and accounted for by the player comes way to late and results in an unwanted adjustment – ultimately losing the target for a brief moment. And this little moment can be defining in competitive gaming.
_Matchmaking isn’t a lost cause yet because players can be matched on other deciding factors. Like in GTA V, only players who chose to play with auto-aim on get paired together. Or in HALO REACH players with enabled voice communications will play together and in PUBG players who play in third person instead of first person will go against each other. This is because of a mechanic called ‘third person peeking’. If a player with third person view enabled hides behind cover, they can look over the cover with their camera, while their body stays hidden. An approaching enemy would not know that they have already been spotted, since the players camera is invisible to the enemy.
Some competitive games, which feature certain moments where a third person instead a first-person view, they activate a so called ‘anti-peek’ function – it hides every other dynamic gameobjects, which are currently not able to be seen from the point of the character which just switched to 3rd person (e.g., APEX LEGENDS when using emotes).
_To sum up, designing multiplayer games within the aspect of accessibility can be very hard, because sadly, some competitive games are made not to be easily accessible by everyone in their core, which isn’t their fault – it’s just in their nature, so to say. But every other factor besides these core mechanics, which can be made more accessible in this game is a step further and should be done without a second thought spent.
_XBOX made great efforts into the field of accessibility and implemented a wide array of software and hardware for this purpose. Like a highly sophisticated text-to-speech for system UI elements, a mono toggle of unilateral hearing loss (impairment in only one ear while the other ear is in ‘normal’ limits) and a zoom function. They also included features for real time speech-to-text and text-to-speech ingame – the tech is yet not perfect, also because its difficult to cope with the game specific terminologies and lingo, which can change rather quickly.
_I myself tried speech-to-text out of curiosity in APEX LEGENDS, cause often teammates are very hard to understand or just way too quiet to hear them, but the algorithm may hear them. But to put it shortly, speech-to-text works rather horribly. Often, it’s just an unintelligible array of random words which hardly approximate what has been said; it seems to work best with the English language, then it sometimes gets it right. Mostly. Yet does generate absurdly funny combination of sounds resulting in a fun time at least. But the technology will get better eventually and can enable hearing or sight impaired people to take part in conversations which would otherwise be inaccessible to them.
_Also, XBOX introduced the copilot mode, a simple but brilliant solution. Two controllers are connected to the same console and give the same input simultaneously – making it possible for someone else to jump in and help if it is needed. For example, a parents could help their kids getting through difficult sections, while everything else is handled by the kids themselves. Or a blind person could play a game by hearing alone, while another person helps with the walking through the level, which could only be accessible trough sight. Originally it was designed to split the controls between two separate controllers; therefore, maybe controlling one side of the controller with one limb and the other parts of the controller with some other body part, which might not reach the other side of the initial controller. This method can make highly expensive customized controllers obsolete and democratizes technology further. They also published the adaptive controller, a tool for people with various impairments to make it possible for them to customize their inputs even further to their needs.
_Back in early 2020, Mark Cerny, the lead system architect for the SONY PlayStation Company held a talk about the soon to be released PlayStation 5 console an its technological aspects and achievements. He explained how they ventured into the field of a new audio technique, the 3D audio engine TEMPEST – it makes it possible for users, to hear ingame sounds with a feeling, as if they were happening around them, by some clever tricks outsmarting our brain and the way it detects sounds. This is, shortly speaking, by measuring the time between an incoming sound signal on the one ear and the arrival on the other ear, defined by the inner distance of our ears to each other, which the brain knows inherently. So, timing sounds just with the right time between left and right headphone speakers the illusion of the sound happening in real life can be achieved.
_To get this done, they scanned several hundred peoples hearing data, there known as HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) and handpicked some of the most common ones to put it into the TEMPEST engine. He also explains that given the fact if this complex and very subjectional/individual perception – and the fact not every user can be scanned to get their personal HRTF – maybe not everyone is physically able to perceive 3D audio correctly – for some it only seems like a bit better stereo audio.
So, in the end one could say future technologies can open the doors for some, but slam the doors shut for others. Although they will try to synthesize HRTF data in the future to maybe make it able to even a wider range of people it may be locked aways for some forever.
_On a side note, MINECRAFT (MOJANG) also did some development into a highly sophisticated system for full 3D spatialization for ingame sounds as an optional feature, meaning you could determine the location of a noise emitter very accurately by hearing it alone. In the end, this system was turned down serval notches (pun intended) to it only determining, if a sound offscreen comes more from either the right or left side and indicated this with an arrow appended to the subtitles pointing in either one of these to directions. They scrapped the idea of spatial sound effects because they realized in competitive games this feature could, if turned on, help players gain an unfair advantage against other which chose not to play with it.
