Most MMO developers are worried about seeming “money-grubbing.” Whenever they introduce a new pay feature, they are stung by people who say the company is nickel-and-diming them. But in general, this is just another case of MMO developers paying too much attention to a tiny percentage of their audience. The general audience of WoW or EQ2, for instance, would pay good money for certain luxury services. But you need to know how to present these services in order to make them happiest, and in many cases this can be surprising: more expensive is better.

Let’s take in-game weddings, for example. One company I was close to planned to add in-game weddings for a small fee, say $20. Doing a simple $20 version isn’t where the real payoff is, though. Perhaps that makes it nice and accessible to roleplayers who want to have a half-dozen “marriages” in their character’s career, but it isn’t particularly appealing to people who are actually getting married. Diamonds aren’t the traditional wedding ring because they’re prettier than other rings. It’s because they’re also really expensive, and they make good tokens of tribute. At times of celebration or gathering, many people want to spend top dollar in order to have top-dollar accommodations. The $20 marriage package comes off as cheap.

Not that you shouldn’t have a $20 wedding package if you feel strongly about it. But have better versions, too. If the $20 version gets you a room, cake, and costumes, then the $50 version should get all that plus an NPC band, catering NPCs, a fountain that buffs everyone in the room for a week, etc. But that’s small potatoes. Go further. Let people have really special events. The $500 version has a customer service rep on-hand for two hours, providing services such as crowd control (keeping rowdy players off the stage), creating custom effects as desired (perhaps the bride and groom want to ceremonially kill a monster together?), and to perform any other wedding roles desired, such as the emcee, DJ, whatever else you can make work in your game. Make it special. Put some time into it.

Then go further. The $2500 version has all of that, plus it’s attended by two game developers who will make short remarks at the in-game reception. This version also includes a real-life framed photo from the wedding, signed by the entire game team. Maybe a unique in-game trinket, too. Add whatever else you can think of to make it feel worthwhile and special.

It’s not really about making money. Even at $2500, the development investment combined with the disruption to your dev team means that your ROI (return on investment) is probably pretty low compared to other things you could do. But man, will it make people feel special! In a game with 100,000 players, I’d expect you’d get 10 or so $2500 weddings a year. Those will be events that participants talk about for many years to come. Plus, you have a good chance of turning those people into lifers — dedicated fans that will stick with the game through thick and thin, and who keep other people playing, too. You should always work hard to create lifers. And the best way to create lifers is to give people personal attention.

Anyway, I got a bit distracted. But the point is this: make your luxury services luxurious! Services in this vein can include weddings, bar mitzvahs, company meetings, funeral services, memorials, sweet 16 parties, and so on. Don’t skimp, and don’t worry about people saying you’re nickel-and-diming them to death. Those people weren’t going to buy your luxury services anyway.

 PS - a tip: start by designing and implementing the most elaborate version first, then create the stripped-down versions second. Don’t try it the other way, it’ll be much harder and a lot more frustrating for everyone involved.

Damion Schubert, an old-timer in the MMO development world, posted an excellent discussion of some common ways that designers misuse Richard Bartle’s taxonomy of MUD players over at his blog Zen of Design.

Now I’ve expressed my opinion of the Bartle types before: useful as a very quick shorthand, but of limited value for really understanding your audience in depth. So as you might imagine I was pleased to see Damion reinforcing some of the points I’ve made myself — especially since more people listen to him than to me!

The most important point he raised (aside from the catchall #9: “Don’t assume that Bartle’s is the answer.”) is to my way of thinking a combination of #1 (”Don’t assume that players are only one of the above.”) and #2 (”Don’t assume player types are fixed.”). Unfortunately, I don’t think Damion goes quite far enough in his caution. In my experience, players don’t just change over time — they can shift dramatically from moment to moment. And yet, at any given moment a player may well be interested in only one of the major areas. It’s for this reason that I find it easier to think in terms of motivations rather than player types.

On the other hand, I think that I am going to have to steal #6 (”Don’t be too literalist with the title names.”) for my future rants. It’s a great point. The example that Damion gives — that explorers are not just people who want to sight see — is one I run into all the time myself. I like to sight see and explore the complexities of game systems, but my moods and motivations when I do each of those activities are very, very different. Sightseeing is for relaxation; system exploration satisfies my urge to solve puzzles and show off in front of other gamers. Similarly, killers aren’t necessarily all about killing — there are other types of competition — and socializers are often the people running the guilds.

