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.

I wanted to introduce the importance of understanding your audience early so I could talk about the many ways in which we consistently fail to do this simple thing, but I didn’t expect to be handed such a clear and useful example just a few days later!

Let me start with some background. World of Warcraft is currently running a seasonal event called Brewfest. This is an alcohol-fueled party in the vein of Oktoberfest. In addition to free-form drinking, there are a number of small quests, most of which reward the player with tickets that can be used to buy special Brewfest items. Most of the reward items are seasonal fluff (food and drink, funny hats and other clothes, a pony keg for roleplaying and so forth) but the big reward of the event is a player mount: a Brewfest Riding Ram. This is especially exciting to players with Horde characters since there is otherwise no way for them to obtain a ram mount. The player reaction to Brewfest has been … mixed. The event began with some severe bugs and design flaws and although most of those have been resolved, one portion of the event had to be permanently disabled due to griefing.

More interesting to me, however, is what we can learn about Blizzard’s characterization of their audience based on what they’ve said about Brewfest. Seasonal events like Brewfest have been touted by Blizzard as proof of their commitment to creating content for more casual players. But what are these casual players like?

The following is quoted from a WoW dev involved in creating the event in a thread on Blizzard’s WoW General Forum. I’ve pulled together several posts on the same thread below (separated with elipses) and snipped out the actual math of ticket acquisition that he’s referring to for brevity.

You would earn…. 782 tickets. More than enough for the ram, for logging in once a day, perhaps 15 minutes, every day, from now until Brewfest ends. I fail to see how that isn’t “casual” by definition.

…

None of my math is contradictory. One is averaging 7 keg turn-ins a day, the other 20 (10 per run, twice a day). One was for the casual crowd; what I quoted the second time was a far more challenging estimate.

…

In a later post, I gave the 20 kegs a day, which was for a more “hardcore” mentality towards the event in getting most of the items.

So putting this together we see the following picture of casual and hardcore players:

1. Casual players can log in once a day for 15 minutes. Hardcore players can log on for longer amounts of time more than once a day.
2. Casual players are less skillful at completing a short mini-game than hardcore players. Note that the mini-game does not rely on skills needed elsewhere in the normal game and takes about four minutes to learn.
3. Casual players will be satisfied with just the mount reward, but hardcore players will push on and get the rest of the rewards, including the funny hats and roleplaying keg.

In the abstract, these characteristics fit our assumptions about casual players: they have less time to play, they are less skillful, they are more easily satisfied. And yet it’s easy to see that these characterizations — especially #2 and #3 — are not at all logical. Why would hardcore players want a funny hat or a roleplaying knick-knack? And if you want to stereotype, then shouldn’t casual players be better at the mini-game? After all, they sit around all day playing Bejeweled instead of raiding …

And what about assumption #1? Can we really assume that casual players will log in once a day for 15 minutes? That’s not very long, true, but it still implies a commitment to a particular schedule. Are casual players known for their commitment? Even when the commitment is there, that schedule may not be feasible: for example, what about the weekend warriors — players who have carefully scheduled their very full lives to allow themselves six hours in Azeroth on Sunday even though the rest of the week is dedicated to work, school, and family?

(If they care enough they’ll make time, you say. And yet this event was carefully designed to appeal to casual players … right?)

The problem occurs when we boil a complex picture of our multi-faceted playerbase down into a couple of adjectives, each with a handful of broad, simplistic attributes, and then we build up designs based on the simplifications (i.e. less time) instead of the more complicated reality (i.e. some have less time per day, some need shorter or interruptible sessions, some need a more flexible schedule). And what we invariably end up with is content that doesn’t appeal properly to anyone because it isn’t actually targeted at anyone. In short: wasted content.

Last year I spent some time writing a monthly column for Skotos called Lessons from the Live Team. (If you’re not familiar with Skotos, it’s a bit of an odd bird: a game developer/publisher that is perhaps best known for its extensive archive of articles on game development. There’s some really good stuff in there, including but not limited to the history of Skotos itself. You should check it out if you haven’t already.)

The column unfortunately fizzled out after nine months, although in many ways this blog is a direct inheritor. Now I don’t intend to crib too much from my old self, but there is one topic that I want to introduce before I go much further: the importance of understanding your audience. Audience is a bit of a hobby horse for me — you’ll see me rant about it often — so I want to start by covering the basics. And since I’m still satisfied with the original article on Skotos, I won’t belabor all the same points here. I’ll just sum up briefly and point you at the original.

