Accessibility is a term that's thrown around a lot when relating to games, specifically in relation to gameplay. However, while everybody loves talking about making games more accessible, everyone has a different idea of what makes games accessible in the first place.
Many argue that a game's accessibility comes from how easy it is to play. This argument generally has two fronts, the difficulty of the game in general, and how difficult it is to wrap your mind around the mechanics of any given title, the former is pretty self-explanatory and the latter is nearly impossible to quantify. Actually, both are pretty impossible to quantify. More on that in a moment.
Some people think accessibility has to do with intuitive design, which is to say how well a game's mechanics and control scheme make sense to someone logically or it can be how a game and its world abide by the rules you've been taught as you play. These are harder to conceptualize but it makes a lot more sense if you think of intuitive design as synonymous with "internal consistency." That said, these aren't quite definitive either.
Some say accessibility comes from the diversity of the character roster or characters you interact with from a racial and gender perspective. I think that's dumb because having more racial and gender diversity in a game doesn't necessarily mean more people will want to play it, it's a first world complaint in the sense that it really only matters if the game is solid in pretty much every other area. In reality, I doubt having a black female lesbian as a protagonist will make a fundamentally broken game less broken.
Even factoring that out, diverse characters in games can also refer to mechanical diversity, or how differently each character plays from each other or what different strategies work against them within the same core mechanics. However, this has the same issue as well, no matter how many unique characters you can play with, if the game is broken, more characters isn't going to fix that.
That said, all of these arguments have relatively similar fundamental flaws: namely that everybody has different needs and different desires. Games that are easy to play are definitely necessary even if only as a contrast to harder games but just because a game is easy doesn't mean everybody wants to play it and, even if you do, that doesn't mean you want to play it all the time.
Easy games tend to fall into the trap of mindlessness, where you just sort of press buttons and watch sparks and effects fly on screen, effectively making the player the gamer equivalent of what a Computer Scientist would call a "Code Monkey."
Mechanics that are easy to wrap your mind around are a bit of a similar though distinct issue. While it is true that simple mechanics are not necessarily lacking in depth and simple mechanics can exist in a harder game, it is also true that simple mechanics can fall into mindlessness because there's not enough to do with your hands and also because games of this type, if they exist in a hard game, are most susceptible to a problem known as "Trial and Error."
As for intuitive design, I recommend looking at a post by Gather Your Party on this topic because they go into more detail about this than I will but, if you want the cliffnotes, intuition is based on prior experiences not logic. Let me give you a personal example.
When I was a kid, I played a lot of Budokai. I never changed the controls and, after Budokai 3's Tutorial all of the mechanics made sense to me. Square is Punch or Light Attack, Triangle is Kick or Heavy Attack, Circle is Energy or a Projectile, and X is Block.
However, with this background in mind, there were two action series that I got my hands on that I had very different experiences with, Devil May Cry 3 and Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2. Devil May Cry 3 put projectile on Square, Melee Attack on Triangle, Specials or Styles on Circle, and Jump/Dodge on the X Button. Now, for me, this was pretty hard to transition to. Because I was so accustomed to Square as Light Attack, I constantly hit Square when I wanted to attack with the Devil Arms which caused me to shoot the guns. X was Jump which was not in Budokai 3 but, due to my experience with Platformers of the time, X = Jump was easy for me. However, Dodge = X + R1 + Left Analog Direction was not intuitive for me because the dodges in previous games were not really of that type. Because of that, Circle ended up equaling dodge because I had equipped the Trickster style to make the game easier. And, because there was no block, I didn't have any way to contextualize this stuff in my head.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 was a lot easier, however. Square was Light Attack, Triangle was Heavy Attack, Circle was Shuriken or Projectile, and X was Jump. All of this was fine so far but there was more that made it easier for me to work with. For example, L1 is the block button but you had to hold the block button and a Left Analog Stick direction to perform a dodge, which while not a correlation on its own, is similar to block and up or down being your sidestep in Budokai 3 so it made sense to me. Also, in Budokai 3 if you held one of the attack buttons, you could charge it for extra damage or a guard break, which translated not as well as I would like but still fairly easily into Ultimate Attacks. Ninpo used Triangle + Circle which was a little cumbersome but still fit the Budokai control scheme in a weird way.