At any rate, it’s a good read when you have a chance!

Not that kind of grouper!

It was a classic example of learning the wrong lesson. EverQuest was huge — HUGE! While Asheron’s Call was small. EQ was all about forced grouping, while AC was all about soloing. It is easy, therefore, to see what our conclusion was. When it came time to make AC2, obviously it needed to be a grouping game!

Even as I speak, developers are making retarded mistakes just like this. They look at what WoW did and make leaps of logic. Correlation is not causation, but we developers fall for this rookie mistake over and over.

World of Warcraft has shown us that we were wrong about grouping: MMO players do not need to be pressured into grouping in order for an MMO to be successful. But on the other hand, when you reach WoW’s level cap, you are almost forced to be a grouper (and a raider, to boot) if you want to do fun things. Now, this approach doesn’t seem to be particularly successful if we look at how many players leave the game when they hit the level cap. The players don’t want to switch from soloing to grouping, so they go away.

So what’s a useful lesson to learn here, if you’re trying to make a new game? Is it “our game should start out as a soloing game and then graduate to a grouping game?” Personally, I think WoW succeeded in spite of that, not because of it. The current wisdom is that you can’t possibly provide enough solo content to keep everyone happy, so you shouldn’t try … but keeping everyone happy isn’t the point. The point is keeping the most people possible happy. Would WoW retain more people if they added new solo content instead of new raid content? We can only guess at that.

Asheron’s Call puts out monthly solo content and has always had extremely high player retention. Would Asheron’s Call have even better retention if it had high level raiding instead? With the tiny number of data points we have, any conclusion like this is just a guess. Nevertheless, we’ve already created “conventional wisdom” about the topic!

Here’s a better lesson to learn from WoW: they did all kinds of things that went completely against the conventional wisdom of the time, and yet they succeeded. You know, stuff like having a clean launch (their post-launch stability was terrible for the first six months), offering fast transportation (WoW has more travel time than EQ2 by almost an order of magnitude), or forcing people to group. Does that mean your game needs to do these things exactly like WoW? That would be a pretty naive interpretation of the known facts, wouldn’t it?

Wouldn’t a better conclusion be “the conventional wisdom we have right now might actually be wrong, or overblown, or irrelevant?”

When you’re designing a game, one of the key things you have to decide is what verbs are available to the player. “Verbs” in this context are anything a player can do at a conceptual level. Typical MMO verbs are things like attacking, running away, running around exploring, buffing people, taunting, and so on. Our traditional MMO verb list is pretty well established, and pretty dull.

Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary Nintendo designer, once explained that making a new Nintendo game involves picking the verbs first and adding context later, once you’re sure you have fun verbs. MMOs should be no different — during the planning stages you need to know why classes are fun, what powers players can look forward to as they advance, what neat tricks they’re going to be able to pull in dungeons and so on.

New verbs can make anything feel fresh. Want to make yet another fantasy MMO? No problem — just make sure it has lots of fresh new verbs!

Of course, there’s a reason we’ve settled into the limited set of “traditional” MMO verbs: they’re easy to code and easy to balance. The more we break the mold, the more work we have to do. But that’s the difference between an amazing new game and another me-too game.

Let’s look at some examples of fun but tricky verbs that some MMOs add to their repertoire:

Feign Death: With feign death, the character falls over and pretends to be dead. This is a relatively low-tech verb, and shows up in lots of games. But even so, this one is rife with exploit conditions — detection-sphere issues if your game has server-side physics, for instance. Plus, you have to handle all sorts of special cases. If I kill 51% of a monster and then feign death, does the monster go back “on the market” so that anybody can attack it? If so, do I get any of the XP from the monster when it finally dies? You also have to work out how group aggro works in tandem with feign death, and many other special cases.

It’s actually a tricky and time-consuming verb to add. But it’s fun!

