In this day and age, you’d think your friends could play any of the most popular video games out there; sometimes, that’s far from reality.
There’s been plenty of times where my friends and I get hyped for a game after seeing a trailer and gameplay demo. Sometimes we’re lucky and can participate in a beta. We jump into a party chat and start launching the beta. We see the company logos appear followed by an intro. Some of us get past the intro, but one of our friends says that they can’t get passed it. We’re all thinking that maybe it’s just a glitch because it’s a beta after all. Sadly that wasn’t the reason. This time he couldn’t get passed it because the intro forced you to interact at the beginning of the story without giving the player the option to get into the settings and change the key mapping. What is easy for me to do might not be the same for everyone else. And in this case, we all decided to stop playing until my friend’s caretaker returned. It’s not so simple since that caretaker had just left to end their shift for the day.
This is just one of the many incidents my friends have faced. What if you can’t press that one button that the screen is flashing at you to press? What if you have light sensitivity and the flash patterns are causing you to go into a seizure? A flashbang in a video game could cause someone to fall ill in a split second.
It can be frustrating when you have a really good game that you want to play and you know is fun, but your friend can’t even play it. Instead, we have to go back to our list of video games and see what game would work for our group for today. But sometimes the handful of titles get a bit stale.
Some examples of useful options that are missing from game settings are mouse/controller sensitivity, key/button remapping, colorblind modes, subtitles, camera controls, flash effects, autorun, etc. The list can go on.
Video games and accessible controllers are getting better though. There are more video game accessibility experts available today and there shouldn’t be a game that can’t be played. If companies were to plan for accessibility during development it is much easier to implement than to release the game and then add in options after its release. I want a world where my friends never have to question if we can all play the newest hit title together. I want a world with gaming accessibility so everyone can game! Thanks to Accessible.Games, this goal within reach and right at our collective doorstep!
Submitted by Prin DeJesus