Accessibility of Difficult Content

Before I write this blog post I wanna mention that there seems to be a difference in the understanding of "Accessibility" from a game design and a gamers perspective, which surprised me at first. Anyways this blog post pays homage to a discussion I saw on Youtube by fellow Guild Wars 2 players, Youtubers and/or streamers. As such I will add a link to the said video to where the sources go.^[1]

Accessibility - Game Design vs Gamer Interpretation

When a game developer or game designer talks about accessibility (of content) they're most often not talking about the same thing that a gamer would talk about. In game design, the topic of accessibility deals with the question of how to develop games so that they can be played by as many people in the target audience as possible. If you plan to develop your game for a certain audience you will still have a smaller audience due to the people who cannot enjoy the experience because of illnesses that plague them. Assuming your game requires the player to listen to some sound but the player has hearing loss, you're alienating those players. This is one of the examples that accessibility addresses in game design.

On the contrary, when gamers talk about the accessibility of content

they instead refer to the ability for players to enjoy or be able to access any content in the game. This now has less to do with the limitations they were given in real life but most often the ability for them to be able to complete and conquer the challenges set to them by the game. This is most often an issue seen in multiplayer online games and not in single-player games. However, is there really an issue at hand?

The Current State

Looking at many games, especially in the massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) category, you can see content specifically dungeons or more likely raids to be considered locked towards the biggest part of the player base. While the motivation for accessing locked content really differs from game to game one thing is definitive. If some content is only played by less than 5% of the community chances are high that said content might get a lower amount of work done by the staff of the game development team. Afterall while this content might be nice at some point when the numbers drop something has to be done and those niche content additions most likely won't be it. We can all agree that making as much of your game available to as many people as possible sounds like a pretty respectable goal. So, how do you achieve higher accessibility?

The Simple Solution

Since the biggest issue is that content is locked behind gear, progression and/or difficulty. The easiest solution would be to implement easier ways to get gear. Simplify the progression or decrease the difficulty. Given the current state of World of Warcraft, a level boost and probably some quality open-world gear drops could potentially get you ready for the raids pretty fast. Especially if the open world drops were end game drops. You could technically lock these items behind a daily grind but that would be too complicated wouldn't it? 

Another example is getting raid ready in WildStar. At first, you needed about 12 steps or so to complete from farming reputation to killing world bosses to completing dungeons on bronze, silver, gold, I don't remember. Later on, they decreased these steps from 12 to four for accessibility's sake. Removing all steps would allow even more accessibility. Lastly difficulty. If people don't play the content because it is to hard make all the content easier. Then everyone can play it and everyone wins right?

Accessibility In Real Life

Let's get back to the current state but from another dimension so to speak. When we talk about accessibility to education in real life. We're not talking about decreasing the difficulty of the university. We're talking about giving everyone the opportunity, the chance to study. To do so we do decrease the entrance requirements. This allows everyone even those who were bad in one or the other topic to be able to study and get a degree. There are tons of people whose grades did not define their abilities and success in university and this is important. So if we're talking about accessibility in real life we're talking about "the ability to do" something. With this mindset, we're slowly getting there, but it's not enough yet.

Excursion: Difficulty Curves

Also, something I notice a lot here is that in single-player games there's hardly ever a complaint about the accessibility of content. Why is that? Well thinking back to the old time's games have been getting easier and easier and recently started to pick up difficulty again. One fact stays though. Throughout all those years game designers have tried to pinpoint and build their experience keeping a difficulty curve. This means regardless of what game you played, in the end, the difficulty did increase and this is not the case for most of the games with the accessibility issue (or so it seems as there are always exceptions).

The Right Approach

Taking in all this information and coming to a conclusion.

What seems to be the right approach is to implement accessibility by modifying the given factors. First of all, we want to decrease the entrance to the content. We want the requirements for dungeons, for raids or for any content for that matter to be easy enough so that the entrance requirements are set to "E for everyone". Of course, we're not gonna stay on this level. Now the goal would be to increase the difficulty slightly higher and higher perhaps with some up and down jumps to figure out the learning speed of the community (in case games as service) and to make it more interesting. Unfortunately as the level increases only slowly hardcore interested gamers would probably have no interest in this. There's a solution for these two. If we split our hardcore content into packages (cmp. raids wings) and make the first bosses easiest while increasing difficulty by quite a bit until the last bosses per section (wing) we can "carry" the less ambitiously or skilled players with the easier bosses while providing difficulty content to the ambitious skilled players through the hardcore content given by the upper end of our section.