_The debate about the game DARK SOULS (FROMSOFTWARE) and its lack of accessibility due to a missing feature of some difficulty setting seems to never stop. But why is this a problem?
_In the previous post we talked about what makes a barrier and what makes a game? If you take away its core feature or game mechanic, which makes it unique, what also be considered as a barrier – what is left of the game? Often only the narrative.
_In the DARK SOULS series, the main game mechanic are the overwhelming odds you face as a player as you traverse the game, and the feeling of being stuck endlessly on a portion of the game only to finally overcome the impossible seeming odds and beat the boss which decimated you relentless in your last tries – only to face such a challenge very soon again. Many people though don’t get the luxury to just ‘get over it’ and due to its high skill cap and rather complex controls, many players just don’t get far enough to enjoy the game properly. They ultimately abandon the game and choose not to play it any further. Because the narrative is one of a kind, it’s a shame that this is locked aways for many players. But the game being hard is in the end, its core feature which makes it stand out and what makes it DARK SOULS; so it would be no wonder if nothing ever comes to this game in the regards of accessibility.
_Or a better question: what makes a game? And what are the basic accessible options are the basic needs for a healthy game? The key difference between games and other entertainment is, that they are by definition – inaccessible; because they need a challenge to be recognized as a ‘game’, otherwise it just would be a toy or a narrative. This challenge could easily become a barrier.
_Every game has barriers which make them what they are, what makes them fun or – what doesn’t make it fun for some. Unlike in the Web content accessibility guidelines, it’s not a simple checkmark list, it’s more like an optimization process. How much can you strip away from the game, what is necessary to keep its core design? What’s unnecessary for the game and its possibility to be enjoyed?
_There are some key accessibility errors making huge impact in a games enjoyability which occur very often which could be avoided easily, like the text size, the use of colors, fixed controls, and the reliance on solely audio. The basic solutions for these problems would be, for example, a decent default text size which is still adjustable, other signifiers like visual or haptic cues instead of only sound, remappable controls and – believe it or not – implementation of basic subtitles. Its not depending on much research and development to implement such features – only thinking of them in the very early stages of development can solve a lot of troubles later.
_Game menus are widely known for their possible complexities. In this case, its about showing the right amount of complexity at the right time to the right people. Like bundling some options into a preset and present them at the start of the game and give the users to customize these even further; because some people like the ability to change many details and configurate, others don’t and want to just jump right in. Like in TLOU:PT2, when you boot up the game for the first time, you will get the option to choose between a few presets, which could help each with different impairments. But if you choose, you can go a level deeper and customize these presets completely to your needs.
_To sum up, defining early what’s necessary and what is optional really helps in designing with accessibility in mind, and create great games.
_Many game studios made pushes into the field of accessibility and the appeal of accessibility in games is growing ever more.
_For example, back then NAUGHTY DOG made UNCHARTED 4 and supplied it with options for motor impairments, and in 2020 they released THE LAST OF US: PT.2 and with their enormous advancements in inclusion they won the award for best innovation in accessibility. There is considerable work done in the various fields of the elimination of different barriers are getting explored one after the other. Back in 2018 we mostly talked about text customization, now we’re at full-blown shader alteration by AAA-titles.
_Mark Brown does a big analysis of each year game releases and examines them in all regards of accessibility and highlights their several achievements.
_On December 10th THE GAME AWARDS for the year 2021 took place in LA, where great games get acknowledged and, stating the obvious, awards. Also is this an event for game developtent companies to present their new projects to the whole world.
_Since 2020 there is an award in place for “Best Innovation in Accessibility”, which recognizes debvelopers that are pushing the medium forward by adding features, technologies and content to help games to be played by an even greater audience. Last year, this award was given to NAUGHTY DOG STUDIOS for their immense dedication to publish the most accessible game n a long time: THE LAST OF US PART II. This year, THE GAME AWARDS made the extra effort to make their show more accessible, including an audio-descriptive stream, an ASL (American Sign Language) stream and closed captions. Even on site one could see ASL interpreters standing in front of the stage, bringing ASL to the audience. The award itself was presented by Morgan Baker (Accessibility specialist and designer; also judge in this category) and Jacksepticeye (webvideo producer).
Games are for everyone.
They stated that it’s about honoring people, who work as hard as possible to share their work with as many people as possible by discovering new and creative methods to encourage inclusion. This year’s nominees were:
Far Cry 6 (UBISOFT)
Forza Horizon 5 (PLAYGROUND GAMES)
MARVEL’s Guardians of the Galaxy (SQUARE ENIX)
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (SONY)
The Vale: Shadow of the Crown (FALLING SQUIRREL)
_Quick Summaries on what each nominee accomplished with accessibility options in their games:
Far Cry 6. This shooter is a quite unexpected newcomer in accessibility, with a wide variety of color customizations for different aspects of the game, like enemy laser pointers, to see where they are going to fire. Also closed captions, a colorblind mode, and texts to speech options.
