Accessible Gaming discussion at GameLoop Boston
On Saturday 3 August my friend Matt Shifrin and I facilitated a discussion session about accessible gaming at GameLoop Boston.
GameLoop is an unconference: in the early morning attendees suggest topics for discussion sessions, and then everyone votes on the sessions to be held. There are no pre-scheduled talks, minimal top-down involvement, and the attendees determine what happens at the conference.
Briefly put: cats show up a conference and then herd themselves.
How GameLoop Runs
The conference started in a lecture hall on the campus of MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sure, MIT is one of the top-ranked universities in the world, lots of technology has been developed there, etc., but it’s also a local university to those of us in the Boston area. Geographically convenient.
At the start, each of the roughly one hundred attendees took the microphone and spoke briefly about their three top interests. Mine were accessibility, multisensory experiences, and AR for outdoor puzzle & maze games. Matt just said something like, “The same as what he said.”
After everyone had a chance to speak, a call went out for people to suggest discussion sessions they’d be willing to lead. Session titles were written up on big sticky notes and posted on a whiteboard. There were about fifty topics, including
- accessibility
- marketing for games
- game audio (which would go on to be lead by Chris Bolte)
- Bob Ross-style “happy tree” games
- neurodiversity for players and creators
- …
Finally, everyone voted for the sessions they wanted to attend. Up at the whiteboard you took the five star stickers given to you, and then you placed a star on any session that interested you.
Then the show organizers counted up the votes.
Matt and I attended the conference in the hope that we could make accessible gaming a topic. We reached out to people before the conference to ask them attend. When it was our turn on the microphone, we named our topic clearly, and loud enough: “Accessibility.”
But would we get enough votes?
Maybe There’s a Happy Tree
In Bob Ross terms, would we be able to paint our happy tree on the canvas of the day?
We did!
Of the 30 topics that scheduled for the day, Accessibility was one of the top vote getters.
Accessibility on the Schedule
That’s our session at top right: Accessibility in the Minecraft Steam Room starting at 11:10 am.
Matt and I had a few minutes to find the Minecraft Steam Room and get started.
Pro tip: MIT buildings occupy more than three dimensions in space, so allow extra time for navigation. Hurray for maze games!
Texting While Driving: Taking Notes in Your Own Session
There wasn’t much of a chance to take notes while during our own session, but I scribbled down what I could.
We started by asking folks in the room to talk about their work and/or what topics related to accessibility. Answers included:
- dyslexia
- how to design for accessibility
- accessibility for very difficult games
- mental health
- sound design and spatial audio, including audio design for blind gamers
- accessibility compliance in AAA games
- increased inclusion: getting more people to play games
- accessibility in the game engine Unity
For Matt and me, this was an opportunity to continue a discussion with local game designers that we’d started a month earlier.
Universal Accessible Gaming
At the end of June, Matt and I held a talk in a local comic & gaming shop about universal accessible gaming: gaming that includes everyone.
Two guys from Boston can’t introduce accessibility for all games in all categories in all languages. What we can do in a presentation and Q&A session is explain
- how many gamers would benefit from improved accessibility
- what guidelines for accessibility could become de facto standards
- what game developers can do to measure the accessibility of a game
- how to improve accessibility for games that designers bring to the event
- what resources designers and gamers can read and watch to learn more
In a future post I’ll include a captioned video of the first presentation Matt and I gave. At events yet this year we’re expecting to focus on topics best suited to particular venues and audiences, such as role-playing games, play testing to observe accessibility, and how to set up game nights to be most inclusive.
Some talking points on the subject were introduced in one of my earlier Medium posts.
The Game Development Scene in New England
GameLoop is organized by BostonFIG, a non-profit that supports independent game developers in New England.
If you live in New England, and if you’re interested in joining the game development scene, join Boston Game Dev on Meetup and hang out during one of the Friday morning coffee hour sessions on Zoom.
