Game UX Summit '19 | Brian Allgeier | Spider-man: embracing accessibility at insomniac games

So thank you Celia thanks everyonethank you for this I'm honored to be part of a fantastic line of speakersit's hard to follow up with Dori hilarious I really loved his talk wellgive it a shot here so I'm Brian Allgeier director of user experience atinsomniac games and I'm going to talk about how we transition to embracingaccessibility but first a little bit about myselfI started working in the industry back in 1992 for Philips CDI who's one of thefirst CD I based consoles actually a little bit of history here Sony andPhilips were working on a console together but they didn't really have agood I guess partnership so there was a splitting of ways and so we know howthat all went down and then I joined insomniac to work on Spiro Year of theDragon so I was a level designer on that and Ibecame the game director on Ratchet and Clank and I worked on nine Ratchet andClank since then as the creative director and lead designer and then Ichanged things up a little bit by working on a VR project called edge ofnowhere which was a HP Lovecraft horror type game and I decided to change thingsup even more and focus on user research on Spider Man and for us Spider Man wasobviously a huge success it really just blew away all of ourprevious games in terms of sales and commercial success and it was also ourfirst game to embrace accessibility and we had made something like 17 18 gamessince spider-man so that was a really big first for us and I think we werejust really kind of blown away by the positive response from fans how theyreally appreciate we had no idea there's this huge segment of people out therewho really appreciated these settings I mean we we knew about it but it reallyhit us when the game came out and we started to see really positive feedbackand it was like one of the nice little good news stories of that week so it'sfunny to think back in 2015 where we didn't accessibility wasn't really evenon our radar we did not even think about it or discuss it and it wasn't until wesaw games like Last of Us or Uncharted where we started to look atit's accessibility features in more serious manner and actually we have thisAMA thing ask me anything that we do every single day at insomniac wherepeople send in a question asking our CEO about anything and so one question wasare we exploring accessibility with regards to our own titles specificallyspider-man but also future titles and that was the point where we realizedabsolutely this is part of our culture this is what we must do and so we saidyep and that was back in March of 2017 and then we kind of formulated a designdocument in October we had an accessibility plan that we wanted toimplement in April that which was soon after our March alpha deadline and thenin May we started to get really concerned because the back focus wasactually finishing the primary game the base game we were still working incombat we're still doing lots of crazy balancing tweaks and tuning and werealized that accessibility was not going to make it until our day one patchand I think at this point we all started to panic and of course the mantra at theend of every game is don't break the build and so everyone gets superconservative they don't want to add any extra features or you know that happensand so the team obviously this was the right thing to do was to addaccessibility but people were just there were some grave concerns some majordoubts and usually the phrase that comes up at this point in the project whenyou're talking about new features is like oh well save it for the next gameor you know maybe we can just add like a small little sliver of it so sorry toget concerned and this was the time to bring in some of the big guns somepeople who could really the advocates who could help us kind of pushaccessibility across that finish line and one of them was Sam Thompson who's asenior producer at Sony and so it was great to have Sony as a publisher on ourside advocating for accessibility and I like to call Sam the Gandalf ofaccessibility because it looks like Gandalf and essentially is a really wiseguru in terms of the features that we could add and so he really enlightenedus in terms of the type of ways we could address the needs of the disabilitycommunity and one major one is just simply having good large text size sothat games are readable another big thing is controller mapping just beingable to make it so that people can have options in terms of how they want to usethe controls this is primarily great for folks with uh motor issues and thencolor blindness through design or through filters it's better toincorporate color blindness options in the design but filters is usually theoption that most schemes go with and then just having decent subtitles andand so that's a big one and soo so many games get it wrong because they havetitles that will blend in with the screen and having like BAC plating andstuff to make them stand out is a huge win so Sam also just kind of enlightenedus in terms of the different types of needs there's permanent needs I thinkmost of us think of in terms of someone was being born with a disability or theyhad an illness or accidents but there's also temporary needs imagine breakingyour arm before one of your favorite games comes out wouldn't be nice tostill be able to play it and then their situational needs and so I've heard alot of parents talk about how they want to play their favorite game with theirchild