Invisibility: Another inherently fun power is invisibility. Developers fret about this a lot, because if a game has invisibility that means that every dungeon has to be designed with invisibility in mind. Important guards need to be able to “see invisibility” so they can keep players from just tromping through the whole dungeon without fighting anything. (Nevermind that this is exactly what the player expects invisibility to be good for!) Most games that give players invisibility go out of their way to dramatically limit its usefulness in PvE combat. But as long as there are still enough times where being invisible “pays off”, it’s a fun power for players to have. In EQ2, it’s a great way to go AFK — if you turn invisible, only a few of the wandering monsters will be able to detect you.

Flight: The ability to fly is just inherently fun. You don’t even have to work at it, it’s just fun. But it’s not so easy to add. With flight, players can simply hop over those impenetrable mountains, skip the ambush up ahead, and go right to the boss. It takes a lot of careful planning to make flight a viable — but still useful and fun — game power.

An even bigger problem with flight is the engine requirements: most MMO engines simply can’t do flight very well. When you’re up in the air, you can see a lot further, which means a lot more scenery has to be rendered, which means the client engine needs to be that much more robust.

City of Heroes has flight, and it’s one of the most fun things about the game. They don’t cheat people out of it, either — flight really is often a useful shortcut to solving problems. This makes players feel clever. World of Warcraft has flight for its new expansion-pack areas.

Many games have “flight on rails” as a travel method — griffons in EQ2 and WoW, for instance. This isn’t the same thing at all, though you have to solve some of the same tech concerns in order to provide it. I will give EQ2’s version kudos, though, because you can jump off your griffon at any point in the travel. That gives you more options for getting places faster, and makes it feel less like a really long, unskippable cut-scene (which is what WoW’s griffon flights are). Of course, at low level, leaping off a high-flying griffon is basically a suicide jump …

Charming: This is another fun power that is terrifying to developers. “Wait, so players can just CHARM the guards into helping the players kill the boss? That’s an exploit, not a feature!” It just sets balance on its ear, making your pretty spreadsheet infinitely more complex. But it’s fun!

EQ2’s Coercer class can charm creatures and use them as pets. This is incredibly satisfying: you can charm a gnoll guard into attacking other nearby guards, killing two birds with one stone. Or if you’re feeling cruel, you can charm a baby spider into attacking its mother, so that momma has to kill its own offspring. (Coercers are an Evil class, after all!)

But it seems EQ2’s designers couldn’t stand how powerful this was (especially in a raid situation), so they’ve nerfed Coercers again and again. These days, Coercers have a hard time maintaining a charmed pet, and it’s not as much fun to play anymore. Too bad! Making this verb into a fun, yet balanced, mechanic is very tricky. (Though for the record, I think EQ2 is erring on the side of weak instead of fun.)

Taming is a controlled version of Charming. You can use this to bypass a monster (in the right circumstances), but usually the monster loses most of its powers once it’s tamed. Plus, there are always limitations on the creatures that can be tamed. Nevertheless, taming is a fun part of WoW, DAoC, and UO.

What are your game’s fun verbs going to be?

NEW VERBS are where it’s at. The game’s setting is much less important to me than what I get to do. I could easily enjoy another 20 fantasy MMO’s, as long as they all have fresh exciting new things for me to do! This is where designers’ creativity is really put to the test — can you invent a bunch of fun new gameplay options, and then reign them in so that they aren’t overpowered, but are still tons of fun?

Some other fun verbs to think about:

• Transforming into a beast or monster (like AC2’s Alchemist or WoW’s Druid)
• Controlling hordes of pets at once (like City of Villains’ Mastermind or AC2’s Elementalist)
• Growing 50 feet tall — and becoming kick-ass as a result (instead of it just being a visual effect)
• Controlling the in-game weather
• Being able to create dopplegangers of yourself (like EQ2’s Illusionist)
• Transportation powers like teleportation and portal summoning
• Causing earthquakes on the terrain
• Imprisoning your foes in alternate dimensions (like AC2’s Oubliette… interesting in PvP)
• Controlling nearby water to create tidal waves on command
• Creating long-range turrets that can decimate foes at distance (like AC2’s Tactician)
• Powers that change with the season or time of day (becoming more powerful at night)
• Innovative movement powers, like skiing downhill, leaping tall buildings, super-speed, or drilling through the ground (City of Heroes has many of these)

You can’t slip these sorts of verbs into your game at the last minute. You have to plan them ahead of time. So pick as many fun verbs for your game as possible. This is the designer’s chance to really shine. Worry less about balance and more about being amazing. Just be amazing! Almost everything else will be forgiven if you’re amazing.

