How Are Games Biased Against the Disabled? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios

These problems aren't solved unless they give even bigger adventage to non-disabled.

I agree with this. Unfortunately, you're totally right about the limitations imposed by the big publishing brands who own the hardware. If we could somehow bring more creative thinkers into the industry, it would be a lot easier to create settings for disabled gamers by way of the controller availability. It would be great to have a foot controller for those who can't use their hands, or don't have any, for example. I would LOVE to incorporate more disabled ready features in my game.

is it that hard to understand how a consumer markeplace works? the market that pays is the market that gets provided for. and mostly able-bodied people make up the gaming market. oh god, i guess this means someone other than the big wigs of gaming have to gasp work hard and innovate themselves if they want a change for gaming with disabilities gasp

i cant stand up but i wont to play body contol game

i cant stand up but i wont to play body contol game

I honestly don't think there is a biased towards the disabled it's more like an inconvinience problem due to their physical disabilities and most developers haven't thought about it, however I totally agree that there should be more tools for them to enjoy video games, I agree with that.

And coming up with ideas is actually great and perhaps we can talk to the developers on how they can implement these ideas.

Being disabled means you need accommodation, not that the base must be changed. Someone in a wheelchair who wants to play basket cannot play in a regular team. It doesn't mean basketball is biased, but that we can look for a way someone in a wheelchair can do something similar. And we did make that happen, which has become a separate sport altogether. The bigger problem is the stigma on non-disabled people joining. You can't expect something to be exclusive, and mainstream at the same time. That is why those sports aren't spreading as fast as we'd like.
The same can be said about gaming. A game that uses sound is not biased against deaf people, but they just can't play at the level hearing people can. There are games that don't use sound in the game mechanics, which can be played where hearing and deaf people are at the same level. But playing a game with hearing will be harder, if not impossible if one is deaf. We can accommodate, but it won't be the same; either everyone can use it if they want, or it is a separate game. The same is true for colour blind people; we can accommodate, but since we can't measure when it is fair, it again becomes 'either or'. Either we allow everyone to use it, or we separate it.

In conclusion, let's not focus on blaming, but let's look at how we can accommodate disabled people. Let's have games that don't really on sound, or that can be played with one hand, or have special controllers. Colour-blind mode can be a thing, but don't expect it to always be available. Being accommodated is a special status, not a right. We can never be inclusive for all, as no matter how we do it there will always be someone left out, whether they miss an arm, miss an eye, are deaf, colour-blind or mute. And even if inclusive of all those we still aren't inclusive for the blind and the mentally challenged.
You would have thought of this if it weren't true that 'social issues' mattered more to you than gaming itself. You care more about those who can't play or won't be able to play, than how we can heighten our experience by adding more and more input and output.

given that many games require some level of skill, games may not always be inclusive of even what we might consider normally able people.

I broke my hand a few days ago and had to get a splint so I can't use a keyboard (I can type with my other hand but) I can still use a controller since I have two fingers and my thumb free on the splinted hand thankfully so I can game on my PS4 but I can't play most PC games this way. :-(

help the disabled gamers,sure.I never thought of this.I just don't understand why this video has over 500 dislikes.

I've got muscular dystrophy and make my own ways to play. I use GlovePIE, joyToKey and speech recognition. What would be cool though would be paralympic style video game tournaments.

The simple fact is that businesses produce video games. The purpose of a business is to make money. The reason so many places are handicapped accessible is because it is government mandated. Most businesses would not have chosen to build ramps, exchange doorknobs etc. if they were not forced to. Furthermore like you point out in video games the handicaps out there are many and diverse. Unfortunately each one has its own set of problems and would make addressing most not cost effective. However, as more and more people that play video get older more of them will suffer these handicaps and perhaps one day it will be cost effective to make these changes.

t what point do you just look at games and run out of things to complain about? Why do games need to meet all these standards? They are not a hospital. People with no hands do not need to be able to access them. If you have no hands, I'm pretty sure you either (A have bigger problem on your . . . ummm .. .  hands . . . or (B can work around it. If disabled people want other ways to control games, guess what? companies will meet their demands. We see it time and time again. Enough disabled people speak up, a market is created, and companies develop new products.

This guy is hilarious, he (or PBS) go out to find things to complain about and don't even get the facts right. He treats disabled people like their idiots who cannot figure anything out for themselves in this video (I exclude people with physical deformities from this because he does have a point with that, but hearing impaired and color blind are a different story).

