In class today, we did a playthrough of the game When Rivers Were Trails, which illustrates and explores the experiences of the indigenous community during the 1890s. According to the developer, Elizabeth LaPensee, the game is meant to be played within an educational environment. The game itself is a point-and-click adventure with mechanics similar to Oregon Trail. Some ways this game differs from Oregon trail is the increased emphasis on the representation of the indigenous cultures and the experiences of individual indigenous people. This in turn helps with putting into perspective the lives of the indigenous people in America during the time period of the 1890s. 

I think something very interesting that I learned was that developing games for an educational environment did not simply mean developing a game that repeats educational information to students that play it, but also how a game is structured as well. In LaPensee’s video presentation of the game, she states that the game’s structure was streamlined to be more linear in order to be better suited for an educational environment, which was in contrast to LaPensee’s usual preferences for game structures. This was something that I had never considered before in games developed in an educational context. The effort to make the game more linear makes it so that it is easier to have a complete playthrough be shown during class time. The linear structure also makes it so that a player can get all of the information they need to learn in a single playthrough, whereas a game with a more open story structure could mean that the player could possibly miss educational topics and facts because they had a choice to not to explore a certain part of the game. I think the design of the game’s aesthetics and gameplay also makes the game very appealing and interesting not only for teachers, but also players outside of the educational sphere. This makes it so that players can learn a lot about the experiences of the indigenous people in America without having to be in a classroom setting or museum. In doing so, I think LaPensee and her colleagues and collaborators made a very successful game.

Sources:LaPensée, Elizabeth, director. When Rivers Were Trails. Vimeo, 28 Apr. 2020, vimeo.com/340980168/e2ab19649e.

Before this past week, I haven’t really paid much attention to the importance of accessibility in game design. There are many different aspects that fall under accessibility.  The more accessible a game is then the more people would want to play.  Accessibility can mean that the controls of the game and how they are mapped out are easy to learns and they make sense for the player. It can also mean that objectives and other things in the game are clear and easy to identify within the game so that is it not frustrating for the player.  Giving the players and options menu where they can adjust settings is important and an easy way for players to adjust their gameplay to their liking. These aspects of accessibility are things that I feel like I’ve never really taken the time to really notice or appreciate.  When playing, I would always assume that these things would always be included within any or most games. When it comes to accessibility, I feel that one of the most important things that is often overlooked is adding accessible features that include people with disabilities.  A simple feature could be having the option for subtitles or having a color bind option people can choose from. These small and simple options can be the difference between having people with certain disabilities be able to enjoy and play your game or not.

Recently Dead by Daylight came to mobile and even added a new feature to the game.  Normally, DBD relies a lot on sound.  You hear the sound of your heartbeat when the killer is near.  Since it is much harder to hear this sound through a phone, the mobile version of the game has a feature where you can see the glow of your heart in your character when the killer is nearby.  I feel that this feature should be an option in the normal version of the game for those who don’t hear well or can’t hear at all.  I feel that in order for more game developers to be mindful of these features, there should be more people who have disabilities that are included in the playtesting phase of games.

Works Cited

“A Straightforward Reference for Inclusive Game Design.” Game Accessibility Guidelines, gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/.

                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

Fullerton’s chapter on Stages and Methods of Development talks about the different stages of game production. There are different phases of production that involve different lines of work, and a great image of the phases can be seen on page 424, image 13.1. The phases described in this image are the Concept Phase, the Preproduction Phase, the Production Phase, the QA Phase, and Maintenance Phase. The Concept Phase is where ideas about the game are shared, maybe there’s come art concepts and mechanics. There is also a budget associated with the game so that the developers and publishers know about how much it would cost to produce the product. The Preproduction Phase is where the prototype of the game is created. This is usually only one level or one section of the game, and is served to see how feasible the game will be. If the game is not feasible, the project is often scrapped. The Production Phase is where the majority of the work takes place. Developers get to work on designing the game and make it playable and functional. The QA Phase is where the game is tested for bugs or glitches in the game, and allows the developers to clean up their code to make a well polished game. Once the game is ready, it launches and the Maintenance Phase is to fix any bugs or exploits that the QA team might have missed.

I think this layout for the different stages of development works really well for some games, but I don’t think that all games can fall under this diagram. A lot of games have had a big focus on providing content post release, whether that be DLC, free updates, new playable characters, map changes and more. I am interested to see what the production phases would look like for a game like Fortnite, a game that is still in early access and is still getting massive content updates. Another game that I would like to see the production phase visualized is World of Warcraft or any other MMO like Star Wars The Old Republic or Elder Scrolls Online. These games have big content updates to keep the player base coming back after years of service. Would the big content updates look like smaller versions of the stages of development? Or would there be more phases of development that would fall in the post-launch part of the diagram?