Have you ever met a designer (or armchair designer) who is excited about MMOs because they have a story they want to tell? It’s a story that they’re sure is going to change the world. What an odd thing for them to believe!

When I was first working on Star Trek Online, the team was initially excited by the idea that we could breathe new life into the Star Trek franchise with our game. There are some amazing stories to be told there, and maybe, just maybe, STO could be the vehicle that reinvigorates the Star Trek name! But one by one, we all came to grips with the impracticality of it. Even if the stories are the best ever, they wouldn’t have any effect on the public’s perception of Star Trek. Video games are not a mainstream media. Neither are books, to be clear. Have any of the higher-quality Star Trek novels ever altered the public perception of Star Trek?

You could try to argue that World of Warcraft has broken through and become a mainstream phenomenon. Look at how many TV shows it’s on! But yet… none of those actually convey any story. They don’t even convey how the game actually plays, or why people would play it. Scratch the surface and there’s no real coverage there at all.

Of course, you can argue that WoW doesn’t have any story to convey. I think that’s a fair assessment. Much of the in-game story is banal at best. The quest text was clearly written by level designers in a hurry.

Now, Star Trek Online has a dedicated writing team, which is unusual for an MMO, and the team has actual game writing experience, which is even more unusual. But even so, they are not going to change the world with their story. At the very best, their story might occasionally entertain the player in the way that a good novel would.

For whatever reason, most designers (and armchair designers) who say they have the perfect story in mind are not writers. They have never written much of anything, but they figure it can’t be that hard because they already have a plot worked out in their head! This is in stark contrast to an actual novelist, who might spend six months to a year creating a quality novel. An MMO has to do all that plus be an MMO.

If you’re going to do any writing, pick up a copy of James Frey’s “How to Write a Damn Good Novel.” This is a great book, and its lessons can be directly mapped to an MMO story. This book will have you creating character details for your main characters, stepsheets for your plot, and redoing your dialog over and over until it’s sharp and crisp.

Now, an average-length novel has 172 pages of background information and stepsheets written before any of the actual novel writing even begins. And an MMO’s step sheets are going to be a whole lot bigger than a novel’s, given the vast number of possible plot branches. Plus you’ll need to rewrite everything several times. And of course, a novelist only actually gets good at their craft after they’ve done several practice novels.

So why do you think your story, with all of 20 pages of back-notes and almost no time for dialog revision, is going to be a masterpiece? If you’re hoping to change the world with your game, you’re in the wrong field. Instead of writing an MMO with a novel-quality plot, just write a damn novel.

I don’t mean to say that we designers shouldn’t write story into our games. We just shouldn’t let it go to our heads. :) All designers occasionally have to pretend to be writers. When that happens, understand that the quality level of what you’re producing is not on par with a damn good novel. Tighten your focus so that its purpose is just to engage and entertain the player briefly, as they go from one activity to the next. Even that is going to be plenty hard enough.

They say that artists see inspiration everywhere. Now I’m not going to get into the “games as art” debate today, but I have noticed that I tend to see the world through my own MMO-colored glasses.

For example, I have recently been reading up quite a bit on web design in an effort to make my various web pages and blogs more usable. I found a really excellent source of great advice on web design in the book Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug. (That’s it on the right; note that both links are affiliate links in case you feel like buying this book.)

In addition to some truly useful web design advice, I also found the philosophy to be very applicable to MMOs. Paraphrased: If you want people to play your game, don’t make them think too hard about how to do it — just let them do it!

And check out this direct quote from a section called “The myth of the Average User” — tell me if this doesn’t set off MMO design bells for you:

The more you watch users carefully and listen to them articulate their intentions, motivations, and thought processes, the more you realize that their individual reactions to Web pages are based on so many variables that attempts to describe users in terms of one-dimensional likes and dislikes and futile and counter-productive. Good design, on the other hand, takes this complexity into account.