Game companies have no reason to make the games color blind accessible, that's on the users side and it should be as easy as downloading a program to do it for them or simply adjusting their own monitor/tvs color balance. If video games started doing this then every color blind person would have to adjust their monitor/tv settings to compensate for the video games new color scheme. From what I have read, many color blind people know what colors they cant see and know how to adjust color settings for themselves to compensate.

I don't want to sound insensitive to people with hearing loss but how would you suggest we make a person who cannot hear, hear? If they have a head set all they should have to do is adjust the sound setting ON THEIR SIDE! these people know what where they have trouble hearing and should be able to use basic setting to compensate, have 50% hearing loss in your left ear, there are often ways to adjust that so that you can hear that side louder on the user side.

uuugh, he has a point with the hardware for people with physical deformities but if he doesn't know how to remap a games control scheme he has no right to comment on physical game limitations. I don't know if I have seen a game in the last decade that didn't let you remap the controls.

On his macro point, there is a bid difference on a person using a macro on an MMO to farm gold and a person using a macro button on a controller/keyboard that are often built in for able bodied players to do the same thing, I HAD A MACRO BUTTON ON THE N64 so people could do just that. Ill admit he has a bit of a point with the thing about some people needing markers to find people if they are visually impaired.

Now for a short rant about the rest. He said that the rest of the world is becoming more inclusive more quickly and mentioned buses with wheel chair ramps, for on thing being in a wheel chair does not stop you from playing video-games, that's is a mute point even if I don't mention buses are a necessity while games are recreation. He talks about game text begin to small to read and then mentions that all tv programs have subtitles now, these are conflicting points. He makes it sound like the games text size is the problem and then acts like the games don't have subtitles, pick a side, I haven't came across a game in the last decade that hasn't had subtitles. He also mentions phones and computers have siri....he does realize that there were voice controls and other things long before that right? besides that, how do you suppose someone controls a fast paced game with their voice? Its defiantly out of the of FPS or fighting games, though it could work for point and click. I know he has tried to redefine the term "gamer" but he definitely is not a console/pc gamer (probably a mobile gamer and thats why he made that what a gamer means video, so he could call himself one) if he did not already realize that many of these things already exist. thus ends my rant.

Sounds just like what happened in schools :D Bring down everyone else to the levels of the lowest.

I'm a little saddened you mentioned a variety of physical disabilities, but not learning disabilities. learning disabilities might be a core reason I like to lower the difficulty setting on games.

Why isn't left-handedness a disability? It might not be a severe one, but it is an inability to do things the majority way. (And no, I'm not being flippant. I rely on a guide cane & walking sticks to get around, which I think is pretty obvious disability.)

"Next week, we dive into the evil corporations that are biasing colourblind tests against the colourblind."

some peoples comments are disgusting

Gosh this video is really cool. I know it's kinda old but I get so excited when people mention accessibility for d/Deaf/HoH people in video games!!! Assassin's Creed 1 was so difficult for me, as someone who plays games for stories, with its lack of subtitles. It's the reason why I tend to lean towards Nintendo games, being as most of them don't have voice acting, and when they do, they readily come along with big subtitles. What a cool video!!!

A better phrasing would be 'How do disabilities inhibit video game play.'

These disabilities cause problems in many aspects of life, and the blame does not fall on the video game industry. The word 'disability' itself defines an inability to function in the same way as the majority. Yes disabilities are a sad fact of life, but I think it is in fact an unreasonable ask for developers to build games with these people in mind as a priority.

Of course the middle ground exists, but games should not be compromised.

The problem isn't that developers don't want to cater to a bigger number of people. The problem is that it's often not really that doable. How can Halo be accessible to the blind, the one-handed, or those with crippling arthritis in the fingers without limiting what the player can do? How can racing games be more accessible to those with serious motion sickness? How can puzzle games that rely on matching different colors be more accessible to those with color blindness?Left-handed people? Give the option to move with the right stick and aim with the left. Maybe have ABXY perform the d-pad's tasks and vice-versa.

My mother, though she loves games and gaming (seriously, she's online and playing almost all the time when not at work) can't play almost any games with motion on screen, because she gets severe migraines. I mean like the worst kind, the habe-tolay-down-and-keep-perfectly-still-because-every-slight-movement-is-agony type. She hoped to play the Witcher, because it's not in first person, but nope, same problem. She's confined to strategy and point and click games, and even those get sometimes too extreme for her with visual effects.
I had bone necrosis as a child and though it was not a very severe type and because of my young age it reversed completly, it took a tole on my bone structure, mostly my legs as I was unable to walk between the ages of 4,5 to about 6. I can walk and do stuff normally but as much as I love DDR, one round and I gotta rest for like, an hour.
Disabilities come in many forms and sometimes people don't realize that just because you have controll of all four limbs, both eyes and ears, that doesn't mean you're not disabled.