Forza Horizon 5. The option to enable a in game sign language interpreter was added to this new racing game, besides of many other accessibility customizations.
MARVEL’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Various settings to alter gameplay and certain aspects of it, like changing received damage, ammunition costs, timers, and cooldowns.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Options to customize the visual appearance of the game, like depth of field, screen shake, colors, high contrast outlines and more.
The Vale: Shadow of the Crown. A very interesting nominee; a game solely and entirely told through audio and almost no graphics with a focus on narrative and storytelling – perfectly designed to be accessible for blind and low-vision players.
_The winner for best Innovation in Accessibility this year was Forza Horizon 5 (also Best Audio Design & Best Sports/Racing Game) made by PLAYGROUND GAMES. They stated, that their team were so committed to accessibility, so they made it to one of their core pillars of game design in this project. According to them, there is a billion players with some sort of disability which makes gaming a challenge for them – they are happy to be creators who can add options and features which open the ‘magic’ of video games to more and more players.
To win the @TheGameAwards award for Innovation in Accessibility for #ForzaHorizon5 is incredibly meaningful to us, and we hope to continue the important work of making Forza for everyone!
_Immediately after watching this award category and its winner I pondered, what are the exact benefits of ASL as opposed to subtitles? Apparently, ASL – provided by a skilled interpreter – makes it easier for sign language users to keep track of the conversation, who is currently speaking; by taking on the certain aspects of the speaking character. This is achieved through the fact that ASL works completely differently as language, with a different grammar, syntax, and stylistic nuances. Also, subtitles rarely indicate music, sound effects or the atmosphere of the situation. In conclusion, ASL in conjunction with subtitles can greatly enhance the experience of games for people with hearing disabilities.
_Hands-on experience with DEATH STRANDING by SONY and Kojima Productions. This game is a beautifully crafted dark apocalyptic sci-fi game with an enigmatic story, a masterpiece in convoluted narrative, futuristic designs and rather complex systems and even more complex UIs.
_Last year I played the ‘base version’ – the PS4 edition – quite a lot and found my way around the complex systems after a while. I learned how the different features work and how to use them properly; and even how to exploit them as much as possible to make my life easier with this game. But there were many things which annoyed me, like non scalable text size which made me often scooch even closer on the couch to my rather big screen, only to read some menu texts. So even for me, it wasn’t satisfying from the beginning and now, almost more than a year later, the “Directors Cut” for PS5 got released – rumor has it, this version is now more accessible. So, I tried the new version of the game after a yearlong break on a PS5 and immediately notices many improvements, mainly quality-of-life improvements. Now the question came up, how good were those improvements really? For a start, I researched some accessibility reviews on DEATH STRANDING and gathered their findings.
_The 1st review was made by Steve Saylor, a blind gamer – his general thoughts and opinions on the accessibility of this game were very intriguing. The crazy and wild story did really impress him, yet did he feel held back by the limitations of accessibility. He tested the PS5 version, where they implanted a “large text” option to enlarge the text size in the whole UI – whereas text in the base PS4 version initially was considered rather small. But even with this new option, often it seems hard to tell where large text was applied, and small text remains. Paired with that, the game has a lot of Button prompts, menus, button maps and texts which take up a lot of the screen, making it rather crowded. To identify everything correctly, one is required to lean back and forth to the screen – which is tiresome.
Staying with visual barriers, subtitles exist through the whole game; yet they do not have any high contrast or background to them – no further settings except on/off. But weirdly enough, in some situations – like any open menu – where there is dialogue experienced, the subtitles get a nice black gradient as background, but only there. Besides that, hearing impaired people might also find difficulties: there is no menu narration, but there are audio feedback/cues, that play on selecting inputs. The two main accessibility barriers he identified were for people with motor or cognitive disabilities. Starting with the latter; in the game there are a lot of different subsystems, which require you to memorize complex input patterns and often it’s hard to determine, what the most important information on the screen is right now – or what is just eye candy. There are subtle visual cues to those vital elements, but often you are left with a ‘lost’ feeling in all these menus.
