Is it such a surprise that a company that is driven by popularity doesn’t favour disability? Nintendo brings gaming to mass-market. Their agenda is to create great games that can please as many people as possible. In that way, it makes logical sense that they prioritise the majority of the population, making the best games without conceding on parts to cater to a smaller audience.
It would be terrific if every game Nintendo made was inclusive, but some of the solutions offered in the article aren’t as simple as they seem.
These moves could easily be triggered by a button press, if only there were an option to do so.
Allowing the swapping of buttons for people with disabilities allows the same change for anyone. It's well known that gamers will take the path of least resistance, not optimise towards fun. If such changes are allowed, regular gamers would make the same button swaps if it meant they could get an extra few points or finish the level a little quicker. This would change their behaviour from that intended by the game designers who worked hard to craft a specific experience for the gamers. There’s a reason things are the way they are and simple changes like this could be detrimental to the overall flow of the game.
These technological marvels can leave people with inner-ear conditions like vestibular neuritis feeling queasy… And when online multiplayer games started introducing voice chat, they left gamers who were deaf unable to communicate with team members.
Thankfully there are few who have all the disabilities mentioned in this article. This means that due to the overwhelming number of games created by companies such as Nintendo, even if some games are restrictive, many games are not. In a perfect world, this restriction wouldn’t be there but throughout our society, there are inherent restrictions on people with disabilities, people of different heights, of different weights — it’s difficult to cover everything with one design.
I’m not saying disabled people shouldn’t have access to games, they should.
It may even be more important for disabled people as games provide an escape from reality, allowing them to experience life without any disabilities. What I’m saying, is that we should let Nintendo do what they’re good at, let their game designers make great games and innovate technologies to better engage gamers. If there is a market for games for people with disabilities — there’s a sizeable one, with 10% of the population suffering from some disability or another — then sooner or later speciality games or companies will come about.
There are actually a few charities who work exactly on this, one of which is Special Effect.
My final thought, more in line with the publication this is a part of:
We shouldn’t hold back from innovating because of accessibility concerns. Innovation is the path to discovering something new, something better.
After the hard work of discovering and forming the path, we can widen it for all to follow.
