The podcast episode features an interview with Dr. Jen Beeston, who discusses her work in game accessibility. She highlights how disabled people interact with games, often leveraging their unique strengths and strategies to navigate gameplay.
Transcript
Mariana: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the DARCI podcast, the podcast on Disability, Accessibility and Representation in the Creative Industries. My name is Mariana López, and I’m a professor in sound production and post-production at the University of York. Today, we have the pleasure of welcoming Dr. Jen Beeston. Jen is a senior lecturer in the computer science here in the University of York. She teaches on the human-centred interactive technologies MSc, in particular focusing on qualitative research methods, as well as digital game accessibility, social aspects of interactive systems and ethics. Jen started her teaching career in the final year of her PhD in the Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence (IGI) Centre for Doctoral Training. Her PhD research explored the social aspects of accessibility in digital gaming. She has since Vince co-supervised another EE PhD student through their work on investigating the perspectives of game developers and the barriers they face in creating accessible games.
Mariana: Hi Jen, thank you so much for joining us today at our University of York studios. How are you doing?
Jen: Fantastic, thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s lovely to be here and to be chatting about game accessibility.
Mariana: Thank you so much. So your main connection to research and disability and accessibility is in the field of gaming. Could you tell us a bit about your work?
Jen: Sure. I think it’s probably easier if I start from the beginning, I guess, what inspired me and kind of how I ended up doing that research. When I started my PhD, so this would be back in 2015, a little while ago now, I’d been kind of inspired by this particular player who had quite a following online. This player was called BrolyLegs. And this was a player with disabilities. He wasn’t able to use his hands to use a game controller. So what he did was he played using his jaw and his face and his tongue and just supporting the PS controller. And this player was a professional street fighter player. And he also coached other players as well. And I remember watching and just thinking, this is incredible. I think this is fantastic that we’ve got somebody playing professional who is using a controller in this different way, and they’re competing and, you know, they’re getting into the game with everyone else. And certainly games should be accessible to everyone. So it was really nice for me to see that there was a player out there. And so I thought, OK, so there must be other players out there who are already using controls that exist or perhaps their own setups. And so I kind of wanted to explore the context within that kind of gaming activity would happen. So like, I feel like a lot of research into games and games accessibility is conducted as if you kind of almost take the player into the game out of its everyday natural context.
Mariana: Okay, yeah.
Jen: Okay, so it’s like almost trying to examine a fish but not understand water.
Mariana: Okay, yeah.
Jen: In some ways. And I kind of felt like looking at game accessibility was a little bit like that. Here we had a player competing, and so obviously he was interacting with all the different stuff around games, like competition and fairness, and the community that surrounded games, and with that, like toxicity as well.
Mariana: Yeah.
Jen: There’s a lot of that. And so in kind of knowing that the game communities out there were almost like making judgments, kind of talking about what was happening in games, you’d hear things spoken about in terms of how people were playing, judgments were made about how somebody was playing. And so that’s kind of the basis for where my research started out. I wanted to understand that kind of community of gaming and how my accessibility and disability fit within that space. So my kind of approach followed very much the social model, social understanding of disability where the environment provides a dis-disablement or mismatch with somebody’s abilities. So there was a tricky way of trying to actually go about figuring out how this impacted players and what was going on in that space. Which was how I ended up working with the charity AbleGamers. AbleGamers are a US-based international charity and they originally helped people to figure out how to get their setups, like all the equipment and how to set up all the options so that they could play games. And that kind of then moved into forming a community, a community of players with varying access needs, varying abilities. And so my collaboration with them allowed me to communicate with that community. And so my starting point was trying to understand what ways in which people were playing, what kind of options they were using, what kind of tools, what equipment was happening in that space. And once I was able to do that, we did it in kind of like a collaborative way with the players through AbleGamers. We talked to the players, figured out what kind of questions that we could ask other players, how we could talk to them and understand their experiences better.
Jen: And through that, I was then able to conduct some interviews with players. And the main thing that I wanted to investigate was how they interacted with other players when they’re in social games. What kind of communication tools they use. Did they use accessible controllers? Did they use options in their spaces? And did they feel that other people kind of noticed? Was anything said about it? You know, was it supported, you know, or did it just simply allow them to kind of enjoy games with everyone else? And so I found out lots of interesting things.