So to sum up:

1. Having a clear grasp of the people you believe will want to play your game — your target audience — is essential during the pre-launch development. It’s not about deciding which features to include; you can say you are targeting ‘everyone’ and throw in the kitchen sink, and in fact too many developers do. No, it’s about:
   1. knowing which features to cut, because you will be cutting features (and lots of them!), and
   2. knowing which features need to play together nicely (be integrated, support each other) and which need to run in parallel.
2. Once you’ve launched, you need to have a very clear grasp of who is actually playing your game — your actual audience. For most MMO games, it’s simply not feasible to replace your audience with a new one if you decide you don’t like them (although some have tried). So the only possible result of misunderstanding your audience is a smaller playerbase.
3. And finally: Understanding your audience is not a touchy-feely gut-instinct “I’m building the game for people like me” thing. (Clarification: It’s perfectly okay to build a game for people like you — so long as you know who you are and in exactly what ways your players will be like you.) You need as much solid data as you can get; you need actual intelligent analysis; you can’t afford to assume or oversimplify.

That’s all pretty obvious, right? But how do you really go about understanding your audience? Well, you figure out who they are, why they play, and how they play:

• Demographics: Who are your players? Are they male or female, young or old, educated or illiterate? This data can give you a very basic window into your audience, although it’s very important to understand that it is only a very basic window. As I say in the Skotos article, it doesn’t help to know that 17% of your players are females over the age of 45 unless you have some idea of what a female player over the age of 45 wants from your game — and it’s unlikely they all want the same things anyway.
• Motivations: Why do your players play your game? Although many people still use Bartle’s player types as a useful shorthand, I prefer Nick Yee’s Model of Player Motivations, largely because in my experience, people are very rarely after only one type of experience at a time.
• Habits: What do your players actually do in your game? Actual in-game actions and behaviors may line up perfectly with motivations, or they may conflict. If there’s a conflict, it may be due to bias in self-reporting motivations, or it may be because your game doesn’t allow players to do what they actually want to do. Either way — valuable information!

Now in my experience, a lot of developers either think that this level of understanding is rather more complicated than useful, so they skip it, or they agree that the need is obvious … and then tend to skip it anyway. In truth, it’s hard not to slip into a gut-feeling assumption-laden model of your playerbase. How many times in the past week have you used the term ‘hardcore’ as a shorthand for a set of motivations and behaviors (and probably demographics) without giving it a second thought? And yet even hardcore MMO players are by no means a homogenous group.

For example, let’s take a player I know. He plays World of Warcraft perhaps 10 hours a week; he doesn’t like to group; he’s only got one level 70 and it took forever to get there; he has never ever been on a raid. Not terribly hardcore, yes? And yet … he runs a WoW fansite as a hobby. He spends upwards of 30 hours a week on the fansite, every week. He lives, breathes, and dreams WoW. That’s hardcore.

Now I’ll give you that this friend of mine is hardly typical … so far as we know. And that’s my point. While there probably aren’t millions of intensely dedicated fan site operators in your playerbase, it’s quite possible that you’ve got a bunch of players who are very intensely dedicated but who don’t fit the hardcore mold, either because they are intense about the wrong things (i.e. not raiding) or because while they want to be hardcore, their play habits are circumscribed by real life. You really won’t know until you get real data on both their motivations and their habits.

Our players are complex people with complex needs, and since we make our living meeting those needs we’d best do our damndest to understand them.

Many MMO designers I’ve talked to consider an on-screen map to be a luxury, a convenience feature for lazy people who don’t want to navigate “the real way,” whatever that means. These people tend to be really good at FPSes and think of maps as a bit of a crutch.

The mini-map: a requirement or a crutch?

This is why it’s so important to identify your audience early on. If you’re going for the FPS audience, then having a map on-screen is in fact often considered a crutch. But these games are very difficult for many gamers to get into.

Women, in particular, tend to navigate by visual cues like maps and guides, rather than by directional orientation.

I’m not female, but for whatever reason, I have no innate sense of north or south or whatever. As a guy, I’m expected to have this ability, but it’s not something that can be learned. You have it or you don’t. So when faced with a game that doesn’t give me enough cues to tell where I am, I simply don’t play. It’s not snobbery — I just can’t play it. I am not the only person like this.

In the real world, I navigate by finding distinct landmarks continuously. In a game, landmarks betray me: textures and geometry get reused constantly, and soon I am utterly turned around.

When you remove the map and compass from your on-screen GUI, you remove me from your audience. You also remove plenty of other people. Does it matter? Well, that depends on your target audience. If you’re going for broad appeal, then yes, it matters. If you’re trying to hit the 18-22 male FPS-playing crowd, you should probably avoid the radar, because that’s what they expect. It boils down to knowing your audience goals.

So, what’s your target audience? Is it written down? Is it clearly delineated into one or more marketable entities? If you don’t know your audience, then you’re designing randomly. You might get lucky and design a game that an audience really loves, but more likely, you’ll make a hodge-podge and fail.