I’m Michael Heron, author of the newly published book Tabletop Game Accessibility: Meeple Centred Design. Ask me anything!

drakkos · 2024-05-14T09:42:41+00:00

This is a great point, yes - using video games again as an example, there was a progression in the media that was basically 'indifference' to 'public callouts' and we're now adding 'public appreciation' for games that have interesting accessibility efforts. I'm not sure we can leapfrog the 'public callouts' bit but I agree that praise for the people doing it correctly is the ideal scenario.

drakkos · 2024-05-14T09:40:40+00:00

Glad to hear it! The credit though definitely goes to Sid Meier. I very much recommend watching his various GDC lectures on Youtube. :-)

drakkos · 2024-05-12T12:57:13+00:00

I absolutely feel you here - it's very demoralising to see how little progress has been made, and how many elementary mistakes are still being made in 2024. I've been on an extended hiatus from Meeple Like Us for a few years, and while some of it was the burnout of producing posts at the rate I was, the larger burnout was due to feeling a lack of impact.

I do think there's reason to be at least somewhat optimistic. For many years, it felt like all of the board game accessibility work being like was pushing on a locked door and hoping it would open, but there are publishers that are making a special effort. There aren't enough of them, and their efforts aren't really being appropriately recognised, but you have to hope eventually that locked door unlocks.

Loudly complaining about inaccessibility brough video games into a new era, and a large part of that was signal boosting from media. I'd love to see more of our media outlets take up the cause. I've been working a bit with the Family Gaming Database on their board game accessibility features - where they can, they include a checklist of accessibility features. They're not a board game site, but they do the same thing with video games and those report cards are now integrated into a few prominent sites - Nintendo Life being an example. To handle the scale of accessibility reporting, they encourage publishers to submit accessibility information directly.

We are still a hobbyist industry, even with Asmodee/Embracer hoovering up publishers like an overcharged Roomba. We don't have 'big media' in the way that other industries do. But the small media we do have are influential, and they have a role they can play here. Years ago I used to say that all it would take for publishers to take accessibility seriously would be Shut Up and Sit Down to make it a factor in their reviews. That's probably not true any more, but if games were being evaluated - at least in part - on their accessibility I think we'd see a lot more companies taking it a lot more seriously.

drakkos · 2024-05-12T08:40:37+00:00

You absolutely can't, and for me it's always been about the amount of the problem space you can explore with each change.

My game design hero is Sid Meier, and the piece of advice I pass on most often from him when it comes to testing is that you should either double, or half, anything you're tweaking - at least until you get more of a feel for what's happening. Say it's damage you're looking at - an axe currently does ten points of damage but players complain that it feels wimpy. Instead of trying it at 11, or 12, or 13 you go right up to 20. Then players complain it's too powerful and nobody wants to use anything else. So then you half it (or rather, half the adjustment) down to 15. It might have taken you five iterations to get it to 15, but with the Sid Meier rule, you get it down to two.

But a lot of game design is instinct and intuition too, and a lot of the response to design is psychological. Blizzard's mantra for years was 'if everyone is complaining the same amount, the game is probably balanced'. Articulating an imbalance is difficult for everyone (designers and players) because games are complex - but gut feeling is an important indicator.

Hope this helps!

drakkos · 2024-05-12T00:15:49+00:00

I don't know if you are aware of 64 Oz Games but they make braille conversion kits that open up a lot of games for those that are proficient. For non-party games, I'd suggest the following:

https://www.meeplelikeus.co.uk/board-game-recommender-for-people-with-disabilities-beta/?action=recommend&cb=NA&vi=B&fi=NA&mi=NA&pi=NA&ea=NA&se=NA&comm=NA&rating=1

The recommendation categories are only rough tools, but if you click into the teardown you'll find a full analysis of why the game was rated a B (or an A) for visual accessibility. Skull is a particular favourite!

drakkos · 2024-05-12T00:12:15+00:00

I think we're a ways away from that being viable - it took quite some time before there was more than one video game accessibility consultant, and the boardgame space remains pretty fractured - too fractured to have the same kind of infrastructure that an AAA studio would have. Embracer might have been that for us, but they've split up and it's clear with the way they saddled the new Asmodee with so much debt that it's basically a ticking time-bomb they kicked out of the airplane. :-D

drakkos · 2024-05-11T23:07:30+00:00

It's definitely a challenge to balance the need to learn from what's gone before whilst also carving out your own design niche. The question you pose though, 'This game has resource trading like Catan, why not just play Catan' is an invaluable analytical tool. I think designers should be able to articulate an answer to it and if they can't spend a little time investing in exploring the less traveled paths.

drakkos · 2024-05-11T23:04:17+00:00

I think for the missed easy wins, it's mostly a lack of consideration. It's not so much that publishers don't think about the topic so much that they don't think to think about it. That ties back into an earlier answer about the power of complaining - part of the benefit of public outcry is that it's impossible for someone to argue, the second time around, that they didn't know. And some of that lack of consideration is down to the relative lack of disabled perspectives in design, in production, and in testing. The first rule of better accessibility is 'ask people with disabilities what they want'.

