Designing for All Gamers

Sammanfattning: In recent years, playing games has become a popular activity for everything from socialising purposes to educating purposes, with billions of players worldwide. However, being able to play games is not evident for people with disabilities. The gaming industry is excluding masses of people by not creating enough accessible games. Indie gaming is a part of the gaming industry that has grown immensely during the last decades. Indie game companies are often smaller studios with independent publications, finances and creativity. Almost everyone has the tools nowadays for making games. Indie game companies do not usually have the resources for engaging as much in accessibility as bigger companies do. Since they are distributing a big share of the games on the market today it is necessary to explore their possibilities of creating more accessible games despite their resource constraints. The research question for this study is “What are the game development challenges that Swedish indie game companies face when implementing accessible design practices, and how can they overcome them?”. This was investigated through a survey study where the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with employees at seven different indie game companies in Sweden. The results revealed perceived challenges in the tools that the investigated companies utilised, such as challenges in accessibility communication, resource constraints and how they aim to gather player feedback. Other challenges were identified in how the company operates, more specifically in their work tasks and planning of accessibility. Results also contributed to an understanding of how the investigated companies work with accessibility, through how they prioritise tasks and how they receive accessibility information. Possible solutions on how they can overcome challenges were identified, both on an individual and company level, as well as on an industry level for the indie gaming market. The results provided insights into the factors impeding indie game companies and developers from designing for accessibility as well as possible solutions to these challenges. These findings contribute to the understanding of the challenges with implementing accessible design practices and have added a nuanced perspective on the challenges faced by indie game developers and suggest potential directions for future investigation, both in research and in the indie game industry.