sleeping in the next room or on their lap and they'd like to be able toturn the sound down be able to see all the closed captioning and information asthey play so Sam also directed us to an advocate Josh Straub if you've heard ofJosh but he's basically an expert and advocates Gaming accessibility he runs awebsite called I think it's daggers or daggers and it focuses on reviewinggames in terms of their accessibility features and this is a great resource tokind of look at in terms of just seeing where games are making progress in termsof addressing needs of this community he was also hugely influential in Uncharted 4 accessibility features and so Josh came with his co-consultant Josh Culpwho's to his there's to the left there and they came to by the studio sat inthe room we had all the developers around and they played through the gamewould just call out various issues that they saw and so this ranged from bothmotor issues which is the issues that Josh faces having cerebralpalsy but then also he would call out visual and auditory issues and so here'shim playing through the game and Josh asked us to put the camera on his handsto show how he plays the game where it's resting on a controller and he uses hisindex fingers and thumbs to manipulate the controller and so I think this wasat the moment where accessibility for us turned from an idea from like yeahthat's a good thing to do to a we really need to let Josh play this game becausejosh is an awesome guy he's a huge Marvel fan he loves our games and sothat's where it suddenly it became real and this was a moment where we reallystarted to embrace the idea of implementing in our games so suddenlynext thing all of our features that we had talked about and the new ones thatJosh gave us suddenly became underlined and we focused on making sure QT tapsbecame holes large subtitles backplates for subtitles speaker notation in termsof who's saying what there was a skip puzzle option that we added and then wehad this HUD parallax which was like this AR effect that some we allow peopledisabled because Josh pointed out that it could be very discomforting so weimplemented all these features and our original plan was to try to test peopleof various needs and so we thought well we'll find someone who has a motor issuesomeone with auditory issues someone with visual needs and try to line thesepeople up and have them play through the game and get some valuable feedbackand do kind of a think aloud individual session but it was actually very hard tofind people in the LA community we reached out to AbleGamers which is aWashington DC organization that's creating a database but given how latewe were in production only weeks away from shipping for our day one patch wewere really struggling to find just the right players that could give us theright kind of feedback on a Saturday morning maybe you know so it was kind ofa moving target and eventually we just landed on finding another advocate someSam Schaffel who works at Naughty Dog as a QA analystand Sam is actually a very big advocate as well he's gone to many events talkingabout accessibility he has limited use of his left hand and he came by to sortof verify all of the features that we implemented the big thing that hepointed out was that the there was no controller map that was easy to find it was kind of buried in the menus and for him who has to really be focused onhow to use the controller is very helpful to see that feature up front weactually didn't know where the controller map was ourselves was kind ofembarrassing moment and then we asked the lead designer and he said he didn'tknow where it was so we realized this was more than just an accessibility Imean it's a usability accessibility issue and then we ended up putting thatthe pause menu which is something you basically need for a brawler type andbeat him up style superhero game one thing that he really pointed out too wasthat the option menu descriptions there's a lot of confusion in terms ofwhat one was skipping like oh you can skip a puzzle you can skip QuickTimeevents it makes the game so much you know better and it's like well am iskipping like core content am i skipping scenes like I want to see spider-man doall the cool action stuff so we just had to make sure that we were just veryclear with our descriptions and same thing went with QuickTime events we hadsomething where we said change repeated button taps to be hold and so he wouldbe playing and he'd be mashing the square button thinking that or would beholding the square button thinking that it would do repeated button taps whenSpiderman was punching characters and it wasn't so we just had to be super clearin terms of our descriptions on what all this stuff meant and one other thing toois that we had to think about specifying the default because he would load up theaccessibility menu start making much a changes and then go I wonder what wasthe defaults what was the intention of the developers and so that was somethingthat was pretty obvious but we had neglected to do and then with our menuas well we made sure that the language was consistent so that when you firstopened it up they were all set to OFF we used to have disabled parallaxing wasenable parallaxing so that would be on but then others would be off so weway to make it more consistent so that was kind of like our Hail Mary last youknow bit of testing before we basically wrapped up the game and shipped it's inSeptember later on in February of 2019 Josh Straub presented us with the