Sources:

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, 4th Edition. 2019.

This week for class we spoke about a topic that kind of gets overlooked on a daily basis, at least to an average player like myself, is the accessibility in gaming. Something that most players forget about is the people who play with disability or who aren’t able to play because of them. Our professor asked us how many times while playing have players told us about their disabilities? I answered with “Never”, and responded with  “because it’s something that internet trolls would take advantage of and abuse”. Before developers probably didn’t really think about something like this, but now game developers are trying to make games more accessible to those with disabilities. There was a commercial we watched about Xbox’s new adaptive controller for people who aren’t able to hold a normal control in their hands. It was amazing to see how Xbox decided to help include people who love to play, but had a difficult time doing so. Games have also out in color blind modes in their game for people who aren’t able to see a certain color in the game. Things like this can impact how well the player can play the game, because if there are certain colors to highlight something important or combos on the control to defeat a boss it will be hard with whatever disability they have to provide them from doing it and without something to help them perform better. They will lose interest and drop the game, and when they drop the game it will affect the developers and cause them to lose customers. It’s good for developers to be inclusive and make games more accessible to diable people. We played a game that we had to rely only on our hearing. While staring at a black screen and listening to the sounds around me put me on edge and always had me thinking something was going to pop out and scare me. This game put us in the shoes of people who don’t have the ability to see like we do, and poking around in the game and not being able to find something was frustrating, so made me realize how lucky I am that I’m able to see to go about my everyday life.

In class, we discussed accessibility in video games. This semester, I am also taking a computer science class that focuses on human-computer interaction and the user experience, where we discuss accessibility a lot in terms of user interfaces, and had several lectures focused on making interfaces accessible to people who have disabilities. As a result, I found this week’s discussion on accessibility very interesting because a lot of things that were discussed this week I have experienced in the other class.

During our discussion of accessibility, we discussed the point that people with disabilities can be “invisible” to others, and that developers may design games and gaming consoles without having disabled people in mind. I experienced this problem in the other class, where there is a semester-long group project to design a website. During development, I made the mistake of sometimes displaying messages as red text on top of a green background, and I did not realize that this would make the text hard to read for colorblind users until someone in my group, who was colorblind, pointed it out. When I look back, I feel like I could also just as easily have made this mistake while developing a game. I think this goes to show that playtesting and including disabled people in playtests is very important to make sure that your game does not exclude people based on their disabilities, because many times we do not take into consideration struggles that others may have simply because we do not have those same struggles.

However, one key thing this discussion differs from my other class is the idea that not all games have to be completely accessible. Sometimes a game is trying to get a theme or message across that may require the game to exclude some accessibility features. One example is the game, Blindscape, that we played in class. This game allows the player to play through the experience of a blind person, such as triggering interactions through sounds and the feeling of anxiety of not knowing one’s surroundings. This game would not be 100% accessible to a deaf person because one of the themes of the game is to show how a blind person relies heavily on auditory cues. However, I think maybe for a deaf person, a game premise such as this could be expanded upon to include vibrations as part of the experience, as touch is a sense both blind and deaf people rely on.

Sources:

Brown, Gavin. “Blindscape.”

Michigan State University, “Accessibility and Gaming.” Accessible Learning Conference.

This week we discussed accessibility in video games, meaning not only how people can access your game in order to play, but how people with disabilities can access your game. To begin, we played The Jackbox Party Pack during class, a game that only requires one copy to play online with friends. Additionally, the game is played through a browser window on any internet device, including computers, phones, and tablets, thus no extra components are required to play with up to 10,000 people online. I have personally been supporting the Jackbox Games company ever since their first party pack, and have always been amazed at the way these games can bring people together due to their simplicity and accessibility. These games are (as the name implies) great for parties, and I have played these games with friends and family many times. People I know who aren’t too keen on video games, such as my aunts, uncles, and even my grandparents love these games, and they have practically become a staple of family gatherings. Nights go by quite quickly when playing these games with friends, and having introduced these games to many friends and meeting people through playing these games has convinced me that these games are the closest you can get to accessibility to everyone. The small cost and insanely high replayability factor of the games is something to be admired and studied by the games industry, and from a strictly gameplay perspective, is a perfect example of how to make something everyone can enjoy. On the other hand of accessibility comes making the game available to play by people who may have disabilities or otherwise may have trouble playing video games. We can see this exemplified by most games having subtitles for the hearing impaired, such as with The Jackbox Party Packs, which also have family friendly options that remove the raunchier options from the games. While these accessibility options don’t affect me personally, it is always wonderful to see gamers playing games in any way they can, making accessibility a big factor for game developers and studios. Some examples that pop into my mind are the multitude of color blind options in “Overwatch”, which accounts for several different diagnosed variants of color blindness, such as Deuteranopia, Protanopia, and Tritanopia. Another example is with the Xbox Adaptive controller which we discussed in class, which is a large, programmable controller that allows the user to map their buttons onto the controller in any way they please. On top of this, some highly dedicated players with disabilities have found their own ways to enjoy their favorite video games. Just one of these players, known as “handi” on twitch, plays “Counter Strike: Global Offensive” using special key bindings despite being born without arms or legs. Accessibility doesn’t stop with the players either, as sometimes developers honor and embrace their community of disabled players by adding items or characters to their games that acknowledge disabled players. This can be seen with “Overcooked!” featuring a chef character that works in a wheelchair, and in “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” with the wheelchair item, helping some players feel more at home in their virtual world. Accessibility of video games can mean many different things, but is incredibly important to consider in order to reach the widest audience.

