The Truth About “Accessibility” in Gaming

SkillUp responded to people saying his Wolverine review was invalid because he was on easy mode with accessibility features on. He wasn’t. He played Mutant, the difficulty Insomniac itself recommends, on default settings, and the navigation trail can’t be disabled at all.

But I’m less interested in the game than in why this argument goes nowhere, and it comes down to one thing: ask people to define their terms. Discourse is dead because two people use the same word to mean different things and never notice.

Accessibility used to mean accommodating disability. Colorblind settings, remappable buttons, adjustable input timing. Nobody objects to that, and Wolverine actually does that part well, with presets for hearing, motor, and vision needs. That’s real and it’s good.

What the word now often means is accommodating everybody, to the point that the game stops having a target audience at all. And when you build for everybody, you end up master of none, with no identity.

My position: make the game what it wants to be. Define the experience, define the core mechanics, then add settings to accommodate as many people as you can. It won’t be for everybody and that’s fine. FromSoftware is the model, not because everything should be hard, but because they know what their game is and won’t run from it.

We grew up with mountains of games we never beat. Nobody filed a complaint. That was normal.