daggersaward for Breaking Barriers on spider-man which is a really nice gesture of him itwas one you know it was really nice to see at Triple A game embracingaccessibility and so that's what he wanted to recognize so you know we'redone right we made our game accessible yay you know we figured it all out ofcourse there was tons of stuff that we wished we could have put in the gamethat we never did and so I think that's part of why we were really pleasantlysurprised by the the news stories because we felt like we kind of missedthe mark but it turns out that the disabled community such an underservedcommunity that they really embraced it and we wish we could certainly do moreand we're planning on doing more and so we didn't address dual button pressesyou know playing spider-man it's like playing a musical instrument it's likeyou're pressing multiple buttons at the same time it's like they're like buttoncords and we didn't have any optional controller layouts because our the waywe coded it we had a lot of hardwired buttons and icons that wasn't easy justto change on the fly so we couldn't even do a simple left/right flip which is ahuge benefit for people who have issues on one side or the other one thing itsurprised me was we couldn't implement mono audio I asked about a month beforethe game shipped if that was an easy thing to turn on and it wasn't based onhow we did all our audio processing and we didn't have any color blindnessfilters so all of this could have been addressed much earlier and probablywould have been easier to implement so the biggest regret was that we didn'taddress chases and so there's a number of chases throughout the game that ifyou have any kind of motor needs or visual needs you're going to reallystruggle and have a difficult time to kind of follow the targets and we didn'thave any like simple rubber banding you know Globalvariable that we could just adjust and it's because every single chase wasscripted in a unique way and so it wasn't so simple to fix and again sothis was something that we could have addressed early on so after we shippedSpiderman we wanted to just continue momentum across the company insomniacsroughly 300 people there's 250 people in our Los Angeles office and 50 people inour Durham office and so we were thinking like okay we have a small groupof people who sat in the room with Josh who enjoyed you know seeing him play andand understanding the various needs that we could be addressing how do we getmore people involved and so there was an opportunity that came up where there wasan LA abilities Expo that happened in Los Angeles which focuses on productsfor the disability community and Sony actually had a booth there featuringspider-man and so this is an option opportunity for us to invite insomniacsto the booth have them actually meet the players firsthand walk them through thegame and so there's a lot of really heartwarming stories that occurs as theymet with people we had some people who were like I don't play video games I'msorry that looks great but I can't do it and after a little bit of coaxing theywould go up and swing through the city fight the first boss and just have ahuge smile on their face the entire time one player actually ordered aPlayStation Pro and the copy of spider-man on site because her child washaving so much fun so that was really great to see so at the same time sonywas gathering names for recruitment database so we could find more people inLos Angeles area so we wouldn't run into the same situation that we had we whenlooking for players for spider-man the other big surprise was that there areoccupational therapists who were visiting the show these are people thatwork with people with disabilities they typically work at hospitals I know ifyou're called the same thing in France or other countries but they really justhelp people live meaningful lives they help them with basic things likeeating or other things that they need to do if they've suffered an accident andrelearning how to walk or eat but they have a huge network of people that theywork with they're probably a lot of them are gamers themselves so this issomething we all look into tapping for future projects so one thing that wasreally nice to see is as we start to get more internal advocates we startedhaving players I'm sorry started having having insomniacs developthese confluence pages and web pages to try educate all the other departments onhow to make our games more accessible and so this was just really cool to seethis confluence page that one of our character artists put together on how tofilter different screens and educate people on the different color blindnessfilters how we can evaluate high contrast and and all of our visuals soas we start talking more about accessibility people started to speak upand share about their spouses and partners their friends fellow gamedevelopers and one person actually kind of met all of this criteria his name isJason bolte and he is the partner of our VFX lead Brianna Lindsey and Jason hasRP syndrome which is retinitis pigmentosa and he's losing the center ofhis vision and as well as the outside of his vision and he's actually a gamedeveloper a veteran and worked as Animax studios for he worked in the gamesindustry for ten years and he's at Disneyland here using thisaccessibility device so we thought you know wouldn't it be great to invite Jasonto the studio have him share his experience and try to get more people onboard so we essentially put together a presentation we