The lack of any in-game remapping of controls (PS5 version) comes to play at one of the core aspects of the game: while you deliver your items/cargo you will cross different types of terrain (water, rocks, mud, snow…) and for that you to balance your cargo. This is done by ‘ready yourself’ – pressing down left & right shoulder trigger – to prevent yourself from toppling over. The need to push them down constantly to stay upright might be a barrier for some people with motor disabilities. The adaptive triggers of the Dualsense controller do feel nice, but even without any dexterity problems it can get annoying and exhausting, because you will press the shoulder triggers a lot – fortunately you can disable the adaptive feedback. Later in the game you do get access to vehicles, which will help you with that, but it will take some time and exhaustion to get to that point. But that being said, these helping game features possess a durability system and do have to be maintained to work properly.
Buttons in DEATH STRANDING do have many different functions, depending on what subsystem you’re in. A good example would be the item “Repairspray”, which is used to repair worn out cargo containers. To use this item, you will have to:
Press the D-Pad right and hold it, that opens the item wheel
Select with your right analog stick the item
If it’s not on the first page of items, press the right analog stick to switch pages (often referred as R3)
Let go of the D-Pad, item is now equipped
Press left shoulder trigger (L2) to ready it (it now points forward)
Press square to point it backwards to your cargo mounted on your backpack
Press right shoulder trigger (R2) to activate it (until it runs out of gas)
Now you either but it back with D-Pad right or you hold D-Pad right, access the item again in the item wheel and press circle to drop it
Everything has such complex interactions und requires multiple button presses, even in combat and other stressful situations. His final words were that the “Directors Cut” does have some neat little improvements, but it remains just an upgraded & polished version with minor changes to the PS4 edition. It could be, that for many people the advances made are still too little.
_The 2nd review is by Michael Matlock who also came to mainly the same conclusions. Multiple button presses at once are difficult, and even remapping them within the PS5 integrated system options (which is possible nonetheless) is tiresome and exhausting. An interesting aspect which joined the barriers for people with motor disabilities was the camera: the right stick must be adjusted constantly to look around and an automatic camera would help a great deal; this would center/adjust the camera always behind the player character. It was mentioned that the difficulty setting “Very easy” was overhauled that everyone could beat the game, where penalties for dropping cargo are very small and combat is fairly simple – this would have to be tested, I might add.
Concerning accessibility options, the aim-assist is by default activated (changeable) and there is an option for “Keep balance”-sensitivity, which controls who difficult the balancing part is for the player. Also, there is now a “Hold Button”-option, resulting in overriding any quickly repeated button presses (quick time events) to just holding the button down. The analog sticks have adjustable dead zones, and some motion-based inputs can be remapped to ‘normal’ button presses. The HUD can be adjusted with selecting & deselecting shown icons to reduce visual clutter; and the brightness can be easily adjusted. Another interesting barrier, everything has subtitles – expect the frequent appearing music pieces. Yet not hearing them will not stop you from advancing further in the game, but sadly do they add a lot to the atmosphere of the game.
A big burden is lifted through the rather smart game design – the online component. As one might never meet another player in his own game world, yet these other online players might alter your own game world by leaving objects and structures to help you traverse the world easier – this feature often helps a great deal getting through the game. For example, at one moment you might struggle crossing a river and when you return later someone left you a bridge in the meantime. Final judgement of this review was partially accessible and again, a lot of helpful accessibility options, but still room for a lot of improvements – yet it has gotten substantially better considering earlier Kojima titles.
_3rd review of the game was done by Courtney Craven at CAN I PLAY THAT?: again, iterating many of the given problems. Interesting enough, the ability to plot routes, which will then be visible in the game world as dotted lines was praised as helpful tool while being deservedly difficult to operate (speaking again of multiple button presses). Also, the “very easy”-difficulty could eliminate combat completely, but I doubt stripping away this aspect completely does the game any good, but maybe there could be a workaround by maybe leaving the combat situation in the game yet removing the possibility for a “game over”.
The statement was made, that if you struggle with holding down the triggers, you will not really be able to play DEATH STRANDING – which, given the number of times you will have to press it, is most likely true. Regarding the font sizes, it was mentioned that even the “large text”-option looks like rather ‘normal’ text size. I agree on that; the ‘large’ text was just right for me, yet somebody might need it even bigger – and that’s just not supported. Final words in that review that this game is one of the most barrier-ridden games in a long time but not a complete accessibility failure – although many people might not be able to enjoy this game.
_My own small notes on this game are that I was rather surprised by the given accessibility options, because Japanese productions often suffer from a poor approach to accessibility – maybe it was SONY helping hand – but it was nice to see that there were some ideas, thoughts and time spent on making the game more easily enjoyable for a broader audience. What I still struggle with, which is funny no one mentioned it in my research; the sheer amount and variety of complex, new and unknown icons often leave me pondering, what they want to tell me – although this is for another time.