Mariana: I was gonna say, what did you find out?
Jen: Yeah, so I had some really fantastic and fascinating conversations with players who were accessing games using different kind of control mechanisms and things, and some of the things that surprised me, I think, most of all, were that other players noticed, even though they couldn’t see that that was happening.
Mariana: Okay.
Jen: So because using some accessibility options or some control mechanisms would mean that players acted very slightly differently in the game space. Such as moving kind of jerkily or slowly, perhaps taking advantage of things like aim assist.
Mariana: OK.
Jen: And so those were things that other players noticed and would ask them about or talk to them about. And there were certain kind of conversations around, like, is it fair that you’re using something that, you know, might give you an advantage in the game sort of thing. So there was, yeah, really fascinating discussions around that. But most of all was that game communities were very supportive. You know, if somebody was accessing the game and using controls and options and things, for the most part everyone’s like, “Yeah, this is fantastic. We want more players, you know, interact with us, join our communities.” And certainly those players who were using those controls and stuff like that, they kind of advocated for themselves and they formed their own communities, helped each other figure out how they could get into certain games, you know, the different setups of controls that they might use. And so through that, I think it allowed me to understand the potential contextual barriers, if you for one way of saying it, that went beyond simply getting access to the game. So kind of going beyond controls, going beyond the options menus. There were some kind of contextual barriers and some of those were social, some of those were because communication in games allowed people to talk to each other in certain ways or to react in the game space, and particularly around things like fairness and stuff was interesting. But it was also heartening to see that there are players out there using various different mechanisms of play and that it was broadly supported. So the game communities support access. So yeah, access is supported but there are still some kind of contextual challenges and there’s areas where game developers and gamers researchers could look at perhaps innovating.
Mariana: Yeah that’s really really fascinating thank you so much and that’s such a lovely lovely clear summary and it just kind of leads us really nicely to my next question because I but but do correct me if I’m wrong. I feel that accessibility in gaming is one of those topics that is a little bit underexplored. Like when I go to academic events, research practice events that are about accessibility, we hear a lot about film and television. We hear a lot about theatre, dance. There might be a kind of heritage representation, but gaming is one of those things that maybe you get one paper out of a hundred, maybe two if you’re having a good statistics. And do you feel that that is the case, that people aren’t researching accessibility in gaming as much? And how do you feel that connects to the industry? So is there work on accessibility in the industry being done? Are game developers, companies engaging with it?
Jen: That’s a really good question. Has like four parts. So I suppose I’ll start with the academic community. I think it’s getting better.
Mariana: Okay.
Jen: There is accessibility research out there in the human computer interaction community. Okay, yeah. But a lot of it certainly early in my research, there was a lot that was simply about mechanisms for access. Okay. So control mechanisms or exploring kind of what options somebody might need in order to make it so that they could interface with the game. Yeah, okay, meet the challenges. Simply climb a wall, jump a, you know, shoot things, that kind of thing. So, but there’s also been quite a lot of work around games built for people with particular needs. So perhaps a game for somebody with visual disabilities, for instance. So there is work, there is work that exists. And I think there is a growing awareness in the academic community that there is still work to be done. I think, I know that it’s still happening. It’s one of those things where, you know, like if you are looking at buying something new and then all of a sudden you see it everywhere, on the street, you know.
Mariana: Yeah, yeah.
Jen: It’s a little bit like that so I kind of I keep seeing it because it’s in my mind. But I do think there are ways that are being focused on that do still neglect that context and the broader set of experiences that games offer. There’s a lot of research into player experiences and it varies vastly. It can be anything from looking at the different challenges, the different types of challenges that games present. It could be looking at a player’s feelings of agency within the game space or a sense of, you know, belonging. You get all these different kinds of experiences and I think what we’re lacking is the connection between access and games and those experiences. That’s something that myself and a few of my colleagues and my PhD supervisors were aiming to kind of bridge that gap. And I think that there is a bit more awareness now than there previously was about that. So now we talk about accessible player experiences, what those experiences look like when people have varying degrees of access to a game. In terms of the second part of your question, which was kind of connection with industry and professional settings. I think that in some ways perhaps the industry is even more aware of it than academia. I was certainly trying a lot more. I mean, there’s this fantastically broad set of potential players, players who have various varying degrees who maybe want more access to different games, different opportunities to play, different genres, that sort of thing. And so there is a sizable market out there that the games industry certainly is trying to reach and that benefits everyone if they can get into that game. You know, everyone gets better experiences the more options and different ways to access games that we have. So the games industry I know a little bit about because I’ve supervised a PhD student who’s now submitted and he’s just about to face corrections.