Another example: I read Seth Godin’s blog. Seth is a marketer; he tend to express his knowledge through marketing. But what he has to say goes well beyond marketing — or perhaps it’s easier to say that it also addresses the components of our lives that are fundamentally marketing even when we don’t think of them that way. At any rate, I often find his posts help illuminate aspects of MMO design for me. Check out his post on Mean vs. Median in which he says (slightly snipped for clarity):

Consider a website that reports a mean (average) of 2.1 pages per visitor.
Then realize that the median is 9…
That’s because there’s a large number of people visiting 1 page and a large number visiting 10 or 20.
Once you see that, you will completely change your understanding of what’s happening and what you need to do to change it.

You’ll find the same behavior among McDonald’s customers. The typical (mean) American eats a meal at McDonald’s once every two weeks. But I never go and some people eat there twice a day. That’s a lot more useful to know.

Put these very disparate bits of inspiration together and what do you have? That there is no single average player in your game, and that reducing complex behavior down to a single number to describe that non-existent average player is meaningless.

But more than that, by assembling bits of wisdom from other fields and applying it to your own, you are building a deeper, multi-faceted toolbox to understand your audience. Or so I like to tell myself as I obsessively filter everything I read through my MMO-colored glasses …

A pet peeve of mine is overblown engines created by teams who haven’t even made a single MMO engine before. The honest truth is that most MMO development teams collapse because they can’t make the technology work. (This is very rarely the reason they admit to, though.) The server is harder to make than they think. The content creation pipeline is vastly more difficult than they expect. So MMO teams fail, more often than not.

In this environment of rampant failure, you would expect to see pragmatic engineers and designers who have modest goals and hope to do just a few cool things with their first game. Make a game with a working engine first, then go crazy with your SECOND game, right? But no, nobody thinks that way. There are lots of reasons why not, but a HUGE part of it is that they don’t think it’s going to be that hard.

“Our engineers are really smart. They’ve read why everybody else failed, and they aren’t going to make those mistakes. We have a brilliant new architecture idea that solves everything.” The sad part is that I never get to say I-told-you-so, because after these guys’ games collapse, the last thing they need is me kicking them when they’re down.

Have you ever looked into the various third-party MMO engines for sale? They are really very primitive, if they work at all. These are companies whose sole reason for existence is to create an MMO engine. And they can’t make it happen in a timely manner. And here your team expects to do all of that, plus make the world’s craziest new features on top of that and add 5,000 hours of content too. In two years. With an estimated cost of just 15 million.

Same old story.

I made the same sort of mistake when I decided to make a casual game. “Sure, everybody says they can’t make real money with indie downloadable games, but they’re doing it wrong. I’m really, really smart. I’m going to knock this out of the park.” My game was basically a failure. It sure didn’t make me rich. But I learned a lot — things I hadn’t even conceived of when I started – and my second casual game could have a real chance of success.

MMO engineers do the same thing. They think they’re going to knock it out of the park on their very first try. But in reality, it’s their second or third try that has a real chance of being amazing. Of course, unlike casual games, an MMO game can often take three, or four, or five years of toiling to get that first game out the door. That’s a big chunk of your lifetime to lose if you’re going to fail in the end.

Engineers are inherently optimists, and the best engineers are incredibly self-confident. I don’t want to change that. Hell, if people honestly assessed the risk involved in creating an MMO, very few teams would try to make one. And that would be sad.

But do me a favor. Start small. Yes, sure, your team is really smart. Way smarter than the team at Perpetual who couldn’t make their server and pipeline work after 4 years of continuous development. Sure, okay. But instead of shooting for the moon right away, could you make a simple version first? Make it a zoned architecture, like an old EQ1 server. Make that work, and if you have time left over, make it zone-free.

Just… take it in steps, okay? Sure, maybe you’ll have time to add flying mounts and realtime terrain deformation. But first just make sure you have path planning and collision detection.

You say your game will be the first to support 50,000 simultaneous players in a non-instanced contiguous landscape? Nice! But before you do that part, can you make sure your server supports 3,000 simultaneous players? (And no, your prototype that can handle 200 connections is not a good enough test. A few hundred are easy. Thousands are surprisingly hard.)

It makes me so sad when people fail after years of blood and sweat. And these failures could often be salvaged into fun games if the team hadn’t shot for the moon right from the get-go. Yes, you’re smart. I sure hope you are, because otherwise you haven’t got a chance of making an MMO. But being smart is just a prerequisite. Those other people who failed… most of them were really smart too.