showed it to all 50 60leads at the company and convinced them that we needed to make a big day of eventout of this and so we had a company event where we just focused onaccessibility and we invited all 300 and insomniacs to this company meeting and essentially walked them through a presentation andso here I am at the company presentation and the one thing that I shared witheveryone that is that there are some new laws going into effect there's a lawthat went into effect just this year which was the cvaa and that's an updatedlaw in the United States for communications between people so thiscan mean anything from you know real-time mobile communication to gamesand it mainly applies to multiplayer games and one big example that came outearlier this year was Apex legends which had this cool chat wheel and you couldactually select these pre-recorded lines and and communicate with other playersand so this was very helpful for people with speech issues so I essentially youknow said that this is something that was on the horizon it's growing movingtrend it's something that we need to be very cognizant of and we have to startthinking about it for future games but then the thing that I also did was Ijust reiterated that was all part of our vision statements and insomniacs visionis to create games that have a positive and lasting influence on people's livesand it also was integrated into our mission statement which was to inspireplayers with stories of underdogs overcoming colossal challenges and sothese screens are actually displayed in our kitchen every single day as we walkthrough the office and so it was really nice to be able to bring these up andreinforce the reason why we want to promote accessibility so then also themission is to challenge inspire each other within our collaborative cultureand to help the less fortunate by supporting worthwhile causes and so wewe donate money to a charity called the Starlight foundation that we've beendoing for the last ten years and they supply video games and consoles tochildren in hospitals and then also we're the we want to be the leaders inthe game development community and so I mean I am sort of it's not it's an easysell and when we embrace these kind of values but I've really wanted to hithome hard I really wanted people to just feel it in theirbones that accessibility was something we really needed to support so then webrought Jason bolte up on stage and Jason gave this really wonderful talkwhere he asked this fundamental question which was can i play too and he posedthe question because in a lot of media whether it be books movies or TV orgames for many of them the answer is yes he can play – he can engage he goesto the movie theater where he gets headphones he can actually listen tonarration of the film while he you know sits there with his partner and andwatches it and books of course there's Braille there's screen readers that hecan benefit from but with games it's always a maybe he's not sure if he'll beable to actually finish the game when he buys it so we asked him to play throughSpiderman and he actually had already played through it and he came to talkabout what his experience was like and he sort of created this mock-up imagewhich is where he's losing his vision and it's essentially like losing pixelsin the center of the screen excuse me and then he he showed this was part ofhis presentation where he talked about the Fisk which is like the kingpinbossfight and this is how it's normally seen excuse me and you may try you canpick out Wilson Fisk which is the bald guy that's the main boss there andyou'll notice he kind of blends in with the other enemies and he's actuallyreally hard to pick out this was actually a usability issue that we neveraddressed during our testing so this is of course Jason how he sees the game andhe uses his peripheral vision to try to track objects and so it's even hardernow to track down Wilson Fisk and see where he is in the fight so Jason youknow given his background expertise and design pointed out the importance ofsize shape texture intensity and color and how you have to use many differentmethods to communicate features in a game and how you can't just rely solelyon one and again this is just good UX and thatwas something that he was reinforcing throughout his talk to the team one ofhis favorite challenges was called the black cat challenges where you have todo like a Where's Waldo type type thing where you're searching the city lookingfor a small cat and going back to my teenage years here and he enjoyed it hecould actually find every cat and I thought this is rather ironic forsomeone who struggles with this visual disability that he could do it but thecontroller vibrates every time you're close to the cat and so he solved all 30of them and he liked feeling this empowerment of being able to find allthese cats so that was another example of another way of communicating feedbackwith through the vibration of the controller it was a small thing for usto add but a big win in terms of accessibility so this kind of brought meback to Apex legends and the first time I had heard about the feature with thewhole chat wheel wasn't because of it making accessible for people with speechissues but it actually people brought it up because they felt like it was a safespace where they could play they didn't have to worry about age gender identificationor their cultural background invite any kind of game or toxicity so that wasjust kind of the thing that was reinforced