Fighting games, depth vs. complexity, and how conflation of the two leads to anti-accessibility rhetoric was written as part of an assignment for Social Issues in Interactive Media and Games.
The article explores common conceptions about accessible design in fighting games, debunking notable myths about design, advocating for accessibility, examining design goals, and demonstrating the relationship between accessible design and a community's attitudes about its own players.
Completed: 2021
Development time: ~2 days
Tools: Google Workspace
I love thinking about the deep systemic designs of games, and fighting games are a really rich genre for deep systems that encourage player strategy. Embracing that passion allowed me to write this fairly comprehensive article over just a couple days (even if it's not my most polished writing!)
There's a prevailing narrative among fighting game fans that we cannot allow more players to enjoy fighting games because doing so would break the games mechanically, and that discussion gets mean. As a designer and fan of fighting games myself, I can't disagree with that perspective more. We can preserve both depth and accessibility without one stepping on the other; as designers, we should strive to be inclusive and think beyond the preconceived beliefs that prevent us from doing so. This even extended to the jargon used in the article; I tried to make the article accessible by not using specialized terminology wherever I could.
Oops...
Download the article here