Accessibility “Is Cheating;” Who Cares?

After 24-years on this planet, I do not understand why anyone cares. Raised with the music of the hippies, their drugs of choice surrounding me in my early years, and their ideals cementing themselves in me, I’ve been raised to ask, why does anyone care? I don’t mean about life, life is a wonderful and beautiful pile of good things and bad things. While the good things don’t outweigh the bad, the bad things don’t outweigh the good either. Life is a magnificent thing you should hold and cherish with every bit of strength you have, and give nothing but love and respect to those closest to you.

Yet, for some reason, you still care about what others are. You might say you don’t and you might even fool yourself into believing it. However, you do care what others think, what they believe, and more importantly, what they do. I don’t understand why it matters to care what someone believes: Take religion as an example. If you believe one thing and someone else believes another, move on and ignore it. Someone has the gall to like a different type of music or TV show from you? Well, here is a little secret, who cares? Unless they are strapping you down like that one scene in A Clockwork Orange, propping your eyes open, and forcing you to endure it, who cares?

If you’ve made it this far, no one has forced you to read this article, and no one forced you to look up the film I referenced. You are a human being who makes their own decisions, just like the billions of others currently stuck to a dying rock falling through space flying around a star of pure hatred. So why does it matter when someone else, one of those many many billions, does a thing that is slightly different to you? Take for example the raging hatred someone might have if they watched me play a game, and I deviated from the strictly linear path of a plot just to look at something. Why are they angry?

Unlike, say a book, games are an interactive medium. Let’s go for the full hypothetical of me (a dyslexic) recording an audiobook, and suddenly in this unabridged recording and I broke into a song (an unrelated song) and then moved on without explaining why. You’d be a little miffed (angry) because that is a completely strict linear sequence of events broken up with something unrelated, and that’s annoying. A game isn’t a linear sequence of events, there is a plot within a game, but a video game itself is simply an interactive experience done through moving pictures (video).

Let’s take another extreme example, let’s say I was sitting down to play a game on my own and no one was watching me or had anything to do with it. Why does anyone care if I’m playing that game on “very easy,” “Easy,” “Medium,” “Hard,” “Very Hard,” or “I bet you are compensating because you are about to brag on the internet that you could play on this difficulty” difficulty? I don’t care if Sp00geLord69XcX on Reddit beat Dark Souls. I don’t care that 2AAmer1ca1sForAmer1cans beat Hitman 1, 2, and 3 on Silent Assassin and it gave him a special feeling. It does not matter!

This is one of the most annoying things in gaming right now, what JohnnyC0mLatetly thinks of how someone else plays a game. My question isn’t primarily focused towards you, asking “why do you care what they think?” No, why do they care what you do in a game that they have no involvement in? It is like saying because someone is gay on the other side of the world, your breakfast cereal tastes funny. These are two completely unrelated things, so what multidimensional mental game of Twister is being played here?

“Well, it hurts the developer’s vision for the game!” they cry. They being the phrase for the angry bit of the internet that gets riled up anytime you suggest a little bit of change to something for someone’s benefit. I was looking up something the other day and saw someone described as “radical” for suggesting those who were dying and being ignored be treated with respect and given basic help out of squalor. In reading that this person was known as a “radical” for basic human decency, I then thought the word “radical,” (outside of the 90s) is only ever applied to anyone looking for basic changes. Be it political, in that sense, or inconsequential in this one.

That tangent is brought to you by the part of my brain that finds this notion “the developer’s vision is hurt by change” utterly ridiculous. How many times have you turned the volume up or down on your TV while watching a movie that’s loud and then very quiet (or vice-versa)? Well, “you are hurting the sound engineer’s vision” to be the worst-known human alive. “Well, it brings dynamics to the sound, without dynamics everything would sound very flat,” That’s great! I just need to apologize to my neighbors for trying to watch a movie at 10 PM and suddenly the sound of Godzilla going for a dump has woken their three-month-old child.

It is giving a player choices to make the experience enjoyable for them. On the other hand, you just want to pretend you are great for beating large things in games. Here is the thing that is going to upset you, if that’s your mindset: They are supposed to be beaten. Beating a Dark Souls boss, hell just beating Dark Souls, isn’t doing the impossible. They are made to be beaten and beaten by a lot of people. However, just because a disabled person can’t play a game shouldn’t make you smug, just like the fact they can play a game shouldn’t make you feel inferior. Yet that’s what Sp00geLord69XcX is doing, he’s smug over someone else’s inability to play something.