Mariana: How exciting!
Jen: So he looked at the experiences and the perceptions of developers in a games company and the kind of challenges that they felt that they had in developing accessible games and making it so that people with varying disabilities could play and access their products. So through that, I think there is levels of awareness in the industry such that they have dedicated staff members who maybe look at accessibility or who look at the design of the interface and the controls and things. But what we did seem to find was that although the will is there, people really want to make sure that games can be accessible for people, the knowledge doesn’t quite get them to the point of understanding beyond simply things like the standard options that we get for customizing play. So like setting up your keys in whatever configuration you want or perhaps using an accessible controller or even just using things like subtitles. I think once you start looking at different types of challenge within games, I think that’s where the knowledge starts to vary a little bit.
Mariana: Yeah, okay.
Jen: Because if you want somebody to beat your end boss as the kind of end goal, you have to think about all the different ways that a player can get there. And if there’s one particular mechanic that your game relies on, then it’s thinking about how do I make sure that I’ve got access for everyone to that mechanic, you know, can somebody react quickly enough in order to avoid a blow or something like that. So I think it’s the knowledge barrier is how to vary challenges in games so that players can get access to the thing that they want to do which is complete the game. And I think that’s a challenge for everyone and I think that’s possibly the bit where the games industry is reaching out and kind of going help us like how do we understand how to do this better and I think that’s where the academic world and the games industry world could do to collaborate a little bit more and there are mechanisms for that there’s conferences like develop and GDC and we often hear about accessibility specialists who go and talk at those events and share knowledge and things like that. So it’s happening, but I think with all of these things, it’s a process of learning and a kind of almost a maturity going up the ways of accessing things and understanding how to do that.
Mariana: And I think as well, it’s kind of also growing awareness that some of these settings, as many kind of accessibility work that you design, thinking about a particular community actually then ends up, as we know, benefiting loads of people because there’s loads of options that you can access that can help you. And I am I’m a little bit delayed with my game. I always I always play games years and years after they come out and I’d be playing The Last of Us. And I was kind of going through the settings and I get really bad motion sickness when the camera moves a lot. So after a few minutes, it just really affects me very badly. And they actually have a setting for that. I have to declare that it has not solved my problems. But it was really nice to go through the menu and say, oh, actually, you know, there’s loads of different things that you can change that can benefit loads of things that, you know, maybe are not always considered as part of the experience. And also kind of it struck me what you said about kind of what you were talking about, academic work and sharing something that occurred to me because you referred to HCI conferences and others is how how divided work on accessibility can be, because the type of events I go to generally have a tradition of either audio visual translation or media accessibility, whether I kind of what I’m hearing here is that gaming work tends to go into that HCI work rather than maybe media accessibility and audiovisual translation conferences.
Jen: It would be lovely if we did.
Mariana: Yeah.
Jen: Cross boundaries a little bit more like that.
Mariana: Yeah.
Jen: I think interdisciplinary work is the way forward.
Mariana: Yeah.
Jen: And if we actually helped each other to understand the different ways that we’re aiming to solve the same problems, essentially.
Mariana: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Jen: It would be vastly helpful to us and certainly people working in HCI we do draw on literature and research from from other fields but I think the solutions tend to be a bit more technical which then yeah means that we we in a way we restrict ourselves from thinking about the bigger picture which is the interesting. And it just going back to kind of game developments have you had an opportunity to work with game developers and contribute to accessibility? Not personally, I would love to. The PhD student who worked to understand the game developers perspectives did go on to work with a games company and to help give them kind of additional insights and write reports for them to explain you know like the different approaches that they might be able to take to increase their accessibility and to cross those kind organizational boundaries that might happen. I think the more academics that we get talking to the games industry, the better. We can share that research and that insight and the connections that we might have with research participants who may well be the players that they want to talk to and understand. I would love to. I’ve not had the opportunity to personally, but I think that’s that’s something that’s quite important.
