Consider these autistic-friendly options

March 1, 2023 7:18 AM

How to design autistic-friendly games [gamesindustry.biz] As the games industry slowly becomes more aware of accessibility needs, efforts to account for neurodiversity have been limited. As part of the GamesIndustry.biz Academy, we previously addressed understanding and supporting neurodiversity, including autism, in the workplace, as well as the fact that accessibility isn't rocket science.

“"There's the kind of desire to throw all the accessibility options in [but] that in itself can be overpowering and not a good thing to do," Alison says. "So you won't find every option that you can think of in our game. The ones that are there are there because they've been thought through specifically [at] every single stage that we [went] through. A huge control centre... That's too much in itself, potentially, for an autistic person. So it's not overwhelming them at any stage, even if that's at the accessibility options stage."”

This article is an attempt at bridging the gap between these two topics, giving pointers about how to account for neurodiversity in-game, and more precisely how to make your game more accessible to players on the autism spectrum.
posted by Fizz (11 comments total)

Thanks for posting; this is really timely for me as I'm currently dealing with a situation where some of these issues are at play. The workplace link is one I'll dig into for sure!
posted by invokeuse at 7:46 AM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is very interesting! As an autistic person who's played a fair amount of games, my first impulse was to wonder how game design might make games even more accessible for me - and then I read their list (limiting unexpected situations, creating games without fail states or timed missions, making it super easy to get into a less stimulating environment), and thought, yeah, all of that stuff would definitely help!

Especially no timed missions. Those were the bane of my experience of the Mass Effect series, which was my onramp to more serious gaming. I do so poorly under pressure that I even dislike it when games have an area where an NPC is mentioning over voiceover that you really should be getting on with things, that [other NPC] is waiting for you somewhere else, even when there isn't an actual timer and that's just the game design's way of telling you where to go next. I like to explore at my own pace, and even the vaguest insinuation that there might not be time for me to do that is a big additional stressor.
posted by terretu at 7:55 AM on March 1, 2023 [16 favorites]

the section about less granular options is interesting because I often see discourse about how EXTREMELY granular options being the solution to accessibility stuff across lots of different target audiences, and how that in and of itself is at odds with certain needs people might have.
posted by Ferreous at 8:36 AM on March 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm an allistic parent of an autistic kid and this topic is of keen interest to me. My kid gets fixated and dysregulated by time pressure, failure, and winning/losing.
posted by splitpeasoup at 1:39 PM on March 1, 2023

Ahhhhh thank you for these links. Like invokeuse up there, I'm currently waist-deep in a project that involves a big, big UX overhaul in regards to accessibility. I don't have nearly as high a bar to leap as extremely interactive video games do, but the WCAG guidelines are nonetheless intense.

The "rocket science" link I'm finding particularly useful, as the main thing I've been wondering in this process is just how you account and then test for the wide range of variation that is needed in a design.

Also, from that article:

Situational, for instance you just had a baby and you want to get the baby to sleep but you want to still be able play games without disturbing them so you have to turn off all audio.

And you can't just use headphones because you need to hear baby! You feel me you infuriating sound-only game puzzles?!? (Although I'm glad the Zelda games have gotten much better in this regard.)
posted by greenland at 1:44 PM on March 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

taquito boyfriend & I played through Borderlands 3 co-op split-screen & there was a moment when he looked at me as though many things suddenly made sense & said "OH, you process visual information DIFFERENTLY!"

see Borderlands in general & I think maybe 3 in particular? (or I've gotten worse at visual processing since I played 1 & 2?) has a lot going on visually, it's kinda like playing a Michael Bey movie

whenever combat is happening (a lot of the time) the screen just sorta fills up with enemies & particle effects & it's hard for me to parse what is whom & where is happening

was able to mitigate this a little bit using a Rakk Attack build for FL4K, which meant every 20 seconds or so I could push a button & summon birds to attack the enemies, which would make damage numbers appear, and I can spot & parse the damage numbers for some reason

so I functionally had a "show me which set of polygons in this room is an enemy" button at the cost of a more optimal build

I also, and I think this is what caused my partner to have his epiphany, cannot keep track of where my party members have fucked off to in all of this

in front of me? behind? to the side? close? far? behind a chest-high wall? no idea -- also it's not a given that I'm gonna see you even if you're right there, especially if you're lying on the ground

so when dude would overestimate the number of enemies he could tank at once & go down & need a rez, I'd resort to trying to find him based on the minimap, & frankly the devs chose violence there in that HIS DOT AND MY DOT LOOK THE SAME

WE'RE PLAYING SPLIT-SCREEN, OUR DOTS COULD HAVE BEEN DIFFERENTIATED, WHY, WHY IS IT LIKE THIS

so I'm trying to figure out if I'm on the left or he's on the left & he's bleeding out & beeping & I've got some internalized ideas from somewhere about having to rez your partner or you're not a good provider & it's just awful, see also Yoshi's Island where you can lose a baby while it cries the whole time

so it's actually a huge relief that taquito boyfriend had his big realization moment about some specific ways in which my brain don't work; I feel like he gets it & I'm no longer on the hook for some stuff I physically can't do, in Borderlands and in life

would be great to be able to bottle that experience for people
posted by taquito sunrise at 3:35 PM on March 1, 2023 [11 favorites]

My kid gets fixated and dysregulated by time pressure, failure, and winning/losing.