throughout was that you knowby making our games more accessible we're making it that we're justimproving the games in terms of the UX and improving the design so I ended thetalk just sharing with the whole studio that all of us are getting older thatwe're all going to at some point in our lives most likely face accessible issuesaccessibility issues I know myself in the last six months I've become the guyat the restaurant who holds the menu like this and has to kind of squint tosee the text so I would definitely benefit from larger text in games andultimately it really hits home for all of us at some point so even though againas I said before I was it was it was an easy sell to insomniac I really want tojust break down why it was important to us and it alignswith the company goals it's forward-thinking just as mediaprogresses there's going to be more laws put into effect where it's going to beimportant that we have accessibility great accessibility is great UX andeverybody will benefit from this and so even if you're the most jaded personyou're reaching a wider audience ultimately and you're making bettergames so how do we embrace accessibility on a day to day basiswell we emphasize during the talk the accessibility is a team effort there'ssuch a wide range of accessibility needs it's hard to know where to start or howto meet them but the more educated every team member becomes the more we can askourselves how can I contribute how can I help improve this feature and make itmore accessible and also just keeping it top of mind we have our group ofadvocates we meet on a monthly basis and we all share either recent games that havesome great accessibility options or what opportunities we see to improve for ourown games and and essentially we have also a flack I am list and email listand all that just so that we can continually get emails and remindersabout accessibility and the other thing that we want to focus on is just seeinghow much we can incorporate accessible features into our design and notnecessarily always rely on settings or options menus like what if we would haveproposed that Wilson Fisk was wearing a white suit or the enemies were wearing adifferent color and that was just part of the base game now we want to seewhere we can make improvements as of the foundation before we start adding thesettings and then just as noted before starting early in the production cyclebringing in the advocates having them play through the game potentiallybringing in those I'm just drawing a complete blank here I can't I can'tbelieve I just forgot the whole name of that people that work at hospitalsoccupational therapists that's it okay Wowall right so bring them in early so they can essentially check out the game andgive feedback and then our goal is to build off ofeach game so we take all of the information all the option settings wewe've put it in a confluence page and we make sure that we carry that forwardspider-man was essentially phase one for us but all future games will be phasetwo and phase three we'll just keep building off of what we've createdbefore and so ultimately accessibility for us is not just about adding newfeatures for our games but it's truly embracing it as a culture and that isall thank you awesome thanks Brian so we do havequestions them they're a lot now we're not gonna be able to answer them all sonone of these questions are uploaded so we're just gonna pick one to pick it'salright there's more even more okay so do you have more examples of really goodfeature than enhance accessibility in a game like the chat wheel in Apex ? Yeah Ithink well I think there's some minor stuff they they're very low cost they'renot like a big feature like the chat wheel a good example is in Gears 5 youknow how when you play through gears and combats over with and there's like themusic kind of has a little stinger at the ends to let you know that you'vebeaten everyone well for people who don't hear that they don't know thatcombats over and so they just added a very simple line the subtitle sayingcombat music ends or something to that effectand so that's a really nice feature that I think is very easy to add but as a bigwin is there any other question that you want to just like one last you speakthe one you want sure then we can have a quick break so I guess there's aquestion here how far can we allow the player to skip challenges into makingthe game accessible so it's interesting because and this kind of relates toanother question about cognitive issues so for our puzzles we decide to make allof them skippable and some of those for fine motor control issues but we alsorealized that there was some probably cognitive issues and there's some peoplejust don't like puzzles you know and they don't want to bother with them andwe've been going back and forth on this like Sam Thompson says that we shouldnever have a skip option or he kind of posed that question because the concernis that that's an easy cop-out or an easy fallback it's like oh we'll justadd skip to the whole game you just like skip through it and obviously people areplaying games for a reason they want to be challenged they want to enjoy theexperience the thrill of being spider-man so we we we do want to try toaddress all the needs as we can and give peoplethe full experience but we also realize that there will be times where we needto include the skip option but that shouldn't be our first go-to plan.

Sweet alright we gonna stop now thank you so much okay thank you thanks everyone.