 Hello. This is the first time I've spoken to a group since maybe 10th grade. So if you hear my voice wobble and waver as though it wants to shoot through the skylight and live on the moon forever, I apologize in advance for that sudden silence. Yes, and I additionally am very nervous and very conveniently and topical to our talk. I'm having a really intense chronic illness splatter today, so this will be really interesting for you all, I hope. You see me suddenly lean on this table, I'm not just trying to strike a cool pose. It's because I need it to not fall through the ground to the moon. Anyway, funny jokes. Hi everyone. That's how video games work, by the way. If you fall through the ground you pop up on the moon. I'm Xander. I have been dealing with mental and physical health issues since I was very young, and also I make video games about that. I'm Kevin. I have been using video games as a way to connect myself to the world in a way that feels good for a long time, but it wasn't until recently that I made the connection between the way that I experienced games which always felt different as accessibility problems that I just wasn't recognizing. So yeah, so we're going to be talking a little bit about ways that games are and are not. For instance, captions. That is extraordinarily helpful. It seems like often it feels like an afterthought in games. It's getting a little better, but the common theme you might notice is just making things optional, not being able to be changed or altered if you don't have the resources to do it, to make it easily altered by an outside program such as a screen reader. So you'll want to use fonts that, although they might not be as fun as thematically appropriate fonts, you want to make them readable, legible, high contrast, and then timed well to what's happening and relevant and proof read. I'm often surprised at games with a $700 million budget that don't know where apostrophes go, but that's just me. Additionally, more things within game mechanics such as making extreme dexterity things should be optional and non-mandatory, especially for parts of the game that are just part of the story. Yeah, there's a curse that will not go away where in order to make the story sequences more exciting button prompts appear, and you just acknowledge that there are buttons and you hit them and the story continues. This should be reflected, if you must put this in the game. A, I don't really know why. B, make sure that it is reflected in the difficulty options or just optional because it doesn't really relate to the game proper, and that's often a stumbling block as you can have the most accessible game design you can imagine, and then during a story sequence you will fail and you cannot continue. So that leads us right into... Yes. I feel like often times people don't think about the ways that they assume, like, oh, okay, I can have this speed for a game and this will be fine for players, but you're not really considering... Right, and this, again, should be thought of early in the game making process so that you can have the infrastructure there to account for changing these variables or making them changeable later, and this can cover a broad range of disabilities because not only do you have trouble interacting with the game physically, it can cover cognitive things as well if you have trouble processing a lot. Just making the game slower often is all you really need to do, and that's probably very complicated math, but just taking the time to make that variable will help a lot. Additionally, something really, really simple, wonderfully implemented at this conference is trigger warnings. What may not be triggering for you may be triggering for someone else, and that can be in terms of anxiety or depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, but also physical disabilities and health issues, seizure warnings. Yeah, seizure warnings are an interesting one in many... In order to pass certification, which means you will have your game published, it will come with a standard seizure warning, which means it is one of the things you skip at the beginning and means nothing because it applies to all games, and you don't know when it's going to occur, it just tells you that it might happen, which isn't super useful, probably to the people that need that warning. Yeah, so being specific with what you're doing in your game, whether that... Sorry, I'm still nervous. So, yeah, we've had some examples. Sure, just a couple examples from different ends of the spectrum. On the more familiar, people familiar with Mario Brothers, the more recent games have an option where if the game detects you're having trouble with it, it gives you the option to skip that sequence, and it does not judge you for it, it does not make fun of you for doing that. It is also optional, it just appears, and you can choose it or not. The game will play itself out, or it will show you how to do it, or it will skip you past it entirely, and it will give you an item that allows you to go through whatever the challenge is. So, there isn't a sticking point. I think that's a good compromise. Another example on the other end is the Bayonetta series of games, the most recent of which... I'm also sorry, I would like to open it. Yeah, I often wonder how that appears. Oh, look at that, on the captions. Anyway, if that being a more hardcore whatever that means, gamer's game is very... A lot of things happening all the time, very dynamic, exciting action game, but it has an automatic mode baked into the lower difficulty modes, it's not called something demeaning, and it allows you to perform the same actions that an incredibly high level skilled, quote-unquote skilled player would be able to do and get through the game and get the same experience, which means it can be played and enjoyed by more people. That's great, whatever I think about the rest of the game is irrelevant. So, and there are so many more aspects of gamer's mechanics we can talk about, but there's other parts of the talk we would like to talk about. So we super recommend a really wonderful website that is a project of the Able Gamers Foundation, I believe, and it's called Includification.com, and they have a guide to actionable game accessibility. Things you can do, yeah, broken down by, seemingly, by how difficult it might be to implement and the different people that would be helped with those implementations. And it's broken down into different categories, such as mobility, vision, hearing, and cognitive. Highly recommend anybody making a game, and even the small game, even just for things you might not have thought about, even a small game that you're just going