Developers love new technology. They love it more than players, honestly. This bleeds into developers’ perspectives of their universe, and that’s unfortunate.

Here’s an example: “Wouldn’t it be great if players could beat the ultimate bad guy boss in the story arc, and then a giant rift opens up and a castle appears? That would be so great. Wait, you say that’s been done before?” Back as far as Asheron’s Call 1, developers would pull stunts like this, to great effect. I remember an AC1 event where the ultimate boss dungeon had a big padlock on the door (so to speak) that unlocked itself at a predetermined time. About 12 hours after that, the servers came down. When they came back up, the “aftermath” version of the universe appeared. Players loved it!

“But that’s cheating. It’s not real time, it’s just a hack.” Let’s look at that for a minute, because it’s a pretty common complaint. Sure, it was rigged. The players couldn’t fail, right? Well, in Asheron’s Call 2 we experimented with letting players fail — if a given server hadn’t completed the quest, their world didn’t get updated until later. But it’s still cheating, right? Because it didn’t happen in real time!

Real time wouldn’t really help here, though. Let’s suppose it happened in real time. A group of max-level characters would complete the final quest at 1AM, and everybody who happened to be online at that point would be shown a dazzling real time spectacle. All 50 of ‘em. Everybody else who logged in the next day didn’t get anything out of the “real time” feature you worked so hard on. It’s just not a very good use of development time. And although it’s not as sexy, players enjoy the “fake” version very much. Don’t be afraid to go there just because it isn’t ridiculously over-engineered.

Now don’t get me wrong, some cheap and effective realtime content can go far. In AC1 and AC2, we would have magical portals that appear and disappear in real-time, gating content and quests. Worked great, very easy to implement. Still not sexy (to designers), but it worked great.

Keep it simple! Figure out the easiest way to get the results you want. Do that, not the really hard version. Making and running an MMO is already inconceivably difficult without piling on random features you don’t need.

The upcoming EQ2 expansion has some really nice artwork. (There’s some screenshots over on MMOGNation.) I’m sad to say that the game is still never going to win any prizes for beauty, and that’s because the characters are so ugly that it detracts from even the most beautiful environment.

But nevertheless, the past few expansions have done wonders for making EQ2 not look retarded. The last expansion was also extremely fun — in fact, for the first time since I started playing, I was willing to vouch for the game to my friends. “Try it,” I said, “but make sure you start in the new newbie area! The old areas are horrible.”

This brings up the question: when should you redo the art for your old zones? EQ2 has repopulated many old zones, making them more fun to play, but they don’t redo the art — they just redo the quests and monsters.

The old starter areas are still ugly, overly complex, and (to be honest) not very well laid out. I’m not sure what can be done with zones like Freeport, which looks like this in most areas (click to view):

The theme for Freeport seems to be “intentionally horrible-looking slums.” They did a great job with the horrible-looking slum bit, but why would anybody ever want to live here? Still, I bet a couple weeks spent retexturing the city could work wonders.

An easier case can be made for zones like Antonica, which aren’t inherently super-ugly, they just suffer from bad texturing. Check out the “freshly mown grass” look in the fields (click to view):

Here I suspect an expert texture artist could fix up the zone’s art very quickly.

So when should you redo a newbie zone’s art? There are two good reasons not to do this:

• It takes time away from creating new content for high-level players
• All your existing players have already come to accept the ugliness of the old zones

And there are reasons to go ahead and redo the old zones:

• It ensures that newbies have a positive experience with your game no matter where they choose to start their characters
• It makes your existing players less embarrassed about the game (which means they are more likely to recommend it to friends)

Weighing the pros and cons, I could certainly see EQ2 writing off these old zones as a lost cause. After all, they are unlikely to ever get a huge influx of new players. The players they do get are likely to be friends of players, and their friends can tell them to avoid the old content!

But at the same time, they seem to be adding more and more new low-level content with each expansion. This tells me they’re still hoping to get new players. If they expect to get new players, why don’t they tweak the old zones before they make all-new ones?

Here’s my guess: none of the artists or designers are excited about redoing old zones; they’d much rather make new art instead. So it keeps getting pushed off the schedule. (You’d be surprised how often these sorts of things get delayed because of a lack of enthusiasm.)