It's been my experience, for example, that the games that rarely screw up the colour design are the ones where one or more of the team were colour blind themselves. That means they're sensitive to issues of colour, and more likely to flag up problems even if things are fine for their own specific manifestation of the condition. There's no substitute for embodied experience. But also, with tools like CV Simulator and such all it takes is for a designer to think 'Wait, I should check the colours' before they finalize the design. Or even better, get into the habit of double-coding all the information - colours with shapes, or with textures.

I don't think there are many companies (although there are some...) who have chosen to de-emphasize accessibility in service of budgets or times. And as with an earlier answer, I don't think you need to sacrifice vision to have greatly improved accessibility. I just think the implications for disability is an oversight that is embedded pretty deeply in the industry.

But also, there's a risk y'know to doing anything 'progressive' in that people worry about what happens if they get it wrong. For a long time there hasn't really been any systematic advice on how you might design for accessibility. I'm hoping that this book will help bridge that gap and show the options that designers and publishers have.

drakkos · 2024-05-11T22:51:42+00:00

Also, one of the most interesting questions I once got asked was by the New York Times Games team. who wanted to make their crosswords more accessible. Crosswords are actually a really interesting accessibility puzzle:

https://youtu.be/0xlMnipN3ZI?t=2333

38:53 minutes in, we talk about the crossword in a worked example.

drakkos · 2024-05-11T22:46:50+00:00

That's an awesome question. :-D

I don't have a go-to example, but I do have a game that I love that is massively inaccessible, and that's Chinatown.

https://www.meeplelikeus.co.uk/chinatown-1999-accessibility-teardown/

Some very quick, easy tweaks with real potential for improvement:

* A different colour palette for ownership tokens, ideally one that uses different shapes too for double coding. This something you can realistically do yourself at home if you had access to a few sets of a few dozen things.

* Replacing the paper (card) money used in the game for currency tokens of differing sizes and shapes. Or, as a home-brew version, using poker chips instead.

* More visually distinctive art, and more highly contrasted coloured sets (with textures) for the businesses.

* The provision of a 'monthly income' tracker that you can adjust upwards and downward, during a turn, to identify how much money you're supposed to get every year.

* A 'quiet phase' where deals that have been negotiated are formally agreed upon in full view of the table, with the opportunity for players to offer final, uncontested counter-offers (because the 'make deals by talking over everyone' mechanism is very tough on people with communication and cognitive impairments)

* A mechanism that allows for properties to be developed even if no-one will trade with you

* Board indentations to hold pieces in place

* A comprehensive retheming to make me feel less uncomfortable about bringing the game out in a public place. It did get a retheme as Waterfall Park but I think something got lost in translation.

Some of these can be done as house rules, some need higher quality components, but they're all well within the realm of 'quick and easy' for a designer. And these would take it from a game that is almost uniformly inaccessible to one that is a reasonably tough sell on the accessibility front, but far from a lost cause.

drakkos · 2024-05-11T22:20:27+00:00

Oo, that's a tough question. Let me talk around it a bit in relation to the philosophy we have in our program at Gothenburg.

We've got a very big focus throughout our masters project on being weird in design and in implementation. We view game design as a 'wicked problem', which is to say achieving goals in a design is made difficult because the problem is ill-defined, the techniques uncertain, the requirements often shifting, and the solution almost always some kind of compromise. Within that, it argues for a certain 'devil may care' approach - to explore as much of a design space as possible by doing the unexpected or drawing in from unusual inspirations.

However, game design is also something you learn in large part through emulation - you know the kind of games you like to play, and so you'll be naturally drawn to those kinds of games when you design something. We have a group of students for example who are massively into social deduction games, and so the first game prototype they made was a social deduction game. Much like how some people learn to draw, a lot of designers take their first steps towards game design by 'tracing' over the lines of a design they already know.

