Accessibility and the concept of “fun” were this week’s two main focus. Putting aside “fun” for a moment, while some games pay heed to the more common of, such as color blindness or perhaps control schemes, is still something that I think is ignored for the most part in many games. I can think of several games off the top of my head where there were no regards to visual contrast, both for the game and the menu, or several games where the controls are confusing and difficult with no ways to change aspects of it, meaning there is already difficulty of access to certain parts of the game. While I do not have a direct example of visibility within games, there have been times in other courses where students would have to design a portfolio or create our own webpages and students would use similar colors for both foreground, background, and text, making visibility extremely difficult. Using something like that as a basis of poor visibility and contrast, I can only imagine what it must be like for those visually impaired.

                Fun was something that was discussed that I found greatly enjoyable, simply because it is such a basic concept that is different for everyone. As we discussed in class, different games are fun for different reasons; where some games might be unfun to some because of its difficulty, others might find it fun because of that difficulty. I spoke of Dark Souls as my example of a game where the difficulty spurred me onwards, making me want to play the game. However, I have several friends who have quit playing because they didn’t have the patience nor tolerance to deal with the difficulty, attributing the difficulty to either unfairness or an acknowledgement of their lack of ability. Similarly, I have friends who enjoy games that offer “dumb fun” because of how powerful the player feels. Something that is completely foreign to me is the idea of competitive gameplay, where some would find fun and enjoyment over the sole reason that there was a visual skill indicator. Fun is a concept that I saw as very basic, and hearing of reasons why different people found something fun was just a nice and different perspective.

                Sources

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games; Third Volume