“By that same argument we shouldn’t build wheelchair ramps because there are plenty of disabled people that can climb stairs and we’ll clearly never account for everyone. Oh, except that we figured out that making places wheelchair accessible was something we could do that would greatly improve the lives of a lot of people. “



Incorrect. Wheelchair ramps are a technical fix that allows people to get up stairs without compromising a disabled person’s autonomy.

Lowering the difficulty is the functional equivalent of picking up a person in a wheelchair and carrying them up the stairs. You are implicitly saying that the disabled person is not capable of competing on the same level, is not able to “climb the stairs”. It is inherently patronizing because it implies that disabled people can’t hack it like able bodied people.

A ramp is the equivalent of various technical and hardware changes. Special controllers, subtitles, remap options and colorblind mode. It allows a disabled person to act on the same level of an able bodied person, retaining their full autonomy.

“The form that @thespectacularspider-girl’s argument takes here is essentially another form of perfect being the enemy of good. Essentially, it’s the idea that if we can’t do something perfectly we shouldn’t do it at all. Because it might take work to figure out what allows people to participate in games beyond minor concessions for accessibility, we shouldn’t do it.”



Also incorrect. My argument, as laid out in the OP, is that there are technical and hardware options that should be pushed instead. There are charities that hand build controllers for people with disabilities. There are one handed controllers, remap controllers and mouth controlled controllers, just to name a few.

My argument is that there are ways to put disabled people on par with able bodied people that does not involve lowering the difficulty, as if they’re children who are incapable of playing a game on the same skill level.

“Only, like I said, if gameplay can’t be played, it is objectively bad. If a player with dyspraxia sits down to a game and cannot play that game because it isn’t accessible, that’s a failure of the gameplay, not the player. Yeah, that’s right, it’s the game’s problem. No game will ever be perfect, but if we’ve created an entire industry of games that some people just straight up cannot participate in? That’s a failure. And it doesn’t take setting some sort of arbitrary point of perfection to understand that either. “



It’s your assumption they can’t participate in it. But even then, some games are for everyone and that’s not bad.

War and Peace is a literary slog and not everyone can go through it. This does not make War and Peace objectively bad. Accessibility does not equate to quality.

It is absolutely ludicrous to assume so because YOU are drawing an arbitrary line. Take it to the absolute final end. There may be people who are paralyzed from the neck down. There are people who suffer from “locked in syndrome”. There are people who have parkinsons so bad that they couldn’t hold a controller or press buttons.

Should we have a “play itself” mode for people like that? Effectively force developers to be as inclusive as possible, forcing them to use time and resources for that endeavor? OR should be instead be opting to create controllers that allow these people to perform on par with others?

You’re right, no game will be perfect, because “perfection” would involve being inclusive to people literally incapable of playing. But you’d rather compromise artistic vision, take resources away from developers and generally provide a patronizing and weak solution, rather than one that grants disabled people the respect and dignity of playing on the same level as everyone else.

“It’s funny, people don’t complain that adding FOV to a game is heresy, right? In fact, I seem to remember TotalBiscuit, despite being an unethical asshole, did feel the need to frequently talk about the need for the market to support higher FOVs. I suppose he shouldn’t have because then that would be catering, right?”



No, because FOV is a technical issue. It is not directly tied to the game’s mechanics like, say, difficulty is. But even then, if a developer actually incorporates a lack of FOV into their artistic vision and philosphy, like From Software does with difficulty, then the art should remain as is.

And TB was great, as an aside. The man did more for gaming than almost anyone.

“And this is before I even need to talk about how arguments about artistic intent and vision are similarly bullshit. Gameplay is shaped and reshaped and reshaped as a part of game development. And while yes, you will find gameplay difficulties that are tuned particularly well, Bungie wanted you to enjoy playing Halo on Heroic, find Legendary to be a crisp and challenging experience, and yet still had Easy and Normal for people who didn’t have anything to prove.”



Except From Software is not Bungie. From Software explicitly uses difficulty to create meta narratives about the world and the tone and feeling of their worlds. In their own words, an easy mode would provide too much a temptation that would compromise the intended goal of the game.

“It doesn’t hurt anything to give people more options for difficulty. And no, From Software doesn’t depend on their game difficulty for the purposes of telling a narrative. Not when you can activate an additional boss battle as long as you made sure to find and eat three umbilical cords, when the game’s main loop is about going out and finding that stuff and experimenting with it.”



That’s not what From Software has said. Difficulty is part of their design and artistic philosophy. It is not up to you to dictate what an artist does and doesn’t do with their artwork.

And it does absolutely hurt something. It puts more requirements for time, effort and resources on the dev team. Which you clearly don’t seem to ever factor into your arguments.

You never consider the artistic vision, the time and effort of the team or the relationship the studio has with it’s long time fans. I don’t use this term a lot, but you’re acting entitled. You are demanding that artists and creators explicitly change their art, at great cost to themselves, for your own goals, noble as you may think they are.

“These kinds of attitudes are fundamentally about elitism. “

I have never played a From Software game. I am, in fact, unable to properly play these games and many other ‘twitch’ or high reaction time games because I have compromised reflexes.

The argument coming from me has never been about elitism because, by my own metrics, I do not measure by to “the elite”. It is about respecting artistic integrity, about providing disabled people with technical rather than patronizing offsets to their disability, and my absolute hatred for games journalists using the disabled as a weapon to get the easy mode they were so desperately mewling for for the last half decade, all for their own ego.

“There’s no substance to any of the arguments people present in favor of refusing to provide alternate difficulty modes, they always come back to that simple idea that the identity of the hardcore player is harmed by the fact that someone else can play the game on easy mode.”

I have provided several arguments of substance, ones that plenty of disabled gamers in the notes agree or disagree with. The fact that a good number agree with my sentiment shows that these arguments at least have some substance.

This is not about hardcore players. This is about the core idea that people think of “disabled gamers” as somehow “lesser” that require babying. There are disabled gamers who participate in ALL levels of skill in all manners of games.

To lower the difficulty and using disabled gamers as a shield is both a lazy and patronizing position. If you minimize the GAP, then a disabled player can play on the same difficulty. Maybe it will take them longer. I know it takes me longer to beat some bosses in some games because of my disability. But that DOESN’T mean they need an easy mode that doesn’t even address the core issue.

“Speedrunners pick different challenges to chase with each run they do, but you don’t see speedrunners telling you that you can only play the game if you 100% it and find all the secret bosses. That’s their difficult and their accomplishment doesn’t get devalued because other people play it differently. So what’s your excuse?”



The excuse is that speed runners don’t demand a “super hard mode” from developers.

They work within the world itself to get what they want. Which, I’m told, is possible in From Software games. You overlevel yourself to cheese bosses. You look at guides and videos that allow you to exploit boss AI.

And even then, Speedrunners do pervert the game’s artistic vision. Intentionally. They skip the story, the break the game, the go out of boundaries. But that is the result of a game never being able to be perfect.

Comparing what speedrunners do to your demands is asinine.