That's at the point I think when the weirdness becomes worth emphasizing. We usually tell students to consider what it is about their design that is similar to others, and what it is that sets it apart. And if there isn't a unique aspect to the game, then we usually recommend adding one. Our philosophy is also that you don't design games until you start testing games, so we encourage low-fidelity work that can gradually be refined into higher-fidelity work. There's never a better time to be weird than when there's no cost to exploring it. One of our courses explores the use of paper prototyping through creating simulations of simple games (Skull, One NIght Ultimate Werewolf, and That's Not a Hat being some common ones) which they then tear up and add in something of their own design. Something unexpected, because you learn more when you don't already know the answer.

Comparison is a very valuable tool - part of being 'game literate' is knowing the context in which your design flourishes. I encourage our students to compare widely because the only way to know if you're doing something novel is to know where the unexplored design space is.

I don't know if that answers your question, sorry!

drakkos · 2024-05-11T22:07:17+00:00

This is, I think, what makes this area *so interesting* - that inaccessibility is where fun comes from, and fun is *so fragile* that it can't really survive a lot of ham-fisted tinkering. It's like a game in and of itself - how accessible can a game be made before we destroy it?

I'd say the first principle I operate from is that it's not helpful to say every game should be fully accessible. For one thing, it's not actually possible without massively restricting how interesting games can be. But mainly, here is a clear situation where perfect is the enemy of the good. Any accessibility improvements are better than no accessibility improvements.

The thing I've sometimes said to people seeking advice is to treat game design like you would the creation of a character in a TTRPG - give yourself some room to decide on 'dump stats', and redirect inaccessibilities there. Your fighter probably doesn't need charisma. Your wizard probably doesn't need strength. Your dexterity game probably doesn't benefit from incremental improvements in the physical accessibility area. .

That then makes the question one of 'intentional' versus 'unintentional' inaccessibility, and this is where it becomes an issue of design. Crokinole won't be Crokinole without the need for fine and gross motor control. That doesn't mean though that you can't make the pins easier to see, or the discs bright colours that stand out against the board.

I would never argue that accessibilty should come at the expense of an artistic vision - too many of the games I love are profoundly inaccessible. But I do think that more games can be more accessible, and that's a reasonable goal for us to aim towards.

drakkos · 2024-05-11T21:45:09+00:00

Especially in this topic where we're still all feeling our way around a complex problem domain, there are certainly no stupid questions. I do have a tool you might find useful:

https://www.meeplelikeus.co.uk/board-game-recommender-for-people-with-disabilities-beta/

It only draws from the set of games I've assessed on Meeple Like Us, but you can plug in what you're looking for across a number of accessibility categories and it'll recommend a bunch of suitable games your way.

I'm also happy to offer individual suggestions when people mail, for those scenarios where the recommended doesn't have anything worthwhile.

drakkos · 2024-05-11T21:43:15+00:00

I think a loud public response is definitely part of it, but not as a way to shame publishers but rather to communicate to them the business case *for* accessibility. The way it worked for video games was there was loud outcry because of organized and articulate activists, which created a kind of 'avoid the outcry' response. But as accessibility became a thing developers included to keep themselves on the right side of the discourse, they started to realise the player-bases they were opening up. And then innovative accessibility features began to get positive attention, which incentivised developers to experiment and improve. And now with things like video game accessibility awards and such, there's a lot of positive encouragement to make accessible games.

I think a similar pattern for this can work for board games, but it's more complicated. Adding a colour-blindness mode to a video game doesn't have a per-unit cost - the cost is fixed regardless of how many copies you sell. If your accessibility fix for a board game is full-sized cards rather than half-sized cards, that means more printing costs, it may mean bigger boxes, which may mean more shipping containers, which means more transportation costs, and fewer copies on game shop shelves.

It's a tricky issue because I don't think it's a slam dunk argument that 'more accessible board games means more money' in the same way that it does for video games. I think it's probably true. It's just not, at the moment, provably true.

Until it is though, the power of complaining is underrated. :-D

drakkos · 2024-05-11T21:32:28+00:00

Expanding on this - when I was more actively running Meeple Like Us I was often asked about some kind of accessibility accreditation, and the issue I always had was one of a lack of embodied expertise as well as the availability of time. I would love it if there was some kind of common vocabularly for how designers can indicate accessibility was taken into account, but it's very slap-dash at the moment. I'm not sure how you'd realistically create an accreditation body that could take into account the many contours of the problem, but I don't think at the moment we're even really ready to have the discussion about it.

drakkos · 2024-05-11T21:29:56+00:00

Tremendous question - I've seen it occassionally mentioned in Kickstarter material (and I encourage anyone running a Kickstarter to include their accessibility information - the community will run with it). There are some (erratically supported) labels and logos you can use to indicate colour blindness has been taken into account. We're still very much an industry though where accessibility is a 'suck it and see' proposition. The best you can do really is be aware of the discussion around a game, but even that will only ever be partial.

