DISCRIMINATION in GAMES?

My brothers and I have been dealing with gaming and protanopia all of our lives. Throughout that time we've often been able to make our situation work regardless developer support. For example, for a while in year 1 of Destiny I had to write down what enemies used what kinds of shields and memorize it. On the other hand, we stopped playing Halo 5 multiplayer partially due to irreconcilable issues with colors in the game, especially when it came to reading the motion tracker. While I would love for a greater number of developers to be releasing colorblind options from launch, I realize that we fall into a genetic minority. In the end I'm the one who makes the decision to buy something, and so it falls upon me to educate myself before making a purchase. This is especially true for puzzle games as they often have the most varied uses of colors. If need be I'll just wait for the accessibility patch or mod to be released, or Jonathan Blow can send me some of those sweet color corrective En Chroma glasses.

I have red-green colourblindness (partial) and this is the first time I've ever seen anyone address it in the context of games. Ever since I was in early elementary school playing edutainment puzzle games, I've needed someone to help me distinguish what was blue vs. purple or green vs. yellow in colour-based puzzles. Honestly, I can only think of one tiny little flash game that I've ever noticed have a colourblind setting, allowing colour-based puzzles to be set in greyscale. I have lots of weird little problems in different games, like not being able to see the size of the health bars over enemies in Bioshock Infinite. I'm not saying that every game in existence requires colourblind settings, but given that I've never seen anyone else raise this issue with games before, it's really nice to be considered.

Personally I can attest to the fact that compatibility in general (be that disability, backwards, etc.) when it comes to software is a huge cost. Time, redesign, code refactor, it's not easy what so ever. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't try to be inclusive, but everyone needs to understand that there's a cost to it. We live in a world where a lot of people (including myself) are used to just getting things immediately and the way we want for the most part. We take for granted that it's just people like us behind the scenes working really hard. Especially in game development where it's the developers who take a lot of shit. That being said, if a small portion of the puzzles relied on color, then a small disclaimer before sale could have been added. I'm not taking sides, just hoping to get everyone to understand both... which they did in the video. So... yeah. LoL

I can see situations where you might have to sacrifice accessibility for the sake of making the game you want to make, but in this case I don't think it would have been a big problem to just warn people that colour blindness or deafness would present a barrier. Especially since the media have already revealed this "spoiler".

Has Lawrence done something with his hair? He looks different somehow...

I don't think it's the fact that the developer didn't include "color blind" and "hearing problems" options in his game make it discrimination...

If you'd have one of those problems, when buying a puzzle game, which mostly heavily relies on color and sound, you might want to check if it has those options before buying it...

Instead of "shaming" developers that didn't put those options in there, let's compliment those who did, focus on the positive...

I agree that a number of games could improve the options for people with certain disabilities and in single player games this is all the more possible but, and actually this is a BIG "but" the requirements for a completely "Level 3" game on http://includification.com/ would gut a good chunk of the competitiveness out of a lot of present multiplayer games - whether RTS, FPS or Sports - and that is not even taking into account the possibilities of trying to make a "Level 3) cognitively accessible competitive multiplayer game... ultimately competitive games are competitions and those with disibilities (cognititve or not) are going to do badly in games where their disability is a necessary skill.

That a lot of games are based on speed, finesse and tactical thinking abilities reflects on the interests of humans in competitions, these are the things we find challenging and therefore fun. When these are then games that are PvP then those with disability are going to suffer as they do in the real world and unless they are willing to be registered with the developer who can then put in a sufficiently secure systemt that allows them to be boosted in some ways without other players being able to hack into that system then there is no real solution to that - life is unfair... granted, it seems like we should do something about that but then it's unfair I couldn't be an astronaut, along with millions of other people who wanted to be but had any sort of visual impairment at all... when is that going to be fixed??

Having said all of that: it also seems unfair that The Witness is suffering from all this approbrium when Call of Duty, Battlefront, Star Wars and most other games from HUGE developers are not getting called out (except by small websites like includification.com) and yet a one man development team is!!! The poor guy might be able to include fixes at a big cost to value ratio, however the money made by BIG devs means that a few fixes like that for them is a pitance (especially when they can do a lot of them in engine and keep reusing that engine for a huge number of games... say like COD and the like).

Maybe the best solution would be for Steam to include a checkbox for developers to tick, "In which of these ways is this game not accessible?" That could help inform players and develop awareness amongst developers at the same time :)

If he knew that colorblindness and hearing impairment would prevent some gamers from playing his game, he should've mentioned it or fixed it. That said, when you're an indie dev I imagine there's a lot of things you just don't think about, and this was probably one of them. Not sure about the hearing impairment, but I don't understand how altering a few colors slightly could alter the game enough to produce any noticeable changes for the non-colorblind.

As for inclusivity, I'm all for it when the change is so miniscule that almost nobody would even notice. But I don't think that developers should have to put days of work into larger changes that could "dumb down" the experience for people that the game isn't even aimed at. Honestly I'm surprised that was even brought up in this video, considering the leap in logic between the two.

I think that games in general are/should be for everyone, but not every game needs to be or should be for everyone. So sorry but this game just isn't for color blind or hearing imparied people.

I don't see the Video Game industry ever reaching a point of standardized design for the colorblind. They're a small minority that the devs would have to spend a lot of time and money to adjust their game for.

This sounds like the sort of thing that modders could help with. Mod games to suit the colorblind.

I mean, you joke about discovering you're colourblind when playing The Witness but my friend found out while in a programming class and my uncle when he was 28, so it happens.

I think games should cater for this. I know people talk about how the modding community can step up but I don't see why the gaming community needs to fix these problems? The developers should be thinking about accessibility because it's not a small thing. 1 in 12 men are colour blind to some degree, that's a lot of people. I mean, people don't get in an uproar about subtitles in skyrim, but that's there for accessibility. Why not a colorblind setting?

Seriously? I get that it sucks you have a disability, but it should be your responsibility to check on those things, not just assuming someone is going to make accomidations for you.