Eighteen Months of Meeple Like Us: An Exploration into the State of Board Game Accessibility

Abstract

The study of game accessibility to date has largely focused on the topic of accessibility within a video game context. Largely underexplored in the academic and professional literature is accessibility in the domain of tabletop games, especially those that are classified as part of the 'hobbyist' market. An ongoing series of research annotations, published on the blog Meeple Like Us, has been aimed at addressing this lack of attention. In this paper, the authors report on the work of the Meeple Centred Design project which to date has examined 116 board games for the accessibility issues they manifest and the lessons that can be learned for designers in this space. While the project has not achieved significant coverage of even a fraction of the available library of hobbyist games, currently numbering approximately one hundred thousand, it has discussed the issues with many of the most critically success and popular of these titles. This paper reports on results to date, methodology of the analyses, limitations of the project, and the future plans for work in this interesting game accessibility context. Keywords Board games Á Accessibility Á Inclusion Á Tabletop Á Meeple like us Á Universal access & Michael James Heron

Diamond: The Game – a board game for secondary school students promoting scientific careers and experiences

“…A critical question for this work was how to target inclusive design, which is an important discussion ongoing in the science communication and board game community (Ryan, 2016;Pobuda, 2018;Dawson, 2019;Lewenstein, 2019). The nuances of accessibility, and of board games, mean that it is difficult to design a perfectly accessible game, but there are certainly many small design tweaks and adaptations that can easily be made in the design phase to open up board games to even more players (Heron et al, 2018;da Rocha Tomé Filho et al, 2019). We aimed to minimise barriers for players, and started by considering the experiences of players with sight impairments.…”

A New Approach of e-Commerce Web Design for Accessibility based on Game Accessibility in Chinese Market

“…In [3,4], the methods and challenges of designing accessible games are analyzed from the perspective of the game itself and the user, which also gives the inspiration for the choice of the scope of this research. The scope, or user profile is essential for the whole design method in this research, not only in video games, this research also collect user profile from table games, in [5] the user profile and the way of typical methodologies, limitations are reported; respectively, an efficient accessibility game design will be one of this article's guidance, "The Last of US: Part II" is a uniformed and detailed example in-game field, in [6], the author demonstrates the importance between accessibility and game by providing Active Game Accessibility (AGA) development framework and game accessibility guideline. Although the content of game accessibility above cannot be copied in this paper, the framework they used will be a guide for building an integrated accessibility environment.…”

“…At the same time, this experiment gives users the use of barriers to simulate the target users. The change of CSS filter scale in the source code of an e-commerce website can affect the sight from different kinds of color-blind; the slightly shaking from the mouse to simulate the shaking from hands can be realized by C++ [5]. The experiment result is shown below; all the experiment was based on Taobao China website.…”

Meeple Centred Design: A Heuristic Toolkit for Evaluating the Accessibility of Tabletop Games

“…Instead it offers a low-cost, reasonably quick way to highlight important issues that must be considered before a gaming group considers a title for inclusion at the table. The limitations of this approach are discussed in Heron et al (2018).…”