I like video games, I’ve been playing them since I was a little child laughing at the farting alien, as he saved other aliens from horrible business practices. For the most part, games have been this driving force in my life for as long as I can remember. However, it was only the games that were accessible to me and that I knew would grab my attention. I’ve joked about ramping off the hip bone of OPAs while wearing all black leather and holding a sex toy. Games aren’t always accessible even when you look to be like anyone else you’d see gaming.

When it comes down to it, looking back at the number of games I still have to this day, I can see a pattern. Yes, I still have my copies of Burnout, GTA: San Andreas, Canis Canem Edit, The Sims 2, Star Wars: Battlefront II, Theme Hospital, and many others. Yet, when you look at those few there is a lack of something, at least when you compare that sort of collection to that of others. Only one of them requires that you read some information, though Bully (or Canis Canem Edit) does feature some English lessons. Yes, I was one of those that copied their homework from the internet‘s cheat sites and passed the class.

You might be thinking, “But, why does that matter? You enjoyed a select number of games. Who cares?” Yes, part of it was by choice, and part of it was by necessity. You see, I have grown up with something fairly common and hardly spoken about: dyslexia. A dyslexic can have different problems depending on the form they have, mine is strictly reading and language-based, but with that, I wasn’t treated to the benefit of the doubt when it came to numbers and math class. In the end, I gave up with the lackluster help that either treated it with contempt or coddling concern.

While you may assume that most of that is in the past, you’re seeing something that’s aided with the advent of spell-check, an editor or two, and endless self-scrutinization. If you were to ask me what dyslexia was, however, I’d be at a loss of explaining how this mess forms differently. I can only tell you my experience as I’ve only had my experience. Sometimes it is, in the case of texts, moving an S from the end of a word to the middle; thus resulting in the assumption of another word being there. Other times it is breaking up the syllables in the wrong place, making “hors d’oeuvre” the sound of a dial-up modem in my head.

“Ok, what’s your point? Idiot!” My point is when video games require a bit of reading, the developers don’t think about that limitation. When it comes to the prospect of quickly reading something or the inevitable wall of text in an RPG, I stop. One of the many reasons I don’t play classic-style RPGs is that book-like feeling, it is a heavyweight to take on when playing a game. I might enjoy Disco Elysium greatly, but it requires some breaks after all the reading. Dark Souls has a lot of lore you could read about online, but the game is focused on the gameplay, so I care mostly about that aspect of it.

I could read a wall of text that would take you minutes, and I a handful more; or I could beat a pensioner to death in the Nevada-like deserts of San Andreas. I could sit patiently with a JRPG that requires fast-moving subtitles, or I could watch several billion sparks fly off a barrier as DJ Stryker plays “Breathing” by Yellowcard. Why do something that’s going to make me feel like crap when I could enjoy myself? It only made sense to play Tony Hawk’s Underground than Pokémon, a series known for its lack of voice over and endless text boxes.

I still played management games, to varying degrees of success. I’d even play a couple of Pokémon games, almost always ignoring the text. So as I’ve gotten older, my tastes have slightly changed; again by choice and by necessity in places. I reviewed the compilation of all of Telltale’s Walking Dead series in the definitive edition released this past summer. The first season is still one of the best-written games, but it is unbelievably hard at times to play. Its central mechanic requires that you read things in quick succession under pressure. Does anyone want to guess what a dyslexic’s nightmare happens to be?

You guessed it, the pressure to read something.

Another part of gaming that’s grown in small amounts since the end of the PS2-era with Spider-Man 2 and Shadow of the Colossus is independent games. Smaller games, made by smaller studios, with smaller budgets. It is not uncommon for some indie games to include a voice-over, but it is far more frequent to not feature one. This includes games I love like FTL, Celeste, Minit, A Normal Lost Phone, Hacknet, Orwell, SteamWorld Dig 2, and more. FTL is a great example because I’ll read half a line, know my decision and stop; a rogue-lite with repeating text for decisions is so much easier.

There are exceptions, of course, such as Gone Home to an extent, as well as Her Story, Horace, Oxenfree, Return of the Obra Dinn, and if we’re generous to Mike Bithell, John Wick Hex. However, that doesn’t solve the issue; reading lengthy pages of dialogue or information crucial to the game. One of the reasons I don’t like stopping and taking an indecently long time reading something that should take minutes at most, is defeat. Again I’ll raise the question, why bother when I’m not enjoying what I’m doing?

Doom (2016) might have wonderful text files exploring the lore, Final Fantasy VII might be rich with teenagers killing god, or Fallout 1 and 2 might be deeper than the cave you came from and where seamen pay to enter. My issue is being stumped when reading “Yuffie Kisaragi,” for all I know that could be an implement for a nutritional blender-thing. The Witcher 3 is hard enough to follow when Hagubman and Imlerith are being spoken about so reading and undoubtedly misunderstanding, isn’t going to help that.

Yet still, I have to persist with unknowable names and phrases that unintentionally feel belittling to play some things. Outside of RPGs, there are a lot more games that request the player to read and digest information, which is something a dyslexic will always have trouble with. The way it has always been explained to me is “trouble digesting the information read,” or whatever that means. From what I’ve come to understand through my own experience, it is not digesting that’s the problem; it is the lack of excitement to read.