You are probably losing customers because of accessibility, and it would be trivial for you to fix it. I don’t mean the esoteric kinds of “accessibility” here, like the “30 minute playtime window” or making your newbie experience really intuitive. I mean the old-fashioned kind of user-interface accessibility. Games suck at it, and this is frustrating because a lot of accessibility isn’t hard to support. Here are three easy-to-implement accessibility features that will make 12% of your players like your game a whole lot more.

Easy Accessibility #1: Lefty Mouse Support

It’s not a newfangled invention.
This Mouse Options screen is 20 years old.

Some studies place the number of left handed people at 15 to 25% of the population. Not all of these people use the mouse with their left hand, and fewer still swap the mouse buttons on their mice (it’s an option in the control panel, and has been available since Windows 2.0). So let’s say a mere 2% of the population has their mouse buttons swapped so right-clicking is left-clicking and vice versa. That still means you’re alienating 2 out of every 100 customers if you ignore their choice. And every DirectX game ignores this choice unless you explicitly support it.

This is extremely common in games, and very aggravating for people like me who use swapped mice. The otherwise-excellent game Bioshock did not support left mouse swap. It was possible to reconfigure what the mouse buttons do in the 3D world, but not in menus or in the hacking mini-game. More annoying was that during the hacking game, right-clicking auto-completes the level, and blows you up if you didn’t finish it properly. So every time I started the hacking game, I’d click something and boom! I’d blow up. I quit in irritation from that more than once.

In a game where I can kinda-sorta remap the mouse buttons most of the time, I can survive, albeit with ill grace. In a game where I can’t remap the mouse buttons at all, I just don’t play. Clicking the left mouse button with my left hand is awkward and uncomfortable, and I’m not going to do that for prolonged periods just to play your game.

The tragedy here is that supporting lefty-swapped mice in DirectX apps is incredibly trivial.

Make this call whenever you receive a mouse event.

BOOL IsMouseSwapped = GetSystemMetrics(SM_SWAPBUTTON);

If the function returns true then turn a left event into a right event, and vice versa. That’s it! That’s all there is to it. (Don’t worry about changing in-game help text to say “right-click” instead of “left-click” and vice versa; we lefty-swapped users think in reversed terms anyway, so you’d just confuse us.) You don’t even need to cache this boolean because clicking happens relatively infrequently. Just call this function!

GO ON, Go and add it now. Do it now, I’m waiting. Add it!

Did you add it? One damned line. It’ll take you less than five minutes. Seriously, go add it now.

Easy Accessibility #2: Red-Green Colorblindness

About 8% of males and .5% of females have some variety of colorblindness. That means that 8.5 out of every 100 players cannot easily distinguish certain colors, most often red from green. If you use colors alone as key indicators, these people will not enjoy your game as much and many will leave.

The most important way to support colorblind people is to not make two icons that differ only in color. Some games have a green indicator for “safe” and a red indicator for “danger”. This isn’t good enough unless the shape of the indicator changes also.

Ask around for somebody who’s colorblind to evaluate your GUI.

Don’t guess, just check. Every medium-sized company I’ve worked for (and many of the smaller ones) have had someone who was red-green colorblind on staff. They don’t always advertise this fact, but if you ask for help discreetly you can get them to evaluate your UI and icons for major problems. Once you’ve found the problem icons, it’s very easy to tweak them a bit to make them more distinguishable.

Easy Accessibility #3: Deaf Players

Just make sure your cinematic sequences and all crucial in-game audio has subtitles. This one might take a bit more work, depending on your game engine, but 2% of the populace is deaf or has significant hearing impairments. That’s another 2 people out of 100 that can’t enjoy your game because they can’t tell what’s going on. Not to mention all the people who need to occasionally play games with the sound off … ever tried to play a game in the living room while your parents or siblings or spouse are asleep in another room? Subtitles are handy.

They Don’t Tell You That’s Why They’re Leaving

Almost none of these people are going to come to you and say, “I quit because you didn’t support lefty mice|colorblind players|subtitles.” They just go away. Only invested hardcore players will come to your message boards and whine about problems. But these people typically don’t become invested players — your game’s inaccessibility keeps them from getting into the game, so they just go do something more rewarding.

If you don’t do these three things, 12% or so of your potential audience is just going to wander away, and you’ll never know why.