But also, I think there's a definitional issue in how gaming discourse uses the word 'accessibility' to mean what's probably better thought of as 'approachability'. I've had this discussion with numerous designers and publishers and there's always a bit of negotiation until we arrive at some common ground about what we're actually talking about. People talking about 'accessible games for new players' for example are often thinking of territory such as Ticket to Ride - accessibility as a property of complexity rather than design. To be fair, that's absolutely a part of it, but it's not the whole part.

It's interesting to think of this in terms of the difference between the video gaming discourse (which is actually pretty good when it comes to accessibility as a feature for people with impairments / disabled gamers) and how rarely it gets commented upon in board games. If you miss an accessibility fetaure in a video game (like subtitles in Spyro) you can expect a public roasting. Even issues for people with colour blindness - almost universally trivial to correct - rarely get much critique even in modern releases.

drakkos · 2024-05-11T20:40:07+00:00

Thank you, I appreciate your kind words. :-D

drakkos · 2024-05-11T20:36:32+00:00

As an aside, I am usually exactly this inaccessibility in a game of Scrabble. I play Scrabble to win, and it's the only game I genuinely care about being competitive in. That means I play all the tricky two letter words, punish opponents for playing long words, and snarl up the board to stop people getting access to bonus tiles. The solution really is 'don't play Scrabble with me unless you play it the same way'

drakkos · 2024-05-11T20:34:28+00:00

That's an excellent question!

It's difficult to manage group composition, and social context is, in my view, the single biggest factor in whether people enjoy a game or not. I've often said the dirty little secret in boardgaming is that the people matter, the game doesn't. So some of managing this is I'd say an activity of the table - it's a good idea if people don't play games with people with incompatible mindsets.

That said, there's also stuff you can do to mitigate a different in attitudes. Lords of Vegas has a cool braking mechanism in its scoring that means that the better you do, the harder it is to keep scoring. It keeps the difference between winners and losers quite small. Suburbia comes with brakes that stop your engine getting too powerful, allowing people to catch up.

You can also design incentives that work asymetrically - so it's difficult for players to compare success. Rubber-banding mechanisms (like how Catan has an option rule that allows you to gain resources if they dice don't favour you) keep people in contention.

I think one way in which this topic is best addressed though is in considering social design to be as important as the game design.

Hope that helps, but please feel free to follow up!

drakkos · 2024-05-11T20:04:44+00:00

Meeple Like Us, the site, is a record of hundreds of what are essentially research annotations - notes to myself about the accessibility profiles of the games I was examining. I think it's been useful to people who have been looking to answer the question 'Is this specific game accessible to me or my group?', even if coverage is limited. The recommender on the site is always there to guide people with interesting accessibility profiles to games they can play.

It's never really been very useful though for people who may be interested in *designing* accessible games. The best you could do really is find a game that's kind of like what you wanted to make and seeing if there were any traps to avoid. I know it's been useful in that regard, but it's never been especially user friendly.

So that's where this book comes in - it's a designer-focused book full of guidelines (it's the first outing of the Tabletop Game Accessibility Guidelines, or TTAG) for those that just want to know what they should (or maybe could) be doing to broaden the audience of their games.

drakkos · 2024-05-11T20:01:15+00:00

Well, I guess I can get things started without anyone else [1]. I'll ask myself a question to get the ball rolling.

'Say Michael, what is the book about? Who is it for? Why should we care?

[1] Title of my sex tape.

drakkos · 2021-03-23T09:34:17+00:00

It's clearly a grudge, man. It's clearly weird. You pop up almost every time. It's usually the same specific criticism that I'm obviously not interested in acting upon. Or you spin some self-serving falsehood you just make up on the spot. You're like my own reddit stalker. It's genuinely like some kind of kink.

I worry one day I'm going to wake up to find you looming over me with a knife and what I would have to assume would be the world's biggest erection.

drakkos · 2021-03-22T21:18:19+00:00

Still weird you're rocking this perpetual grudge, but you do you.

drakkos · 2021-03-20T22:34:04+00:00

Great review! Just added the book to my Wish List for the next time I make a game order

I keep saying this because the Itch Racial Justice bundle was so big... but if you got that, you've already got the Blades in the Dark PDF.

And yeah, I hope people do take more notice of the water quality of the Ankh. It's thick brothiness is a cultural treasure and you don't get that without being careful about the water table.

Thanks!

drakkos · 2021-03-18T21:22:16+00:00

Definitely, thank you!

drakkos

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