Another thing is being a little tangential with storytelling. One of my uncles is himself a dyslexic, he’s the first experience of someone close to me that was on the other side of schooling and learning difficulty. Albeit, when he was in school, his dyslexic tendencies were mostly undiagnosed and went ignored by teachers. I had the advantage of it as a known problem. Nevertheless, you might already know where I’m going, schools tried to help in small parts, but didn’t really know how to treat someone individually. That’s one of the hardest parts of a room of 30 teenagers.

Now, this uncle wasn’t just a joke about tangential-ness; it is, in fact, a piece of this reading interest section I’m on. I’ve already used RPGs and JRPGs as examples of what had unwittingly turned me away at the door for a failure to recognize the spelling of Imhotep’s cousin’s name: BOB. Honesty, most of the high fantasy settings are what would reject me; uncommon place names and otherwise aren’t conducive to ease of knowledge. One thing my uncle used to, for lack of a better term, “overcome” his dyslexia was J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series. I was born in my uncle’s mid to late-20s, audiobooks weren’t as popular as today.

Just last week, I finished a sci-fi audiobook. Audiobooks are great ways of developing a familiarity with long-form storytelling without that interactivity. Now, with 50+ CDs of the Lord of the Rings series sitting behind me in my office I can say that they are well written but don’t pique my interest. I know I’ll get shivved for this; but I saw the size of the first book in A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones), got through the first audiobook and have not gone back for the second. Fantasy, particularly high-fantasy, isn’t something that grips me the same way it did my uncle to pull him out that early slump of feeling left out. High-fantasy is all games sit-in playing with itself.

What I’ve come to lean on the most when reading and for lack of a better term, learning a rhythm of reading, is something games don’t and can’t really do too often. Biographies and autobiographies I breezed through. For example, I reviewed Daniel Hardcastle’s book for the site. Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, Lee Evans’ The Life of Lee, Frankie Boyle’s Work! Consume Die!, and another biography I’m reviewing for the site in the coming weeks are all sitting around me. That’s ignoring the collection of Orwell’s essays I stumble through. None of which translate to gaming all too well in any case.

Yes, games are about the biographical nature of a character’s life, but most of them focus on guns and action. I think my religion of Doctor Who says that I think “Guns are for idiots!” to rephrase Jodie’s “only idiots carry knives.” To digress, no, games are about characters but not about their entire lives, just the action-heavy bits. What kind of idiot would put someone like Nathan Drake in a house, with a wife, playing a console, and eating food? He’s a psycho. Oh, that was a section of (Warning: Strong language) the 4th game because the last three games were shooting galleries of anyone but a smug American with a chin like Hoover Dam.

To return to dyslexia, games, and how I’ve gotten this far, it all comes down to persistence. You can’t necessarily make a button prompt that would be for tapping a hold now or slower tapping. Reading is a diverse beast when it comes to accessibility because you have to accept that we’re all at different levels of reading comprehension. I for one love reading a more complex explanation of aerospace in the 50s and 60s, others like high-fantasy, and some just like gun porn and play Call of Duty. My point is, making games accessible for those with a learning difficulty is as hard as those with physical disadvantages where you need to slow down the action.

For example, in games like The Walking Dead or Blacksad, their quick decision making is best offset with adjustments to timing made available. Yes, that would or could break the flow or even the challenge of the game for others, but as an option in a menu, it produces more sales. Lengthy barrages of text explaining something crucial to the plot or section of the game, that’s something undermined by itself. Possibly the best way of counterbalancing that would be using a Google Translate-style tool that reads the paragraphs of optional notations. Yes, some who don’t have difficulty might use it out of laziness, but that’s their decision.

When you hear two people talking about FromSoft’s Souls/Borne/Sekiro difficulties for some players, often one would argue that someone who that aid isn’t aimed at will use it. Who cares? I’ve used my almost twenty-year-old cheat book to play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, yet you still loved the game before I told you I did that. If I’m going to use a cheat to spawn a vehicle in a singleplayer open-world to get across town a bit faster, that doesn’t affect you. Much the same as having a paragraph of Skyrim fluff text dully read out by a robot doesn’t harm you as a player.

If you care about games and want people to play Nier and Far: Lone Sails wherever they are; you have to admit some limitations need to be broken, and that was a very crude Celine Dion joke. The limitations shouldn’t set barriers for either the player or the designer, there are plenty of ways of creatively working around issues. One example is The Outer Wilds (no, the other one!), during its moments of translating a foreign language scrawled on walls across the universe, it stops time allowing you to read. You can switch this momentary pausing off, but given the game is entirely about the time of everything, it is perfect.

This isn’t something that can or will disappear or dissipate at any point in someone’s life, it perseveres itself either by causing dread when asked to read aloud or passively tripping someone up now and then. With a reported seven percent of the world’s populous affected (3 million a year in the US), reading is either daunting or an unmovable mountain to push. I’m not saying that everyone’s experience should be hampered by my own, but I can see why other dyslexics would be put off. Working around that is what a designer should at least aim for, “design around the limitations, don’t stop at it” would be my advice.

If you argue and aim for inclusiveness in entertainment, understand that things are being forgotten about. Don’t stop designing around dyspraxia, cerebral palsy, or anything else limiting someone’s enjoyment, include it as one of the things to work around. It shouldn’t make a game 10GB larger than any other when games like Red Dead 2 are already 115GB. The smallest amount of thought put into it could make someone fall in love with games, and that’s the point of being inclusive.

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