to put up for free on the website, just taking the time to, for instance, make the controls configurable, allows a wider range of accessibility devices and programs to enter and face with the game. How are we doing that? We are halfway, so yeah, which is important because we're halfway down this piece of paper. Presentation. There's a lot of tropes about disabled people within video games, and they are really great things that we want to perpetuate. I'm just going to start off right with the horror genre of games because there's a whole lot of awful stuff in regards to disabled people within the horror genre of games. A really common one is the creepy asylum, you know, and having a mentally ill person of some awful ableist term chasing you and trying to kill you. These are things that we do not want to perpetuate. Be surprised how prevalent that trope is in games that otherwise have no reason to feature any of these things. It just seems like an easy way to, oh, we need to add some tension to this part of the game where your character will fall through a skylight into an abandoned asylum where people still live, I guess, and are very angry with you for non-specific reasons. And it's just the idea that any visible deformity or mental problem is bad. You are evil. It's a video game, so you're probably murderous also, and you don't like anyone who is near you. And this is just so lazy. If it weren't awful for obvious reasons, it's just, I think it is boring. I don't think there's anyone that's played more than four video games that hasn't gone to an asylum for no reason. So, stop it. Editorializing. Oh yeah, so for some reason I keep coming back to Wolfenstein because it is an example of many things. Just every societal issue you can imagine smashed into one product and sold. Here's a bad example of something it does, which is to perpetuate the naming convention on the difficulty select screen, which is carried forward from an ancient version of the game, which is basically it makes fun of you for choosing an easy setting, and it tells you you're great in ways that, not to put too fine a point on it, if you choose the lowest one, which is called Can I Play Daddy? It puts a baby bonnet on your cool guy. So great. That is, I had trouble with the game on that setting, so nice. I feel awesome being reminded of time. But on the other end of the spectrum, it does include a character who is paralyzed from an infection that is, it's not even directly a war injury, which seems almost overthinking. And the other characters don't, the character has a character and a purpose is your superior, is capable, is included in all of the things that are going on in this game about shooting robot Nazis. But is it confined to a wheelchair for the majority of the game? And the other characters don't have a problem with this, it's just accepted and the character can be a character. That doesn't unfortunately fall into a trope that we're about to get into later, but for the majority of the game it is a usually good representation within that sphere of games. Someone becoming the super powerful cyborg. Yes. Also the power suit trope. Which shows up in places you wouldn't expect, like games set in 1914. So that actually kind of brings us into like, so can this be used as, I think that it really depends on who this game is coming from. And also this is something that we see so often. Like it's just something that we see over and over and I want game developers to do better. I want game developers to come up with more creative disabled characters that aren't just following the same thing over and over. Or just the plain shock value which is then nullified immediately because the character doesn't actually have to deal with anything because, hello, mad scientist, robot arm, power suit. I'm actually better now. So yeah, so I really, really dealing with chronic pain and still am, but last year it was manifesting to the point of I was better at it, I did not move. I started using twine because I was able to use voice commands as opposed to physically typing because I couldn't even type at that point. So I started making games in twine and I wanted to think about ways that I could make characters that weren't like me in these games because as a gender clear disabled person I don't really see a lot of media that has people like me in it. Definitely not positively portrayed. So yeah, I wanted to create characters that were disabled and were created without erasing their disabilities. So what I came up with was a game called Ceremony which is a twine game about a group of disabled and chronically ill witches and they kind of use their magic to hack various aspects of their existence. It's important to say change as opposed to curing or ignoring. So for instance I have a character who uses their cane and has figured out ways to turn it into a flying broomstick. There's another character who has a service dog that is Cerberus. Stuff like that and I totally believe that game developers can come up with creative ways to represent. To represent characters that aren't erasive. Just not leaning on the tropes also sometimes forces are more creative and therefore I think a more interesting result. Definitely think that although it can be fun to just think of replacing a problem with a better robot problem as very satisfying, it's a redemption narrative. Often I feel better just being represented in any way at all that isn't bad. It just feels good. It doesn't need to be a magical robot laser that solves all of your problems. It can just be a character in the game that the other characters know and respect. The witches don't need to cast spell that makes it so they can walk again. They can still leave who they are. I think that's all we have to talk about. Thanks for listening to us. Probably since so much more I've just been going through but I think a thing you don't hear very often about is the mental. Just stumbling blocks that make the game something you are fighting against and if the thing is a challenge, even if the game isn't supposed to be challenging it can still lead to people just feeling like they don't belong. They don't have a way to experience it. So anything you can do from the very beginning to bake into your game a way to pass through any sticking spot will be appreciated by a percent of people. It is significant. And if you would like a link to that website I mentioned earlier Includification.com You can see that on my Twitter which is at GlitteryAnimal. Yeah, okay. I'm at Trebspace. Neither of us say super important things all the time. As opposed to this which is very important obviously. Very qualified. Yes, very qualified. We both are. Bye.