Hi! Today I got to one of the most difficult aspects and called it "emotional accessibility". There is an emotional design of digital products, which means that it should also be accessible to many users, including computer games.
Since I came up with such a concept (Google couldn't find any mentions, but if you come across it, be sure to share it in the comments), then explain it to me. So, I'm going to talk about the fact that games should be passable emotionally, and not just through control from a gamepad or keyboard, through game mechanics or sound and image settings.
🧘♂️ Some people are looking for a way to relax and therefore choose games with relaxing gameplay without pressure. An excellent representative of such games is Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where you can customize your islands and interact with characters in a relaxed atmosphere. The Journey game allows you to explore the world around you, and in Sky: Children of Light, you can take another player's hand and travel through the worlds together. By the way, this game helped me a lot in self-isolation in covid - I talked to people from different countries in it and we were very supportive of each other.
⚔ On the other hand, a player can strive for dynamic gameplay, but dislike challenging monster fights. And here the already widely used difficulty settings come to the rescue - the enemies' health decreases, your damage increases, and therefore it is much easier to go through battles. In Dragon Age: The Veilguard and some others can disable the death of your character altogether.
🩸 There are also impressionable people who are nevertheless interested in playing a certain game. They make it possible for them to turn off blood splashes - for example, in the games Fallout and Assassin's Creed, Elden Ring. In the re-release of Dead Space, they went further and made a setting for censoring particularly violent scenes, which led to discussions about whether such an option was needed in a horror game.
🕷 Some developers have thought about arachnophobia. In Hogwarts Legacy, you can replace the spiders with a rather funny entity with a reference to Ron's fear (at the same time, the sounds from the spiders will change). Not everyone appreciated this appearance, a couple of my friends had to switch to standard spiders because the creature with glowing eyes and roller skates was more frightening. But in Lethal Company, you can simply replace the spiders with the inscription "Spider", which delighted the fans of the game.
In the picture: spider-inscription from the game Lethal Company.
Article in Russian on Telegram: https://t.me/vkluchatel24/417
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