Let’s say some disabled person wish to play a competitive game such as CS2 or COD.
How would companies include these people to have a fair experience?
While some improvements could be made such as strong aim assistance, it’d also break the competitiveness aspect of the game for non-disabled people. Such feature would also be obviously abused. So it’d require a level of verification like an official medical report to unlock it.
Of course one option would be to delegate the accessibility to whoever is organizing a competition, but I’m talking about online games.
My point is, how could something be implemented to provide a fair experience for disabled people on online competitive games? And why no company has ever implemented something like that? At least, I’ve never heard of something like that.
It just occurred me out of sudden while I was playing Counter Strike, I’m not a disabled person, but while there’s a lot of real life sports with exclusive rules made for those people, I don’t see online e-sports following up.
I have a muscle disease that makes it practically impossible to play first-person shooters. My feeling on the matter is that the amount of accommodations I would require would suck all the fun out of competitive play, despite the fact that I used to love playing Counter-Strike.
Almost no two disabilities are equal, even if they have the same name. Creating a system to set accurate handicaps for a fast-paced competitive game would be a herculean effort. There are objective measures for things like muscle weakness and blindness, but patients often don’t know exactly where they rank, and these things are often changing over time.
And then there’s the question of where do you draw the line between different types of disabilities? Do you throw blind people in the same match with people who have motor problems? Is being able to see enough to offset barely being able to move your arm? How are such questions resolved? How fine-grained can different pools of disabled folk get and still have enough players for matchmaking?
In my opinion, the way forward for disability friendliness is to make sure your game has a server browser and a healthy culture of community servers. Then we disabled people can organize ourselves into disability-friendly servers and answer these questions on a scale that might be feasible.
I’d also like to thank devs for creating so many awesome turn-based and non-intensive games. It took me a while to adapt, but I’ve learned to love many games I never would have considered before. I can still get that competitive rush from a match of chess or RISK or Backpack Battles. This kind of system would be much more feasible in a game like that.
User verification on this level is expensive and definitively one of the real slippery slope things, it’s understandable that most game developers/publishers want nothing to do with that.
Xbox has the adaptive controller which appears to deal with the physical aspect of this as well as it can.
It’s about making the game playable for the most players possible. Good accessibility mechanics don’t give players a competitive advantage, but they can help close the gap. You could put a degree of auto-aim in Counter-Strike, but don’t make it faster or more accurate than a skilled human player can click on enemies’ heads. You still have to predict where the enemy players will come from.
Some features like remappable controls and input device support are absolutely necessary to make games playable for lots of people. I wouldn’t consider remapping controls a certain way to be an advantage. If someone comes up with a better control scheme for first-person games than keyboard-and-mouse, the high level players will be the first to adopt it.
In Quake Live, you can force the enemy character models to use a bright green colors, and all kinds of players make use of that without changing how people play Quake Live. Control assists like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s steering assist and Street Fighter 6’s Modern control style make the games playable for people who aren’t great with controllers, without breaking the whole game in favor of those mechanics.