Other people who dislike these changes feel lesser than because someone else can do something despite their limitations. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro are the examples held aloft in the discussion on the difficulty that surrounds them. However, the word difficulty could also be applied to the phrase “barrier of entry,” for which video games are the only form of entertainment in existence that has its own barrier of entry. Dara Ó Briain has a fantastic little bit on this from 2011 (or around then) where he jokes about this exact thing.

Books don’t close on you after a few chapters and force you to write up a paper on the central themes. TV doesn’t stop midway through to ask if you know who the killer is. You’ve never been watching an M. Night Shyamalan film, and suddenly he appears asking you to tell him what is going on with Haley Joel Osment. However, you have been asked in Kingdom Come: Deliverance to deliver a sword to the king, and there are barriers in your way. You’ve played FIFA and you’ve gotten to the cup final, now you have to beat an equally good team to prove yourself. Everyone has wanted to rip a monkey’s head off for playing that accordion in Spider-Man 2, because those Pizza delivery missions are like a wheel-chair user at the bottom of a San Francisco hill for their barriers.

This mentality that everyone starting with zero help will equal that everyone will end in the same place doesn’t work. Especially when someone can have something pre-existing and a barrier is put against them that you might not find an issue with midway through. That would be a setback. Quick Time Events (QTEs) are a good example. There are a number of games, many without any accessibility, that feature these QTEs. Some people just can’t play games with them. David Cage can’t make a game without them. Something based entirely on a reaction time that can be insufferably short, is something that could (and should) be altered to give someone a level playing field.

Someone with limited mobility isn’t going to have those quick reaction times, so allowing these to effectively auto-complete or have a larger time frame isn’t “cheating.” It isn’t altering your experience, it is balancing theirs with your own. Can it be used for able-bodied people? Yes, of course, but again I’m left asking who cares? It doesn’t change your experience. It doesn’t erase your sense of self-accomplishment because you cut the finger off the cardboard cutout in Heavy Rain by pressing the button. You aren’t affected unless you allow it to torment you, which is a mental health issue if I’ve ever seen one.

I was about to say complaining about any accessibility feature up to auto-aim in a single-player game is stupid, then I realized it can be done in multiplayer too. Titanfall (1) has the perfect balancing tool for what is effectively an accessible-lite tool, the Smart Pistol. Bad at aiming with a controller? This thing can lock on to a target. It didn’t do enough damage to be an insta-kill, it wasn’t firing rapidly, and everyone had it from the word Go. However, Respawn screwed that up with Titanfall 2: Electric-Boogaloo, as you had to get to level 20 (I think) before you could unlock the same pistol.

You can’t complain about this without seeming petty because someone killed you with it. Everyone had it, and if you could aim well you didn’t need it and thus could use bigger and better guns, so what could you complain about? Accessibility isn’t about making things easier for you if you don’t want it, it is about giving it to those who feel they need it or want it. Most of the time this is applicable to single-player-only games, the few of them left in the triple-A market. Though sometimes these things aren’t as far-reaching as that.

Speaking entirely of my own experience, reading text in-games is like pulling teeth. Between writing that’s cack-handed, and it all being poorly formatted for my brain to easily read it, I just ignore long blocks of text that aren’t crucial. Sometimes it is hard to define which bits are critical. Sometimes it is the length that puts me off, sometimes it is the font, and other times it is the color. Two of these things can be solved easily by doing what Loop Hero, Sackboy: A Big Adventure, and a few others do. These games all allow me to change the font to something simple, maybe even change the color to contrast against the background. They may even be able to solve the length issue, or differentiate the fluff text from the crucial subject by making them a different color.

That’s not the most important thing. It is not about being hard of hearing, and it’s not a trouble with my vision, but it would put me on a more level playing field with others. However, with one study stating that there could be as many as 700-million dyslexics in the world, it has taken to the last two years for anyone to realize something simple could be done to help people like me. You might not realize it, but there is a lot of reading to be done in games, especially JRPGs or RPGs, which can be overwhelming when you are slower at reading or will be tripped up easily. That’s why, and I’ve said this before, I avoid high fantasy so much.