Ill. 1: Representation of a simplified difficulty curve
 showing the applied system

To simplify, we're basically treating each content drop or section of the game as it's own subgame providing its own difficulty curve while still increasing the overall position of the section difficulty to average out on a classic difficulty curve. The illustration (Ill. 1) shows this by splitting the overall difficulty curve (shown as a line for simplicity) fragmented into smaller sections that each have their own difficulty curve forming the overall one. Each section increases in base difficulty while having their base lower than the previous sections the last boss to provide an easier entrance for those who could not grow with the previous curve. You can see it as a way to catch those who were unable to grow as rapid giving them another chance.

Regardless of whether or not you successfully defeat all the last bosses in all cases, you can select your own difficulty curve created from your selection of bosses you wanna do and can do. This system is partly inspired by the system Guild Wars 2 / ArenaNet is trying to implement.

Conclusion

While I may call this the right approach this may also be a wrong approach for all I know. After all, this is just theory and without taking it and applying it into praxis who knows. However, so far it sounds like a better approach than giving away the rewards and at the same time allows better and less skilled players to play more or less in parallel as Player vs Player does. Though it is important to say that this approach does not replace tutorials. It is imported for you to explain your community or audience in-game mechanics via good game design philosophy (which is another topic) or via text or even better give your community the option to repeat and skip said tutorials even for trivial content such as raiding in groups. Here too good game design philosophy and awesome tricks are better than forcing or a skip option. Get creative or take examples from those games that did an awesome tutorial.

^[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHVuY3ac170

Genius Loci - "The Spirit of a Place"

I try to mix things up by switching topics. Unfortunately, the game-related / Guild Wars 2 stuff takes more time than I have so let's go with another magick topic. I should also make a poll on what people wanna read to better cater to the audience and out of curiosity. Anyways you might find this topic interesting.

English Meaning

Genius Loci may or may not sound fancy depending on whether or not you like Latin. The dictionaries write:

"The general atmosphere of a place."
~ Collins Dictionary^[1]

it is also literally translated as "the spirit of a place". Though as the dictionaries definition already shows it we're not talking about an actual spiritual entity. Even though I'm talking about a spiritual topic. Which throws up a certain question.

What Is This "Genius Loci" Then?

How does it work?

In my opinion, it's best described as the energy in a certain place. For non-spiritual people or uninterested people, you can go with the atmosphere here. :P

Let's assume that every place has neutral energy or atmosphere. Now assume we perform rituals related to a god, describe a place as holy, act like it's holy, decorate it accordingly, etc.. If we do this to a room or building the energy or atmosphere of this room or building will feel similar or equal to what it feels like to be in a church. If you've ever been in a church or a similar ritual place you may notice that it feels different than any other place. It's the same reason why haunted places feel off.
"Wait, but aren't haunted places not scary if you don't know about the haunting." It really depends but let me assure you there are more than just spiritual people who get the hint that somethings off. A shiver down a spine, some weird feeling, etc.. Why do we categorize a house's rooms into different themes, such as bedroom, living room, kitchen, etc.. Why do you not usually sleep in the kitchen? Why are you not supposed to sleep in the same room you work or play in? Because it badly affects your sleep. This is usually not the problem, but it's preferable to avoid this mismatch.

What's The Use?

Technically you can use this for literally anything. If you want people to feel welcome give a room a welcoming feel. Decorate it, add the words "Welcome" somewhere, add something that can get people cozy. Practice or welcome people in the room primarily and take care of them showing your guest friendliness. As crazy as it may sound it all rubs off.

A bedroom should have a bed and drawers and that's pretty much it. Basically, anything related to the wake-up and goes to bed routine as these remind and are part of waking up and sleeping. There shouldn't be a television, toys or books if these do not belong to your routine. Anything that distracts from sleeping in the room will - so to say - "taint" the energy or atmosphere of the room.

