I’ve spoken about difficulty in video games a few times on this blog but, to quickly summarise, I enjoy difficult video games when I believe them to be fair and enjoyable and find them aggravating if otherwise. Recently, I’ve seen a rise in the discussion of accessibility in video games and I view this as ultimately good as I believe that it’s another crucial component to growing the gaming market. However, something that has begun to frustrate me is the viewpoint that the difficulty of a game and the accessibility of a game are intrinsically linked, something that I completely disagree with. Therefore, I thought that I’d explain why I consider accessibility and difficulty to be separate in video games.
Let’s start with a brief overview of what accessibility means when it comes to video games. Basically, accessibility in video games refers to the ability for people who have disabilities to be able to play a game with little to no difficulty caused by their condition. To give an example, many games use colour as a way to communicate information quickly and efficiently to the player but people who suffer from colour blindness will struggle to interpret these colours correctly and will find playing the game more challenging than it needs to be. The implementation of a good colour-blind mode can remove this barrier and allow the person to play the game as it was intended.
As you might imagine, I consider this to be only a good thing as it removes a barrier of access to play the game and, most importantly, allows people to enjoy the game on a level playing field and to have the same experience. Examples of game options that can help disabled people play games are being able to adjust the colour and colour contrast, being able to increase the size of font, disabling button mashing sections etc. There’s also plenty of hardware that’s being developed with disabled gamers in mind with perhaps the most notable example being the Xbox Adaptive Controller which has been seen as a successful alternative to standard controllers.
However, it seems that people are increasingly becoming more and more confused when it comes to what accessibility in video games means and have begun to confuse difficulty with the concept whereas I consider them to be completely separate. To take an example, Psychonauts 2 released with an invincibility mode which prevents the player from taking damage and I confess that I was quite confused. The fact that Double Fine acted so defensively right out the gate also didn’t help but, returning to the mode itself, I remember trying to understand what they were going for. Their claim that they wanted to allow more people to complete the game makes sense to a certain degree when it comes to the mode itself but what I want to ask is that if this invincibility mode is a form of accessibility, who is it targeted at? To me, it just seems like a lazy attempt to make the game easier without attempting to provide the same experience for all players, something that I personally feel is a spit in the face of what accessibility is all about.
A game can be difficult and it can be accessible with these concepts not being mutually exclusive. Accessibility means that all people should be able to have the same experience regardless of their condition and if a game is difficult to the average person then it should be difficult for disabled gamers as well but, most importantly, for the same reasons. A game can still be inaccessible even if it’s easy as long as it features elements that pose an additional and unwanted challenge to disabled gamers and we need to stop looking at quick-fix solutions and to actually implement options that can make a difference between someone struggling in a game for the wrong reasons and someone struggling in a game for the right reasons.
Accessibility is an important area that needs to be better when it comes to video games and the improvement of in-game options and hardware is a good thing. However, we must not lose sight of what the goal of accessibility is and I can only hope that people take the extra time and effort to learn that a game can be both difficult and accessible. Let me know your thoughts on the reasons why I consider accessibility and difficulty to be separate in video games, what your own thoughts are on the matter, what some of the best and worst implementations of accessibility have been, other video game accessibility issues that need better awareness and solutions to them and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.