What I'm saying is that my experience with Budokai 3 made Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 easier to wrap my head around than Devil May Cry 3 and took a lot less retraining.
You can see this with other people as well. VashTheShellBullet stated that when playing on a Dual Shock, he thinks of Circle as the Jump Button and not X because despite how many Playstation games have X as the Jump button, the one he spent most of his time with was Kingdom Hearts, one of the very few that used Circle instead. I would find Circle completely unworkable because I never had that prior experience.
Now of course you could argue for custom button mapping within option menus but that's really only solving one of the symptoms. While granting custom button layouts will make a game easier to wrap your mind around, it doesn't necessarily make the game more accessible if the mechanics and the balance were built with the default in mind. A lot of games tend not to have custom button mapping because a custom layout may ruin the balance and growth curve of a game. Think of Furi where a new control scheme allows the player to constantly deal damage without taking any by allowing shooting and parrying at the same time and you'll start to see the problem.
The point is that, because intuition is so subjective and based on your own prior experiences, there's really no way to build a game that's intuitive for everybody. One particular example is with Dark Souls and the Youtubers Kite Tails and Flex. Flex thinks Dark Souls' control scheme makes perfect sense and is easy to wrap your head around, whereas Kite thinks of Dark Souls' controls as hard to deal with because they're not like other games. Now, her actual skill at the game aside, it does illustrate the point that not every control scheme will work for everybody.
Not only that but there's also the issue of people like Super Bunny Hop who like unique and interesting control schemes so much that he feels a standard control scheme will make a game feel like he's played it a million times already even if the games he showed had similar game mechanics to begin with.
However, while Dark Souls' control scheme may not make sense to everybody, the world and behaviors of those in it do make sense once you get past that. Internal Consistency is something that really helps with intuitive design because, once you've played this game for a good hour and you've been exposed to most of the major gameplay elements, later parts of the game, if designed well, will challenge you on what you've been taught so far, not on what you learned from other games. For example, in Demon's Souls red barrels will explode if exposed to fire but will just collapse if you break them with physical force. This is internally consistent throughout the game and allows you to disarm those barrels in a safe manner but it also makes logical sense since an explosive barrel won't explode if there's no ignition.
Likewise, in the Ninja Gaiden games, it makes sense that Ryu would have trouble swapping weapons on the fly but, since weapon swapping is not a priority, it subtly teaches you to use the mobility mechanics you've been taught so far to make group encounters more manageable by adding terrain to the equation. Between Wall Runs, Air Dashes, Reverse Wind, and Enemy Step, you can sidestep, subvert, and otherwise maneuver around your opponents in any way you see fit so most regular enemies will not be effective by themselves.
However, while it is true that intuitive design and internal consistency can help maintain player interest after they've gotten to grips with the mechanics, getting them to grips with the mechanics in the first place is a bit more of a craps shoot. While a good tutorial can certain help someone get to grips with those mechanics, conveyance and allowing the player to learn by themselves is a bit more effective. That said, designing a game around that is hard to do in most games and 3D games tend to be so complex due to the addition of the Z axis that conveyance is even harder, not even because the rules change but because 3D visuals and free roaming cameras make it more likely that something that could tip you into how everything works will be out of view long enough for a player to completely give up. Combining this with fast moving objects or things that kill you before you know what happened and it's fair to say this is a big issue.
So what's the solution? Well, there may not be one. No matter how well thought out your game is, no matter how perfectly everything is placed, no matter how internally consistent the whole thing is, there will still be people who can't wrap their heads around it.
I'm not saying accessibility isn't important because it is but accessibility done wrong can, at best, make it harder for newcomers to play and not fix the issue and, at worst, make veterans to the genre or series feel like they're being punished so newcomers can have an easier time and still not make it easier for a newcomer to have fun.
I'm sorry to say that there's no solution that will fix this for everybody. Every game will have problems that will prevent some people from playing them and, even ones that are touted as the best there is may not be worth playing to someone purely due to their lack of interest in the subject matter, genre, or even games in general.
That said, if I had to pick a solution, if a somewhat far-fetched one, it would have to be to gather data on every single person on the planet yearly on what they like, if they're interested in games, what games they're interested in if they are, etc. and make that data available to everyone who's making games so they can make more informed design decisions.
This isn't a perfect solution or even really a practical one. But it's the best I've got.
Have a wonderful day and I hope to see you next time.
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