A workplace should only contain things related to work or needed to work. This will also allow you to easily switch to "work mode" thinking about work while in the room. It also helps not to have the "loss of your train of thought" when moving from one room to another (which is also an interesting topic itself). 

Now for the spiritualists and magick users. The genius loci may or may not be important it really depends on your goals. If you want to perform magick fast and successfully selecting a room or part of a room if not possible in another way to perform your rituals there. The goal is to make out of this part or room a magick room. If the room itself thinks it's a room for magick and rituals your chance of success on a ritual or spell is increased. Of course, you might not want your magick to be bound to one place in that case you have to work harder though.

The Conclusion

The conclusion is that every place has its own life. Lol, no. It is believed that every place in space has some atmosphere or energy that is determined by the use of this place and decoration of it. People shape places and every happening rub off a bit. Some people notice this and it can be used positively or negatively. 

Side Note:

Really fascinating is that it has been used in architecture and art as well. People use this concept to shape the building towards its purpose in building it respectively. Even the Romans did this supposedly.

Who would've thought!

^[1] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/de/worterbuch/englisch/genius-loci

Three Issues with Mobile Gaming

I do not hate mobile games as much as I might let people think I do. Something that's probably obvious for people reading this blog. The reason I avoid mobile gaming so vehemently has to do with the issues that come with it.

Heat Generation

Really nice in the winter, very worry some in the summer. Our current generation of smartphones does not support any cooling mechanisms. Usually, this is not a problem for most applications. For games, however - oh boy. I've seen plenty of games that heat my mobile phone up to +40° celsius / +104° Fahrenheit and that got me quite worried. So much that I have an app that warns me once I reach those numbers. I did a quick search online to determine the lowest value that is unhealthy for my mobile phone and went with that.

Battery Life

I never have to worry about this on my tower PC at home. 

This one doesn't have batteries aside from those that are used to save BIOS or UEFI data like what time it is. (Yes, I had an empty button battery once and it reset the time to the 1st of January 1970 and 0:00am I think?) So, no reason to care about such a thing for desktop games. However, when developing games for smartphones, tablets, and laptops people are not gonna be happy with a game that literally sucks their power out of their mobile phone like a vampire. You play for what feels like 5 minutes and your battery already dropped by 20%. Extremely scary. Especially if you're a long time from a nearby power supply. Of course, you could argue that people can use those compact power cell battery thingies... but do you really want your user to run around with a bag full of battery packs? I hope not.

User Input

This is like one of the more known issues that I've already mentioned but here we go again. For most people, the only input they have on their mobile devices are six buttons and a touch screen. Many of these buttons contain system features such as going back, lower/higher volume, switch off, show other processes and go to the desktop. This means we're pretty limited if we don't want to or can't overwrite these functionalities. Additionally, not every device features multi-touch. That means some devices can only work with up to two touches at the same time. So, if our game needs three inputs our game is nearly unplayable. Another issue that rises from touch input is the limited view from the hands obstructing the view.

Design Goals

So, all these issues need to be considered when designing games for mobile devices. We need to optimize the performance to reduce unnecessary heat. Examples here would be less code in the update loop and working with events like concepts (only call when necessary), reduce graphic effects and/or frames per second and lastly reducing the quality of the graphics.

Same about the battery life. Interestingly using a lot of light colors takes more power for the display than darker colors costing more battery life.

Make sure to design your game that it either is not necessary to stay up to date with the screen or have the input somewhere outside where coverage doesn't matter much or even better at all. A good way would be to implement controls inside of the HUD or menu. Non-action or round-based games don't have as much of a coverage issue. Another thing is to make sure your game can be played with at least two touch inputs at the same moment.

A good option is to also give the user the ability to change the settings to decide if they want more quality at the respective cost or not. I don't care about battery power if I'm at home, I can just charge the phone! Or put some ice on it in the hope of cooling it. Into the freezer, here we go!

At least until we get a new generation of mobile devices that attempts to fix these issues.