And I think that's a good point somewhere in there about how accessibility benefits everyone - almost no one, even people who think they are "normal", finds those things pleasant. Yet at the same time, we need a kind of mental "exercise" in a safe and controlled manner - just the same way as, yes, lifts are an accessibility thing, but both abled and disabled people need sufficient exercise in the day, just in different forms and intensity suiting their ability.

I've had thoughts about how games in particular can be a fantastic aid in developing and honing soft skills, if the environment is set up correctly. Overcoming the fear of failure, managing time pressure, mentally reorienting yourself around the concept of winning or losing to remove the anxiety around it - the experiences you have in life can either be toxic and make you withdraw because you're incapable of coping with them, or those experiences can be inoculating and give you resilience.

For example, many people have anxiety around ranked and competitive play, especially when your ranking drops. You're no longer a Gold ranked player, you're now demoted to Silver. Unlike your other friends who are in Gold or Platinum. This leads to people simply not playing, or only choosing to play when conditions are "perfect" and the stars align.

There's that parable about the pottery class which was split into two groups where the first group was judged on the best pot they submitted by the end of the term while the second group was judged by the total weight of pots they created in total during the term. In attempting to reach their goal, the second group experimented a lot, unintentionally practiced a lot, and got really good at making pots. While the first group did a lot of research, endlessly refined the one single pot they planned to make, but didn't actually get a whole lot of practice and experience.

League of Legends recently switched up the reward system, where instead of needing to be in the top 30% of players to win the season reward, you merely needed to play a certain number of games. This changes it from a performance metric (I need to win, every time I lose my ranking is going down and I'm slipping further and further away from my goal) to merely a "make more pots" metric - something predictable, just play one game a day, and those players will unconsciously get better, experiment, try new things, and just the experience of playing a competitive ranked game over and over and not really caring about winning or losing will inoculate them against the anxiety of winning or losing itself.
posted by xdvesper at 6:28 PM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was just talking to a fellow game developer on the autism spectrum about this topic today, so I'll definitely pass this link around. I'm pretty good at even intense games, but I've always hated timed missions and any genre with one-hit-deaths (like traditional shmups) because the pressure makes me perform way worse. My guess is that the desired complexity of menu options differs heavily from individual to individual. I love having lots of menu options as long as I have time to understand them but I'm definitely a sensation seeker in general. I can tell you it's very hard to make a single game that can both satisfy people who value complexity and other people who value simplicity, but for a VR game I would definitely try to make options simpler as VR is inherently high on sensory stimulation/complexity.

I was talking to my friend about autism in the game industry and how many of our colleagues are now officially realizing they are on the spectrum. I would guess that most large dev teams include a significant number of autistic developers (concentrated in programming and QA), but there's definitely pressure to mask and hide that like in any other workplace. Also I can tell you from first hand experience that the crunch hours of game dev do NOT interact well with autistic burnout...
posted by JZig at 12:27 AM on March 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

My guess is that the desired complexity of menu options differs heavily from individual to individual. I love having lots of menu options as long as I have time to understand them.

My preferences on this vary from game to game. I remember seeing someone playing a then-max-level World of Warcraft character many years before I ever tried the game, seeing the sheer number of buttons on the screen, and thinking "nope, not for me". But then I started dating a WoW player, who showed me that actually the onramping is pretty slow while you're levelling in terms of number of buttons, and the number & layout of buttons is very customisable with addons, and then I played WoW a lot for like a decade. It turned out to be a great fit for me as a game (possibly too great, in that I burnt out on it hard and haven't been back to PC gaming since), but only after someone told me I could deal with the amount of information the game is feeding me on my own terms.
posted by terretu at 3:25 AM on March 2, 2023

As another mefite game developer I very much like the main article's emphasis on including accessibility right from the start in the design.

Checklists can be a good start, but the problem with trying to solve accessibility with them is that they're too rigid: some items don't make sense for a particular design, or are too expensive to implement, or can easily be accidentally implemented in a way that doesn't actually solve anything.

The rocket science article is also very focused on large studios. For me as a solo indie developer, accessibility checklists end up being positively terrifying, because I want to do the right thing, but there's no way I can actually conform to them.

So trying to raise the bar through ever longer checklists ends up leaving everyone but the largest studios out in the cold.

But to be clear, basic stuff like separate volume controls, subtitles, and controls remapping, that's something everyone can do.
posted by Zarkonnen at 5:14 AM on March 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

taquito_sunrise: This is precisely why I couldn't get into Smash Brothers. Too much going on. Too much motion.
posted by Wild_Eep at 10:21 AM on March 2, 2023