Old School - Gaming And Aging
- Speaker: Earl Cousins
- Twitter: @a11ySherpa
Introduction
Games are growing up
- Back in the days: you could spent 15min in Arcade Game
- In the 70s Zelda needed a battery to save!
- Elders Scrolls Online: hunders of hours
Games Growing Up
Capabilities
As we age, people’s capabilities increase… to an extend!
Complexity
Atari control was one button + joystick, nowadays a PS4 control has a different standard (14 buttons, two joysticks, track pad, mic, …)
Changes
Vision Changes
- As I aged, vision has decreased
- Witcher 3 update patch to increase size
- Fire Emblem game on Switch, has a lot of petitions online to increase the text size
Hearing Changes
- Simple action sounds vs environmental soundscapes: because we can make everything too real we have increased the amount of souds played. Example: Elder Scroll has 7 volume settings
Dexterity Changes
- Can’t manage controls as good as before
Reaction Time
Fatigue
- Guitar band games: I can’t finish one of the latest micro games because the main mode of the game required me to finish the game in extreme difficulty level.
Cognitive Load
- If I worked all day, I don’t neccesarily want to do a lot of mental gymnastics while playing games
- Puzzles
- Memory Recall
- Distracting
Uncharted 4 has difficulty level settings, for combat, but not for puzzles.
Take Action
- Provide Options (Spiderman as an example of menu options)
- Make accessibility options easily discoverable
- Present them up front
- Not only for menus!
- Look back
- Newer isn’t always better (for instance controls were simpler, NES)
- Simplicity
- Approachability
- Speak out!
- Call out issues
- Describe impact
- Make positive suggestions!