Among the many exciting takeaways from GDC this year, one thing that excited our team most was the announcement of the Accessible Games Initiative by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). This initiative introduces a standard tagging system that helps a wide variety of gamers find gaming experiences that address their preferences and needs by bringing native accessibility features to the fore.
What’s great about these new tagging standards is that it not only gives gamers clear information upfront before buying a game, but it also provides developers with a checklist of capabilities to include that will help make their games more enjoyable for a broader spectrum of players.
The ESA launched the initiative with 24 tags which developers can measure and catalog their gameplay against. Initial auditory accessibility tags include Mono/Stereo/Surround Sound capabilities, Text-to-Speech dictation, volume controls, and narrated menus, but we see opportunities for many more audio tags to come.
Creative Vision vs. Player Experience
People in product development spaces often joke about how user experiences rarely align with the intended user journey of their product. Yet, where there are a million wills, there will always be a million ways.
Fortunately, game creators are often motivated to reward independent play styles, eliminating the direct contention between a studio’s creative vision and how gamers squeeze the most enjoyment out of their games. In this way, features built for accessibility are beneficial to all players who seek to minimize where they experience friction in their gaming experience. That’s not to say that accessibility eliminates the intended challenge of gaming altogether; rather, it allows gamers to achieve what they deem most essential for maximizing their entertainment value from a given game.
It’s one thing for studios to pursue the most over-the-top visions imaginable, but maximization from a player perspective may not always mean more resolution, more sound layers, and more mechanics. The challenge for studios to maximize their game’s reach is in balancing the expressive vision they aim to push with what actually pulls new players in. Don’t worry – these goals are rarely at direct odds with each other. Usually, it’s merely a matter of empowering gamers with more options to fine-tune their experience to venture from strict rails deemed to be “standard.”
Hitting the Right Sensory Levels
Different gamers will always have different views on what’s most essential for their playthrough experience. Some will prefer the lushest visuals and the most immersive sound design. Others may find extra bells and whistles to be overwhelming or even off-putting. Neither is wrong, and studios have an immense opportunity to anticipate these ranges of experience and build flexibility into their game features for maximum accessibility.
From an implementation standpoint, technical sound designers can be an incredibly helpful resource in determining how best to group audio into varying degrees of what’s essential or directly informative for gameplay and what is an enhancement. When done upfront, this grouping of audio can also help determine which sounds require a visual counterpart that allows gamers to glean the same information for skillful play whether they have a hearing impairment or find themselves in a situation where they must play with the sound on mute.
This categorization of audio by no means depreciates the incredible effort that goes into creating detailed and immersive foley — it simply helps developers give players a little more control over how much stimulus they desire beyond confirmation of how their direct inputs translate into game actions across their speakers and screens.
Silence is Not Golden
Similar to the interplay of audio and visual cues, much can be done with regard to voice-over and text on screen to broaden games’ accessibility as well. The Accessible Games Initiative identifies one of these opportunities with the Narrated Menus tag, which indicates support for screen readers that vocalize text for gamers with visual impairments. This same screen-reader support should ideally extend to in-game content as well, such as dictation of alternate text for hard-to-see visuals.
Wouldn’t it be a huge plus-up from a player standpoint if these menu and text dictations were all done in one or more characters’ voices? This goes beyond the usual script duties requested of voice talent, but we can’t imagine any actor turning down the opportunity to assist players further through UI prompts.
For players with hearing impairment, it may be more important to ensure all in-game dialogue is also captured in text on screen. Some games have even experimented with ways to indicate different character voices and expressive intonations beyond visuals on screen through features like haptic controller feedback. How cool is that for helping even more gamers experience the unique performance aspects of a story’s heroes and villains?
Taking Friction out of Repetitive Grinds
One of the ways players often get taken out of their game is through audio fatigue. When gamers find themselves exposed to the same sounds for extended periods of time, it can grow tiresome to their ears. Limits to sound libraries are often simply out of practicality, yet technical sound designers can help bake in random variation to make repeated sounds like footfalls and weapon fire less confronting.
Take farming enemies for experience points as an example. At these points, gamers aren’t engaging in an activity that directly moves a story forward, so folks with auditory sensitivity might be quick to find friction in the onslaught of repeated sound effects, character catchphrases, or looped soundtracks.
When developers know their players may find themselves in grind-like scenarios or loops, it’s an opportunity to proactively lend players more power to turn their “too much” into “just enough” with easily toggleable sound controls. For developers with enough foresight, these controls might even include dedicated, alternate music modes that give players more ways to immerse in their carefully crafted game world and score — like adapting common theme music into a heavier style for that extra considerate pump, just for their grind.
Accessibility Boosts Approachability
We love approaching game audio with accessibility front-of-mind because it affords even more people the opportunity to be unapologetic gamers. From sound design and voice to audio implementation, our team has our ears constantly to the ground, listening for every opportunity to help developers expand how game audio serves the delivery of their visionary game experiences in the most enjoyable ways to as many people as possible.
Making it all happen comes back to one common thread: engaging audio teams early in production planning for more integral accessibility decisions at the start. We look forward to continuing the conversation around best game audio practices for accessibility, so please stay tuned for more accessibility topic spotlights to come!
