This specification does neat stuff.
This is an unofficial proposal.
User friction in a digital interface creates inaccessibility and accessibility guidance aims to remove this friction to make the interface easy to use for as many people as possible. Some friction, however, is fundamental to the nature of a product or service and removing it can break the system or the user experience rather than enhance it. This Note aims to find a way to identify this 'intentional friction' so that it can be preserved while the unintentional friction that creates unnecessary inaccessibility can be removed.
To Do: It is worth checking the terminology used here fits that used in "Patterns in Game Design" by STAFFAN BJÖRK and JUSSI HOLOPAINEN or any newer similar reference where applicable. This should ensure that standard terms are understood by the industry. Also need to ensure everything is centred on a lens of intentional or unintentional friction and not straying into generic accessibility advice.
There are two main types of intentional friction: generative friction and protective friction. Generative frictionGenerative friction creates value whereas protective friction prevents harm.
Educational tools use friction to encourage learning in users. Asking questions and expecting users to remember facts or data creates a memory challenge. Timed quizzes aim to distinguish between effortful retrieval and automatic retrieval (does the user need to work out the answer each time or is the answer itself memorised). This is especially useful in mathematics where automatic retrieval of simple and common calculation answers can free up mental capacity for high-level problem solving.
Bjork and Bjork recommend several ways in which making testing harder can improve learning overall. Spacing out practice sessions to encourage partial forgetting, switching between types of problem, varying learning environments to remove associations between the environment and the subject that would have aided recall, and actively requiring the user to retrieve information from memory before re-presenting facts will all increase friction and make the process harder.
Bjork and Bjork argue that this improves the storage strength of the facts rather than the retrieval strength in the moment. The level of difficulty introduced must, however, be balanced for the user to create a constructive challenge rather than a deterrent challenge.
One of the most widely cited definitions of games was created by Jesper Juul. Jesper's definition is based on 6 rules or elements. "A game is 1) a rule-based formal system with 2) variable and quantifiable outcome, where 3) different outcomes are assigned different values, 4) the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, 5) the player feels attached to the outcome, and 6) the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable." By this definition a user experience is only a game if it is effortful and that effort influences the outcome. This requirement for effort constitutes intentional friction.
Additionally, some accessibility features in gaming can make the game accessible while removing both the effort and the ability to influence the outcome. An example is auto-aim, which automatically moves a reticule over the target that needs to be hit or selected. While this enables the player to hit or select the target, it removes the challenge of aiming, which forms part of the gameplay challenge itself.
CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) aim to block malicious automated access to digital resources by presenting challenges that only humans should be able to solve.
See the Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA for more on this topic.
Some friction is designed to discourage destructive behaviours. Gambling services often incorporate deposit limits and mandatory pauses to discourage unhealthy levels of interaction. This could be considered a form of "Slow Design" which is interfaces that slow down user interations to encourage the user to interact in a more mindful way.
Microboundaries are interactions that attempt to encourage mindful interactions. Examples are confirmation prompts ("Do you want to continue?") before allowing destructive or ireversible actions. Important and irreversible actions often require a confirmation step ("Do you want to continue?") or a cooling-off period to reduce the likelihood of harm through accidental activation or impulsive decision making.
Adding friction to actions seen as harmful or undesirable is intended to discourage those behaviours.
Identification and authentication mechanisms introduce a different kind of intentional friction. An ideal design would create an insurmountable challenge for someone who should not be accessing the resource while creating minimal friction for someone who should.
This Note focuses on intentional friction in gaming. In the other forms of intentional friction identified it is generally clear what needs to be preserved. If an effort to make a user identification mechanism allows anyone to claim to be that user then it is clear that the mechanism is broken. Similarly the purpose of CAPTCHAS and behavioural interventions are clear and in reviewing an attempt to make them accessible most people would normally agree on whether the mechanism has been broken or not. Friction in educational tools has a large body of work behind it and the frictions involved have specific aims such as encouraging effortless recall, encouraging mindful interaction or impeding immediate recall to encourage better knowledge storage. Again, when one of these frictions is identified it is generally unambiguous whether an accessibility intervention has broken the friction or not.
In gaming the intentional friction is not the means to an end but is the end itself. In 'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience' Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about this enjoyable 'flow' state as being a state between boredom (from too easy a challenge) and anxiety (from too hard a challenge). Gaming attempts to offer this flow state. The need to balance challenge to the player makes game accessibility a unique use case in terms of intentional friction. This Note will focus on this 'intrinsic' enjoyment from gaming that relies on balancing the challenge to the player. There are also 'extrinsic' motivations available; social status from beating games that are designed to test resiliance and perseverance (to continue to play despite the anxiety of a misaligned difficulty level), trophies that state you have beaten a meta-challenge in a game and e-sports which offer material prizes and social status (that could encourage the player to continue despite the boredom of a misaligned difficulty level).
Although the body of the document is going to focus on gaming it could easily address how to deal with protective friction (of the 6 options we identify later we must preserve the challenge if possible or replace it if not). Similarly, generative friction linked to education should be preserved, replaced or rebalanced. Once the cognitive work has been done for gaming it may be quick and easy to apply it to the other spheres.
There is a body of work that highlights the need for some friction in gaming. This means that a standard approach to accessibility of trying to remove all friction or barriers would be inappropriate. Not only would it constitute fundamental alteration of the game which may be considered an unreasonable requirement, but it could actually break the game experience itself.
The existing resources section is currently a direct drag and drop from the GAP analysis. This will be [trimmed | expanded | rewritten] at some point.
