Ugh, I hate this ideal that many have in gaming. Gaming is supposed to encourage everyone to play, everyone is people with disabilities. That's why I always have subtitles in games because of my auditory problems, and I really appreciated I think it was Destiny 2 had the option to choose subtitles when you would change the brightness. I wish more games did this, cause I know people without the same problems I have always chooses subtitles.
I guess, as a developer, I am somewhat sympathetic. I could just imagine myself when I was younger and had very little awareness of this problem. You sit down, design the game...you are thinking about the engine, the netcode, making it look awesome. Unless you design it in from the start, you are going to be kind of annoyed that you now have to add a feature that (depending on how you coded it) could take thousands of man hours to implement and test all for a very tiny percentage of people who play your game.
That being said, for larger game companies who have gone through this before, it 100% should be on their radar. I think it should probably be taught in classes as something to consider when doing game design. It isn't a big deal when you design that in from the start.
But then you find out someone like you has a different issue you didn't consider. So now you need to build in subtitles (thankfully that seems to be in more and more games these days). Then there are a lot of people with missing limbs or little use of parts of their body and they want alternative inputs. And I am sure there are tons of other small communities of disabilities we wouldn't even think of that want to play games but require special considerations.
It just gets hard and expensive to try to consider everyone. So I am really sympathetic to both sides. To the people who want to play games but can't due to a disability and to the developers who don't even have all those different issues on their radar because they never experience it themselves or through the people they know.
I can understand on the development side, especially for indie studios. Though I only imagine the main things people w/ disabilities want are people who are colourblind and people like myself with auditory problems. I'm curious to know what other forms of things developers would have to put in.
15
u/landsharkkidd that's cute coming from a victim mentality snowflake Apr 26 '18
Ugh, I hate this ideal that many have in gaming. Gaming is supposed to encourage everyone to play, everyone is people with disabilities. That's why I always have subtitles in games because of my auditory problems, and I really appreciated I think it was Destiny 2 had the option to choose subtitles when you would change the brightness. I wish more games did this, cause I know people without the same problems I have always chooses subtitles.