Lately, online games-slot have turned into a huge cultural and societal occurrence. The enormous appeal experienced by these games cuts across national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. They have come to serve as a common denominator binding together people across an increasingly fragmented society. More than anything else, the massive, ever-present online games of today seem to be serving as a substitute for the kinds of rituals and “shared experiences” that societies have traditionally depended on to unite them and to pull them out of their everyday routines—that is, for the kind of thing “culture” encompasses.
They have also, of necessity, become the focus of a great many polemical arguments—about addiction and related “pathologies” of the medium, for instance.
In online gaming, accessibility refers to features that have been put into place in a game’s design and implementation to make it possible for players with disabilities to interact with the game in the same way that players without disabilities can. “Accessible gaming is making these interactions possible and equal for every individual,” says Bryce Johnson of AbleGamers, an organization that works tirelessly to promote gaming experiences for people with disabilities. Unfortunately, many game worlds stretch the medium’s sense of inclusivity thin, completely missing the mark with those they aren’t suited for.
On the path to making online gaming accessible for all, inclusivity steps up. It invites everyone, in every way that they come, into the world of the game. It’s not just a basic gesture of letting someone through a door; it’s making that person feel represented, respected, and valued while they’re inside. It’s what happens when the developer asks, “How can we do this better so that everyone who joins gets to have this experience?”
Inclusivity is another side of the conversation that’s ongoing; it’s an embellishment and an expansion of this idea that the game is a space that anyone can come into and belong to.
Ensuring accessibility and inclusivity in online games is tough. It is made even more challenging by the mostly unaware or misunderstanding state of the game’s development. For a developer, the first step in creating an accessible and inclusive online game is understanding just what those players—many of whom can still see, hear, and touch—really need. It’s a knowledge gap that can be closed only in one sensible way: going straight to the source and asking people who are disabled and/or represent a diverse community of players just what the hell they experience when playing a game.
The technical complexity is another hurdle that the project faces. Making a game accessible means adding many different features to it. But the Universal Design for Learning principle also applies to these games. Anything a traditional game designer can dream up, an accessible game needs to offer too. Unfortunately, there are some significant physical and cognitive constraints to both the speed and the memory of the game’s execution.
Then again, the benefit of inclusive game design lies in exactly that—the added features that make the game accessible to more people and allow for a wider range of play experiences end up, in most cases, making the game even better for everyone.
In order to make online games more accessible and inclusive, it’s essential for developers to adopt several key practices. For one, games should give players the ability to personalize their experience. This can span a huge range of potential features, but it begins with difficulty levels; if a game can accommodate a variety of playing styles, then it can also do the same with respect to players’ individual skills.
Simple and detailed controls with a variety of input formats are another big part of personalization. Beyond those features, games can and should offer myriad options to meet any player’s specific customizations.
Clear communication is essential, as we’ve noted, for any kind of game design. But this is especially true in the case of online games, where players may have to communicate not only with the characters they’re controlling but also with characters controlled by other players. You don’t have to have perfect knowledge; you just have to tell the player something. Communication is king.
Alongside these design concerns, it is of the utmost importance to establish a community of those who play the game. These people have to be championed as being a part of something because, for many players, a sense of belonging is lacking in other areas of life. The developers of these online worlds have the power and the responsibility to create an environment that can act as a substitute for the real world but with “better” rules when it comes to interactions—(communicating and sharing with) and among—those who exist within the space.
The surging appeal of online gaming carries with it the prospect of a more accessible and inclusive gaming environment. While some might argue that the online world, with its mostly faceless and nameless characters, might have better wheelchair/ramp access than buildings in the real world, that’s not good enough. It’s still not an inclusive welcome.
“Developers have to pass a lot of hurdles to ensure that the environment they create within a game is worthy of individual players.” And they should work to “ensure that the kind of world they build within a game slot is a valid place for everyone.”