Next at nine, are legless people discriminated from track team?

I like where your motive is but... its really easier said than done. You said Valve is a godsend for disabled gamers but what they do isn't something unheard of in games, and it really doesn't even help those who have impaired motor skills.
That being said, if we really want to make all games disability-friendly, it will take a lot of creative thinking on the part of the developers. Like, they have to tailor gameplay modes to anyone without unevenly stacking certain modes (in the case of multiplayer). But it would be cool to see this done on a larger scale.

the KINECT does not detect you if you're sitting down.... >_> i know this cuz im in a wheelchair and i have tried it..

I have hearing loss, so it's always sad when a game doesn't have closed captions or at least subtitles, but even subtitles leave a lot out that I may have ask about or look up online if I feel like I missed something important. I always put the volume up for footsteps and speech, and turn everything else down a bit. But some games still have so much ambient noise that the speech is hard to hear if captions are lacking, or are really small (I have bad eyesight too). I got a larger tv to help with the size though, but it would have been better and less money to be able to adjust the size.

I know for a fact the Xbox one has a menu just for controller re-mapping from the sticks triggers and all the buttons and it has a zoom mode color blind option and that's just on the console not in game I spent hours exploring and testing the features

You need to hear in the FPS.

DESIGNERS ARE SO CLUELESS ABOUT THE SOCIAL STUFF THAT MATTERS!
HURR DURR

sthap plz. you make me cry ;_;

this just in if you cant hear your being discriminated against

th- this is a joke right? is battlefield supposed to add SOMUNE SHOOTIN BEHIN U text to help people with hearing loss? also, 99% of games to have button remapping, and a lot of them now have colorblind mode, thats about as far as you can go without putting massive amounts of money in or making the game unfair by just turning on the "tell me when someone shoots" option.

I'm not sure what update it was, but Minecraft has a decent subtitle system. It tells you what type of noise is happening, and if that noise is happening on your left or your right. (like it differentiates between your swimming and squid swimming)
(I don't know if it senses other players because I haven't gotten a chance to test it out.)

It is so true that beingcolorblind affects distinguishing teams.

What about disabilities that make it too easy to play games-- by which I mean mental disabilities like ADHD and OCD that can react too strongly to a game's rewards system or become fixated on perfecting their game play? My favorite part of Assassin's Creed 1 was how Desmond was literally told to go bed after every boss fight, because I usually needed to do just that every time. Also the ability to go back and replay sections at any time while still progressing through the main story.

Being a blind gamer is dificult but I find ways to make it work.

I'm having great time disliking your videos :D

No. Stop. Games are not "biased" against the disabled. Don't conflate expecting special accommodations with "bias". That's deceptive and slimy. They're not going and actively attacking the disabled. A thing isn't "biased" just because it doesn't accommodate your special situation.

In fact, such accommodation is actually special treatment. It requires the world to revolve around you and your special circumstance. It also requires extra work just for you, pulling attention away from core game qualities and concepts. It's kind of saying "I'm more important than everyone else getting a game focused on its actual core qualities."

"The rest of the world is doing it" (for necessities) doesn't mean a specialty hobby is obligated to put that before design. Nature sure doesn't accommodate disabilities, but determined disabled folk have found ways to do exact same activities without any accommodation. Where possible, that should still be a thing. Overcoming your disability rather than expecting the world to cater to it like you're broken. Yes, where they have the extra resources to add things like that, it's nice, but it should never be a requirement for a game to even be developed. That could hurt gaming tremendously for the sake of a minority of people.

speaking of disabilities why are you wearing glasses without lenses.

But many games do have colour blind settings.

Hey you know what let's make a video that targets games for reasons that could apply to nearly everything.
We need to work on this not just in games but everywhere.

im so happy this idiot stopped making videos.

Well the gaming beaver can access games alright

PBS disables their comment section that has anything to do with our President Trump because they are liars. Boycott PBS. No donations.

Thank you for this support

Now I have a few problems with this video but i'll just mention the most obvious one for now because I'm busy writing a paper on this exact subject and changes devs are making.
You say that TVs have close captions for people with hearing issues. This is true. However did you not realise that subtitles are an industry standard? Even when this video went up they had subtitles in pretty much every game that needed it. Have you ever played a game before?

I have a physical disability ware I have 2 fingers on my right hand and i xbox with my chin

Damien Brenks is crippled in the events of WATCH_DOGS. And, he destroyed Chicago. Again, you have done no researching into the topic.

Hell no but professional sports does

The NFL is biased against the disabled