Mariana: And a follow up on that, do you have a game that you would recommend because of its accessibility settings? Something that you’ve encountered or you’ve played yourself and you thought, oh, actually the settings in this game, they’re really great. I mean, The Last of Us 2 has very good reviews because of that.
Jen: Yeah. I’ve not personally played it. The one that I hear people talking about quite a lot is the more recent Spider-Man games.
Mariana: Oh, okay, all right.
Jen: It’s supposed to be really fantastic for access and different ways that you can play the game.
Mariana: Oh, perfect.
Jen: Sadly, I’m a little bit out of the gaming loop. I’ve just ordered myself a gaming PC, so I’m gonna go back into it. Oh, you’re ready.
Mariana: Now, it’s all Spider-Man from now on. [laughing]
Jen: Oh, God. Do you know that there’s so many games I’ve played in the past where I don’t consider myself to have necessarily access barriers to certain games, but there’s ones where I’ve had frustrations.
Mariana: Yes.
Jen: If I just had a different option to play this in a different way, then I would very much enjoy it. They have frustrations that just, if you just gave me maybe a different role to play or a different way to get to the end boss, I’d be fantastic.
Mariana: So Spider-Man it is. [both laughing] And I’ve read that you’ve just collaborated on a book chapter on game accessibility as, I’m gonna try to say this word: Game accessibility as culturalization. Could you tell us more about this?
Jen: I can, yeah. So I think there’s still a lot of work to be done on how we conceptualize game accessibility. And I think that the reasons why people play games are vast and many. Everyone kind of has these quite individual ways of kind of conceiving why they want to play, what they value from gaming. And so the book chapter that myself and my colleagues have written is kind of a position, it’s a way of conceptualizing game accessibility that we’d hope that would be food for thought, a different way of thinking about how we provide access to games and what we’re actually trying to do when we say that we’re gonna provide access to games. So I think one of the things that we kind of had gathered is that games are a kind of like films, like books, like TV, they’re a vehicle, I suppose, for meaning. You get something that you value out of partaking in those things. But with a game, unlike say a film, is there’s a lot more kind of participation in that. So what does that actually look like when we conceptualize it? So I think if we think of, and I’m going to borrow some work from one of my other colleagues, seeing games almost like a conversation. Playing games is a bit like a conversation. The game itself is being created by the game developer or designer. Well, usually lots of people design a game. But it kind of… It has meaning and it’s communicating something. And you have a conversation between you as the player and what you come to the player experience with, your own knowledge, background, personality, the environment that you’re in. And that game that was created might have a particular intention of an experience that it wants. It wants. The game designers wanted you to experience. And so you have this kind of communication with the game and the player through playing it, through interaction. And so if we think about it like that, accessibility or providing access to that conversation is a little bit like an act of translation.
Mariana: Yeah.
Jen: And so, drawing on other fields where you might sort of localize or culturalize a piece of media to make it more accessible to a different audience. So, you maybe change the language spoken in perhaps or maybe change some of the content to make it kind of more relatable to another audience. We could see providing access is a little bit like that. So you could translate, and I suppose this varies, there’s different degrees of that, you could translate so many words in that and still have some gaps and you’d still get some level of understanding. And I think that’s a little bit like what we’re doing when we maybe provide an accessible controller or perhaps one option that allows somebody to do something. And so what we’re aiming for is that kind of meaning that the game provides and what the player wants to be fully accessed. So you want the player to be able to get as much from the game as everybody else. And I think that stands for everybody. So if we see accessibility a little bit like that, it gives us a different way of framing why we’re doing what we’re doing when we make things accessible. And I think through working that out with my colleagues when we were writing this chapter, it’s like, this is a really nice new way of trying to get a better understanding of why access is important for games and indeed why representation might be important for games is that you’re trying to make sure that you’ve got that kind of transfer of meaning and give people the experiences that they really want to have in whatever degrees that they want to have it. I think there’s a lot of perhaps interesting work to be done off off the back of that, which could be around figuring out where the differences between simply options and customization and accessibility options.