Ian Hamilton's Difficulty vs Accessibility talk at GAConf USA 2021 highlighted that there is no fixed difficulty for a game. Games present barriers and players have capabilities and the level of difficulty that arises comes from trying to overcome the given barriers with a user's unique set of capabilities. Disabled people will have reduced capabilities in some respect meaning they will face higher difficulty for the same set of presented barriers. Within the talk he states that "Accessibility = avoiding unnecessary mismatch between capability & barrier". Steve Saylor framed this to say that accessibility is a way to bring the difficulty back towards the intended level.
In the IGDA-GASIG page on how to make games accessible it states: "All games must contain some degree of inaccessibility in order to be a game. There must be some kind of challenge. This necessary inaccessibility varies from game to game. It makes accessibility an optimisation process - thinking about the barriers your game may present, which of those are a necessary part of what makes it fun, and which are not."
In the article Game accessibility course design modules in higher education Thomas Westin describes this as the Game Accessibility Paradox. The author argues that games can be described by a series of strict rules for playing the game which are normative. They can't be changed without fundamentally altering the game and effectively creating a new, different, game. The player interacts with these through game mechanics which are performative. They conclude that the two main approaches for accessibility are removing barriers that aren't needed for core gameplay or creating special games that use a different modality (such as audiogames). They note that a third option is to make modifications that alter the game rules creating a new game.
These examples highlight the need to retain some inaccessible features to preserve the challenge of a game but make no recommendation of a formal process to identify which features need retaining.
[intro to remedies paragraph]
Westin offers us three ways to make an accessible game.
Hamilton, however, makes an important point in that the difficulty level of a challenge is not universal. It is generated by the interaction of the barriers presented and the players capabilities which may be diminished in some dimension by a disability. It will also be affected by familiarity with the game itself and familiarity with the game mechanics used.
This suggests two things:
While these will not prevent inaccessibility from increasing the difficulty of a game they may allow it to be rebalanced to a suitable level.
Many games have to balance challenge as the user gets used to the game mechanics. They may do this by making particular game loops harder with tougher enemies and higher skill requirements or by subverting the game loop with new weapons and abilities that need to be learned. There may also be recurring short periods of higher designed challenge that may enter the anxiety level of challenge and provide a sense of acheivement when the player beats them even if it takes several attempts (so-called 'boss fights' or 'boss monsters'). These are adjustments to the designed challenge that will affect everybody and are not neccessarily accessibility issues (except where a new weapon or skill introduces new unintentional frictions).
There are some games that adjust the difficulty of the challenge depending on the skill of the user. They may do this by:
Once we have identified a challenge mechanism that creates inaccessibility we have a series of actions that we may be able to perform.
In a game there is information linked to challenges that needs to be presented to the player. This may entail communicating a game event, confirming a player action or presenting information that gives the player choice (for instance, information about the enemies that can be attacked, the cards that can be turned or information that enables the player to solve a puzzle). Unintentional friction can arise from the way the information is encoded (a language the player doesn't understand), the way it is presented (if only communicated visually, audibly or through use of colour etc) or a requirement for the player to discover it.
Are there any unintentional frictions that prevent (rather than hinder) play not related to sensory disabilities? Should memory games be included in this category or should they always be assumed to hinder play?
Where the information being communicated is encoded in a way that would only make sense to some players such as written, spoken or signed language this may present a barrier that prevents play. In most cases this can be remedied by offering alternative encodings selected in the game menu (or signalled by pre-selected preference settings acquired from the platform). In some cases the presentation of the information may also need to change or benefit from changing. Changing the language of written text will not help someone who is print disabled unless that alternative encoding is also spoken or, in some cases, signed. Sign language could be translated into subtitles but it may feel more natural to players for it to be translated to speech in a language they understand.
Offering an alternative encoding constitutes an accessibility related adjustment that preserves the core challenge.
Audio cues and information presented visually in games can often be presented both visually and audibly. Where the visual or the audible information is communicating a game event, confirming a player action or presenting information that presents options to the user (giving the user a choice of card to turn or enemy to attack along with details about that enemy that underpin player strategy) then this can be done both visually and audibly. In some cases game designers may want to make the secondary channel of information presentation optional if it diminishes realism or increases cognitive load.
Multichannel communication constitutes an accessibility related adjustment that preserves the core challenge.
In some cases the challenge is to discern meaning from patterns in the communication channel. Examples of this would be:
We can't make accessibility related adjustments that preserve the core challenge so we must either remove the challenge or replace it with another challenge.
[ need an intro paragraph here ]
Juicy design can be seen as a type of intentional friction because it sometimes complicate the communication between the interface and the player. Juice encompasses:
Juice can sometimes be used to add realism especially for combat-based games. For players with PTSD however too much realism can trigger flashbacks and anxiety. Enabling players to toggle these effects with a suitable level of granularity and potentialy adding trigger warnings at the start of game sessions or play sessions should enable players to choose the experience that suits them.
Juice is intended to improve the feel of the game and although it should always agree with the aesthetic and standard communication (juice may be superfluous to the game feedback but should never be at odds with it) any extra communication can increase the cognitive load on players. It can also bury audio and visual cues that communicate information to the player in the juicy feedback that was intended to enhance the experience.
Juice is designed to be superflous so it is intentional friction that can be safely removed when needed without breaking the challenge of the game. By offering options to turn off specific features with appropriate levels of granularity an accomodation can be made without breaking gameplay or making the game less engaging for others.