This brings me to the big one, the really big one, Fantasy World Dizzy. No! Dark Souls, the height of this discussion (albeit a one-sided one) being shrugged off by Sp00geLord69XcX. Whenever someone says there should be a way for someone to make that barrier for entry feel less like a pole vault to a paraplegic, we suddenly get anger like you’ve never seen before. “How dare you suggest Miyazaki isn’t a god?” and “Thy shalt not defile greatness, for only–” which goes on for far too long. They slaughter a lamb to offer to Miyazaki, light some smelly sticks, and all in the name of putting mumbo jumbo curses on anyone suggesting such changes. I’ll say it as a fan of Dark Souls, I hate those people.

I hate those people, but love the games. Well, 1 and 3, 2 can fling itself off a cliff like I make those blokes do with the glitchy lock on circling thing. Some might argue it is only a tiny section of the fan base that says you can’t change things, and that’s right, but it is still a toxic behavior that should not be. Take Supergiant’s Hades, for example, a game that allows you to enable a god mode that doesn’t alter the game immediately, but adapts to you. An adaptive mode in the likes of Dark Souls might take a lot of tweaking, but how hard would it be to make this an option? It would be a thing you select at the start of a game and can’t change.

Hell, make it three options for the people who do want to brag on the internet: On, off but can be turned on, and off. It is like Minecraft’s hardcore mode, the save will be deleted if you die, but in this case, you just can’t turn on the mode that makes the game form around you. I’d love it if there was a mode that made this possible for anyone playing Dark Souls, not to use it myself, but to share the experience I love with someone who isn’t able-bodied. Someone who might not have the advantages I have in that respect. Or to put it grossly, “someone who isn’t a H4rdc0r3 g4ym3r!”

We’ve had adaptive difficulties before, we still do, and we still have options. We have a whole genre of racing games where the difficulty adapts to you. Every Mario Kart is a rubber-band racer and you call Toad a cheating fungal sore on society every time. Left 4 Dead‘s omnipotent Director AI is balancing the game all the time, FIFA games in recent years notice you are “too good” and ask if you want adaptive difficulty on, and MGS V was lorded for its adaptiveness. Every RPG I’ve played suggests the level you are on before taking on a quest, and some of the lower level quests raise with you if they go uncompleted.

Where was the up in arms anger over this? I’m pretty sure Gamespot (and many others) loved MGS V‘s adaptive difficulty. If you fired too many headshots, soldiers would learn to wear helmets, and you could later halt shipments of them to make this less pervasive. FIFA‘s adaptive difficulty asked me after winning 10-0 in my first game if I wanted to raise the difficulty, which wasn’t a bad idea. Other games like Half-Life 2, raise and lower the amount of ammo and health (back when he had health packs) for those struggling and those breezing through it. It would seem strange to claim an adaptive system doesn’t work when they are in countless games.

Though, let’s say that isn’t the option for Dark Souls, or more importantly Elden Ring. Instead, they could use what Codemasters does with AI for the F1 games. A grade between 0 to 110, with 0 to 100 increases the AI’s pace by 0.1 seconds each value of 1, with 100 to 110 doing so by 0.2. A similar set of tools in the options of something like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, or even Elden Ring to increase the amount of time you have invincibility during/following a roll, or other ways for players to balance their own experience. Maybe a toggle to show a player a very visible warning that an attack is incoming.

“Well, that ruins the developer’s vision!” No it doesn’t, a large part of developing a game is finding a balance that the developer believes works for the game. I can agree with that, however, each player is different and sometimes what a developer might deem as the perfect balance will be called into question by someone playing the game. For example, Mike had an issue with the number of cultists and crazies that are sent at you in Far Cry 5, something I don’t understand as I love that war-like feeling. I can disagree that the AI is broken, but I can’t disagree that he didn’t enjoy it because of that same AI. “He could play on easy, like a woman, and grow a vagina too” is likely a toned-down version of Reddit comments, but I don’t think that addresses his issue, the AI.

Maybe not all games need player-driven balancing, but some could benefit from it. This is the thing I don’t understand about all of this: While you might not use it or not want to use it, it isn’t about you. I’ll repeat so those in the back can hear it, this isn’t about you! If you aren’t the one playing, why do you care? You are playing multidimensional Twister to work yourself up over something that simply doesn’t concern you, and why would it? This is like complaining when controllers are inverted or uninverted. It takes two seconds for you to change this option and you never think about it again. What I’m suggesting would be the same, locked away in the same options menus, making each game playable to every single player possible.

