Accessibility through Inaccessibility

Today a very interesting game had come to my attention through an article on gamasutra about game accessibility. This game called "game over" has been made as inaccessible as possible for any user. So by playing this game I could finally get a taste of what frustration disabled gamers have to deal with normally.

The developper of game over had a very interesting aproach on developing this game. In order to make this game as inaccessible as possible, they first made a similar game which was as universally accessible as possible.

This kind of reminded me of one of my first year's project at my game design course. Which was codenamed "annoying". The objective of this project was to create a system and interface which would be very hard and annoying to use for any user. This assignment sounded great at the start while we all thought we would just create something that wouldn't do what it was supposed to. But the catch however was that all the functionallity of this system and interface needed to be designed with a positive usefull outcome in mind. So just creating a big barrier to prevent normal use of the system was out of the question. We finally came up with a futuristic supermarket with lots of promising features badly implemented. So for instance we had colored lighting in different sections of the supermarket to represent the types of products that could be found there. Among other this resulted in the fact that our red lighting in the meat section made all the meat look grey and not so tasty anylonger. Furthermore we had come up with an automated payment system where articles would be automatically payed for when put into the shopping kart. This resulted in the customer's inabillity to change his mind about buying a product once it was put inside the cart.

At the time this project didn't seem very relevant to me nor my other project members despite the fact that we had lots of fun doing it. We did endless brainstorming and finally we had set up this theater piece that had to demonstrate our system. Since passing that project 3 years ago I had never thought about it anymore. But when I played game over I finally got it! This geniusly fun way to design things that don't work enables you to see the thin line between that which doesn't and that which does work.

This leaves me with a very interesing option for my own design approach for the creation of my "as universally accessible as possible game demo". Which I will be creating this final semester. I'm thinking pirates.