“Planet Money Indicators”: How Video Games Became More Accessible

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Planet Money's The Indicator team explores the changing landscape of video game accessibility.

transcript

MICHELLE MARTIN, HOST:

For most of video game history, accessibility was something of an afterthought. But that was before his 2020, when a company called Naughty Dog released a game called The Last Of Us Part II. Adrian Ma and Wailin Wong, my colleagues at The Indicator from Planet Money, discuss changes in accessibility.

ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: Steve Spohn discovered video games when he was 12 years old. He had spinal muscular atrophy, so he spent most of his time at his home.

WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: This is a disease that gradually robs a person of their ability to use their muscles. One day, one of the nurses helping him asked, “Have you ever tried playing video games?”

Steve Spohn: So I told her I was too disabled. There's no way I can do that. And she challenged me, saying there's no reason I can't grab a controller. She was in a power wheelchair, so why couldn't she have a controller? Then she brought me a Nintendo and it was like love at first sight. In the end I fell in love and beat Mario.

Wong: Fast forward to 2020 and The Last Of Us Part II is released. Emilia Schatz is the lead designer at Naughty Dog, the company that developed this game. Years before its development, she wasn't necessarily thinking about how to make it more accessible to people with disabilities. She was seriously thinking about how to offer her own game to her mother.

Emilia Schatz: I was pretty much like, “Okay, I want my mom to play this game.”

MA: But the big hurdle for her mother was learning the controller.

Wong: At the time, Emilia was working on a game called Uncharted 4. So she thought, what if we added an option that players could turn on that basically simplified the controls? Although these new features didn't turn Emilia's mother into a gamer, she did get a lot of positive feedback from others who played the game. So Emilia and her colleagues wondered what other options they could add to the game to make it accessible to even more people, including people with disabilities.

MA: So when Emilia and her colleagues started working on their next game, The Last Of Us Part II, the questions snowballed. And after much experimentation and consultation with disabled gamers, the developer finally added his over 60 different accessibility options to the game.

Wong: For example, players have the option to reassign the function of each switch or button, which can be very helpful for players with certain physical disabilities. Hearing-impaired players could turn on multiple visual cues, and there were also options aimed at people with vision-related disabilities, such as Ross Minor.

Ross Miner: So many blind people, myself included, woke up and developed crazy, complicated ways to play video games.

MA: Ross works as an accessibility consultant and actually specializes in video games, which he says he's been playing since he was little. He remembers that this Pokémon video game was really hot at the time, and he adapted even though he couldn't see the screen.

Minor: I literally went home, got my Game Boy, and memorized all the sounds in the game.

Wong: But there were certain games that Ross thought he would never be able to play, so-called Triple-A games.

MA: That was until he played The Last Of Us Part II. It had all the accessibility options for visually impaired players. There was a screen reader to help navigate the menus and a voiceover explaining what was happening in the scene. And oh, the sound cue.

Minor: A sound cue when something needs to be overcome…

(SOUNDBITE OF ELECTRONIC ping tone)

Minors: …when you need to squat.

(SOUNDBITE OF ELECTRONIC ping tone)

Minor: It's truly a work of art.

Wong: But perhaps his favorite feature was the option for players to send out a kind of sonar pulse in-game.

Minor: Then, in stereo, play a sound on the left or a distant sound on the right to track that object and it will guide you there.

(SOUNDBITE OF ELECTRONIC ping tone)

Minor: I'm not an emotional person, but this literally brought me to tears. Because nothing like this had ever been done before.

MA: Since then, Ross says more and more gaming companies have followed his example.

Miner: We hope this trend continues. At the end of the day, I'm 100% sure it will, because it makes a lot of economic sense.

Won: Yes. Because many people with disabilities play games. According to the Census Bureau, approximately 13% of the population has some type of disability. According to some estimates, the percentage is even higher in the gaming community. Ross says it's a big market.

MA: Adrian Marr.

Wong: I'm Weilin Wong. NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF GUSTAVO SANTAOLARA'S “CHASING A RUMOR”) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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