This is simply what I do not understand about the refusal of accessibility, it benefits everyone in the community. How many games have you played that you thought, “I really enjoyed that, I wish more people played that game!” More accessibility gives more people the ability to play the games you love, so there are more people enjoying the game. Additionally, as a result the developer sells more, and possible sequels come down the line. Of course, accessibility doesn’t equal more sales every single time. Though giving more people the chance to play a game isn’t hurting the sales, there is no possible way: Doing none of the work will equate to no extra sales, but the word of mouth that accessibility is key can equal more sales. The most important thing in there is “can,” there is a possibility, unlike the other option.

We talk about games and we share our experiences with friends, family, and strangers because we love games. Sometimes those friends want to play the same games, but simply can’t because there is no accessibility to allow for them to even slightly enjoy the same experience. I can play Minecraft and do things without thinking about them, but my dad takes an extra few minutes to do the same thing because he has a different experience than I do. Do I feel inferior because he can do the same but at a slower pace? No, because you have to be some kind of sociopath to believe that is even remotely a reasonable and measured response to something so insignificant.

This isn’t just applicable to the fans of Dark Souls, though they are often cited as the only source of this toxicity. I mentioned Kingdom Come: Deliverance several hundred paragraphs ago, a game that uses a limited saves system which some people defended with ardent indignation for any other thought. I’ll simply put it this way, I’m an adult, I’m a human being that has things to do, so telling me I can’t save anywhere an unlimited number of times aggravates me. Turns out, this was the wrong response because “it hurts the developer’s vision,” which is several layers of what cakes Henry’s boots; If you want to mod it out, you should.

Why should anyone moan about someone else modding this redundant save system out so they can enjoy the game? They should be able to do so. They should be able to without anyone else even batting an eyelid. Some were more measured, and some less so citing the usual phrase about the developer’s vision. That doesn’t seem matter as Warhorse Studios announced after a week that changes would be coming for those that couldn’t mod; PS4 and Xbox One. It wasn’t that much of the developer’s vision if they could take feedback and adapt it to the game.

What gets me in this discussion on adding a mod or the developer changing something is, “Well, this can be exploited” and “[the developer] didn’t want X […] I’ll abide by that rule.” This from the same people that watch every Games Done Quick event, yet don’t bat an eye-lid at a speedrunner breaking a game to get under three minutes. It is a single-player experience that you have nothing to do with. Modding things like this out or sewing deeper pockets into an RPG doesn’t matter to you unless you are doing it. Why are you complaining if you are? You aren’t being forced to do it. I’d only agree with this argument in the form of multiplayer, which is a whole other mess I don’t plan on covering.

The point I think I am trying to hammer in here is that you should be able to enjoy a game however and wherever you find that enjoyment. No one, and I do mean no one, should be able to call you a “cheat,” or tell you that “you are ruining the experience for yourself.” If someone has to mod something in or out, they don’t need you to tell them what they are doing, they are doing it willingly. You don’t stumble upon game mods and understand how to open the proper programs (x86) files to make them work. It is shocking the levels people will go to tell someone else how to play a game.

This is a genuine question for someone who believes it is ok to tell someone else using accessibility features, using mods, or playing games however they please: Why do you care? Who said you, and you alone, are the boss of how all games must be played? I’m not saying every game should have adaptive difficulties, or have sliders for each enemy action. I’m not saying mods should be fixing everything, or that accessibility to every single disability should be catered for in every single game whether it is required or not. There should be a mix of all of these things, and there should be no “ur [sic] cheating,” “you are a baby,” or anything else attacking someone for playing a game how they feel they want to.

The more accessibility we all have to all games, the better they are. We’re not only including those with disabilities at that point, we’ll be able to share in those experiences and gain a better understanding to create better games. If we’re going to pretend gaming is an art form as it stood 10-15 years ago while it was looking at nostalgia itself, we’re not going to be making better games. We don’t just need more accessibility to show stories to a wider audience. We need a wider audience to show better stories, more diverse stories, ones that vary and tell things otherwise unapproachable before without it being created by people without those experiences.

I’d love for older mums to design an action or driving game, because you know what your mum is like with specific games. The controller is at a 90-degree angle, she’s going straight, and she’s told you to “shut up your tart!” as she robs a bank while apologizing. I’d love to see a game designed by people who are not able-bodied and make it about movement, and how their mind informs that with a lifetime of real-life barriers. I’d love to see, hear, and feel how games designed by people with disabilities let that inform not only a story, but how a game plays, sounds, and looks. I think we only get to that point by including these same people, not shunning them or anyone else for how they play.