Jen: I know that you often get in games, you have kind of basic setup, which might involve different key remappings or turning the Y axis and the X axis around or something to make it so you can play better. And then what would be classed as the accessibility options. And sometimes these things completely cross over. And it’s like, well, why is one thing customization and why is one thing accessibility? And how does that mean, how does that framing impact how players are perceived in the game when they use that, when in that community? So is using an accessibility option perceived differently simply to using a customization option? Those degrees that we’re translating games for people might have an impact on the context itself and the broader experience of play.
Mariana: I wonder you know that the impact on people’s own, non-disabled people’s own kind of conceptions of disability as well and challenging preconceived notions. Really interesting and if we’d like to read this book chapter where can we find it? Is it out already?
Jen: It is out, the book is out. I think one of the things I probably need to do is make sure that the library has access to it and that through the University of York sign on that people can get access to that chapter. I’m not sure if it is currently available for everyone to see but that’s something I’m working on.
Mariana: So what’s the title
Jen: of the book? The title of the book is User-Centric Studies in Game Translation.
Mariana: Okay, User-centric Studies in Game Translation.
Jen: I think so. I may have to come back with you with an accurate title for that.
Mariana: Oh that’s okay. I’m sure people can enter the keywords and something will come out.
Jen: This is true, yeah. But yeah, hopefully we’ll be able to get that into a position where the paper can be available for anyone who searches for it.
Mariana: And like moving into the future, so are there, what’s next for you? Are there any exciting new projects you can tell us about?
Jen: Yeah there’s a few. I’m kind of not strictly in game accessibility but kind of using that same perspective of like exploring the context within which technology interaction happens. A colleague of mine, who I am collaborating with is looking at digital crime.
Mariana: Okay. [laughs]
Jen: I know, a bit of a deviation, I know. And so previous research suggests that game marketplaces, where trading cards and items are traded in-game spaces, may have potential avenues for financial crimes. It’s hot off the press, brand new. We’re thinking about exploring this further to see if there are any risks. Young people play a lot of these games with in-game and meta game currencies and trading cards. There might be a risk that young people could participate in something unethical or harmful. If we can find out more about how the game space supports such activities, maybe we can work to prevent them or understand how they happen and develop from there.
Mariana: Oh, exciting. Oh, cool. And the last question that we like to ask everyone that comes on the podcast is, what are your hopes for the future of disability, accessibility and representation in the creative industries?
Jen: That’s a really nice question. I would like to have a list of nice to haves, please. I think my hopes are that we continue down the route we’re going.
Mariana: Okay.
Jen: Particularly in the games industry, I see more and more different mechanics, different roles that games offer, that people can play in different ways.
Mariana: Yeah.
Jen: So one of the things that I found really fascinating when I was talking to players with disabilities is that they would sometimes play games in different ways. So they would act in the game space in maybe ways that suited their kind of played to their strengths, if you know what I mean.
Mariana: Yeah.
Jen: And so if games support that kind of thing, you know, that’s a valuable experience and something that we can kind of draw from and innovate from. So, you know, providing different roles if you have a team, a team-based game, and there are different roles within that that people can play in different ways. Or allowing somebody in an RPG to develop a character that doesn’t necessarily have to go through and just hack and slash all the way through. You know, they could use misdirection or, you know, talking to people and kind of, yeah, using their vast charisma to get to the end.
Mariana: I like that, they’re using their vast charisma to get through the game. [both laughing]
Jen: Just supporting playing in different ways, I think, would be fantastic. And simply variety, variety and customisation and thinking about access, not simply as how we get people into the game, but what their experiences are like within the game communities themselves.
Mariana: Yeah, well, that’s a lovely, lovely hope for the future. And I hope it comes true.
Jen: Me too, me too.
Mariana: Thank you so much, Jen, for coming to the podcast today, but also for sharing all your knowledge and experience in this field. It has been really, really, really interesting to learn more about your work. Thank you so much.
Jen: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been lovely to chat.
Mariana: What a wonderful episode, and our first one focused on gaming. Thank you so much for tuning in. We’ll be back next month with more exciting updates on disability, accessibility and representation in the creative industries.