This week we covered the crucial yet understated topic of accessibility in games. Many will argue that we should not worry so much about accessibility in game development because  people do not need to be able to play all games and it inconveniences privileged players to have these accommodations (apparently). However, not only is this attitude harsh and selfish, it is also the attitude that would severely hinder development and betterment in all fields. Without taking accessibility into account, many important advancements would not be made and general progress in development would be fatally hindered if things were only available to a small portion of the population. Simple changes and considerations on part of the game developer can make a world of difference for countless people in experiencing games.

One example of a game that is very limited with accessibility is Rainbow Six Siege. Positional sound is crucial in playing the game in locating enemies and objectives. There is no visual supplement to this so people who are hard of hearing are at large disadvantage. In comparison, Destiny 2 had a good combination of visual and audible cues that tells players where enemies and objectives are. For example, all enemies make a different sound so you can locate them and know what is coming without visual cues. On top of that, there are also visual indicators, including red blotches on the screen in the direction that the enemy is that change in size the more dangerous the enemy is (larger blotches for larger enemies). There are also small white arrows pointing to enemies in case the red blotches are not visible for someone. In my experiences, Destiny 2 has the most accessibility in terms of reading the map and surroundings. 

Games that are used to represent disabilities, like Blindscape which we played in class, can have very profound impacts on players and are a very creative and artistic way to portray peoples’ experiences. This goes back into the argument about games being a form of art, because games like this can express things so creatively. An interactive experience like this can show aspects of an experience that are not as easily portrayed in different, more traditional, forms of art.

Today in class, we talked about Fullerton’s Chapter on fun and Accessibility. We brainstormed on why we enjoyed games and why we thought they were fun. Some people had contradictory statements, like some games are fun because they’re relaxing to play like Minecraft and other games are really competitive, like League of Legends. Some games are difficult to master, like Dark Souls, but other games are easy to pick up, like The Sims. I think that depending on the mood that you’re in, there’s always going to be a game that works better than another. If you want to get a few friends together to play a relaxing party game, something like Mario Party or Overcooked would fit that bill. If you want to be super competitive with a team, games like Overwatch or Valorant can work well with that. If you want a lot of creative freedom and explore a fun story, Dungeons and Dragons is a good answer to that.

We also talked about accessibility in games. The example we used in class was Jackbox Party Pack. This game is accessible because only one person needs to own the product for everyone in the party to play. The game also works with a web browser, so if you have a laptop, phone, or tablet and an internet connection, you can play the game. Another way that games are accessible is by changing keybinds for their games. This allows people who are disabled to make keybinds that work for them. There was a professional Fortnite streamer named Ewok who was deaf. She relied solely on the “visualize audio cues” feature, which lets Ewok see footsteps, gunfire, and more. I think this is a great example of accessibility in video games.

Sources:

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, 4th Edition. 2019.

This past week we discussed balance in games. This is an aspect of games that I have not put much thought into since I mainly play single-person games that generally revolve around world-building rather than combat, where balance is a more obvious issue. Although balance is less obvious in the games I usually play, after learning about it in class this past week I have started to see where balance is very important. Balance in item spawn rate, random interaction rate, character temperament compatibility, and more are integral to the enjoyability of the game. If it is hard to get certain items you want or if your character has a lot of compatibility issues with the computer-controlled characters this could lead to a lot of issues in progressing with the game. Again I will talk about Animal Crossing. During the Easter event, many people complained about the balance of the spawn rate of eggs. The water egg was found when you went fishing. Many people were upset because when you went fishing a disproportionate amount of what you caught while fishing was eggs, making it basically impossible to get fish. Before last week I never really thought about this as a balance just an annoying part of the game. I also, over the course of last week’s classes, developed a respect for those tasked with keeping games balanced. I can easily see how this job is one of the most thankless. Many players would interpret this job ass fixing things that should have already been fixed or changing things that some players liked because they knew how to take advantage of the imbalance.

Sources

“Balancing League of Legends for Every Player, from Bronze to Bengi.” Youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii_Q4OCoHvU.