Designing to be Inclusive

For TLDR, scroll to the bottom.

From before we started designing Assembly, we wanted to ensure our game designs were inclusive. The reasons behind this were multiple.

Janice’s mum is physically disabled and has been a keen activist for disability rights throughout her life. Janice has been exposed to disability and its effects from a young age and wanted to bring some of this upbringing into our first creation. Janice was taught some basic sign language as a child which she still remembers to this day.

A secondary reason is that Janice studied and works in a field where women are the minority (Physics & Engineering in case you were wondering). She has been confused on more than one occasion as being a personal assistant rather than the project manager or technical lead. Championing the next generation of female scientists and engineers has always been a passion of Janice’s; she was even an invited speaker at the Women’s Engineering Society annual conference a few years ago. It was always important to both of us that there was gender equality in our games, particularly since we have two daughters!

We’ve talked about many of the considerations we made when designing Assembly in various updates over the past year but we felt that now was a good time to bring them all together with a few additional bits that we’ve not spoken about before. Our fundamental aim when finalising the design of Assembly was to be as inclusive as possible but perhaps more importantly not to knowingly and deliberately excluding anyone.

Hearing Impaired

This is perhaps our most obvious addition for anyone who has flicked through the rulebook in Assembly. When you do, you will have noticed that the last few pages are dedicated to teaching you some sign language to enable you to play the third communication level using sign language rather than speech (based on British Sign Language). Although our main aim when we included this was to educate gamers rather than specifically making it directly accessible to deaf gamers it hopefully had dual purpose.

But why did we bother?

As already said, Janice knows a few signs from her childhood but what we didn’t mention was that we taught our first daughter, Amelie (hearing) how to sign from a young age to help her communicate with us before she could talk. She took to it amazingly well and by 18 months old she had mastered and regularly used over 100 signs and was already joining signs together to form 2-word sentences. The only downside was when she decided to sign ‘monkey’ or ‘sheep’ in the middle of dinner with tomato pasta all over her hands which inevitably resulted in a bath and a lot of clothes washing! We have since taught Sammie, our second daughter, signing(also hearing). She used her first sign at 4 months old, although she does now (at 15 months old) have a preference for pointing and grunting she does also enjoy signing when reading books.

So we thought if an 18 month old could learn 100 signs and a 4 month old can master a sign, then an adult could easily learn 11 signs and perhaps when they realised how simple it was they might choose to learn a few more!

Left or Right Handed?

Have you ever wondered why on many standard decks of cards the numbers and suit are on all 4 corners of the cards? This is so whether you fan your cards out to the left or the right, you can still see at a glance what you have in your hand. It’s a small and simple things to add but will make playing your game easier for both left and right-handed players. So that’s why the command cards have a symbol on all corners!

Colour Blindness

In addition to people with a visual impairment, we also knew many gamers are colour blind. Finding 12 colours that would be distinct for all types of colour blindness, colour weakness and those with no visual impairments is a tough, if not impossible challenge! We ran all of our colours through a colourblind simulator which allowed us to see what it would like like for people with different sorts of colour blindness and weakness. We ended up with a pallete that should be good for most people however to make doubly sure we also added icons on everything that mattered.

Here’s an example: top is ‘normal’ and bottom is red-weakness:

Gender & Cultural Focus

Our first basis for ensuring we were gender inclusive was to address this in our rules. For the most part our rules were written in second person (i.e. you) however when it came to examples we had to use ‘real’ players’ names to improve clarity and engagement. We therefore ensured that we evenly divided the examples with each of the pronouns: he/she/they. We had a total of 3 examples in our rulebook, whereby 1 featured ‘he’ and ‘she’ (the longest example) and the other 2 featured ‘they’ exclusively. To embed this gender inclusivity further, we also named our characters such that we had an equal number of distinctly female names and distinctly male names plus at least 1 gender neutral name (i.e. neither distinctly female nor male in origin).

In addition to this, we also made sure that when we allocated roles and colours to each character that these did not necessarily follow societal stereotypes. For Example, Luca (male) is pink, Jayani (female) is the Production Manager and Anna (female) is blue and the Technical Expert.

But what about cultural inclusiveness? 

For this we carefully considered the final names used on each of our Role cards. Although a few are self-indulgent (Amelie, Sammie, Holly & Alfie) we did try to be as culturally inclusive as possible and here’s the reasoning for the choice behind each of the names we picked:

  • Sammie: A name that is neither specifically feminine nor masculine. It’s a Hebrew name derived from Samantha (the name of our youngest daughter!) and Samuel.
  • Anna: A Latin and Hebrew feminine name that is widely used across Europe and was recently ranked in the top 10 most popular baby names in Germany, Belgium and Austria (among others).
  • Amelie: A French feminine name with German origins (from Amalia), but more importantly it’s the name of our eldest daughter!  
  • Jayani: A Hindu feminine name meaning Shakti Of Lord Ganesha. Not necessarily hugely popular, but a beautiful name none-the-less.  
  • Noah: A masculine name that is popular in both the USA and Germany, among other European countries. It’s currently ranking 3rd for baby boy names in the USA this year and came 6th in Germany last year.  
  • Luca: A masculine name derived from Luke. It’s used widely around the world including in Eastern Europe and South America. Luca or Lucas ranks in the top 10 names in Italy, USA and Brazil (among others).
  • Nahla: A feminine name with both Arabic and African origins meaning first drink of water and successful. Perhaps more importantly this is the name of Amelie’s favourite toy (her choice).  
  • Li Yong: A masculine Chinese name that can be traced back to the Tang Dynasty meaning brave or forever.  
  • Alfie: An English Anglo-Saxon masculine name derived from Alfred. It’s also the name of our one and only nephew.
  • Juan: A popular masculine name in Spanish speaking nations around the world as well as in the Philippines. Interestingly it is also a popular name in for Chinese women.
  • Holly: Is an old English feminine name and one that is very special to me personally. It’s also the name of the male computer on Red Dwarf!

Language & Reading Ability

As a result of the rules being translated into German, Spanish and French, we turned the reverse of the Role cards into iconography to enable the basic game (i.e. no malfunctions) to be able to be played with fully language independent components. We attempted to do this for Malfunctions too but the iconography became too complex so we decided to give this a miss for now and it may be something we attempt to do in the future.

Additionally, Janice is dyslexic and finds the use of icons much easier to ‘decode’ at a glance than text plus we’ve had reports of backers playing Assembly with children who weren’t yet proficient readers so hopefully these icons will also make Assembly easier to play for them too!

Considering Physical Disabilities & Visual Impairments

Assembly was originally an entry into the 2016 BGG Mint Tin Design Contest which is why the original cards were small. We loved the small footprint of the game and also loved the portability of it. 

In the planning stages of the Kickstarter campaign, we decided to do some market researchand put out a survey that got almost 70 responses. Yes, we know this isn’t a huge number but it’s also not an insignificant number. One of the questions we asked was:

Which of these statements do you agree with most?

  • Box and components should be as small as possible (i.e. mini-sized cards and deck box);
  • Cards should be mini-sized but box can be bigger (e.g. box Fluxx/Coup sized);
  • Box should be as small as possible but cards can be bigger (e.g. bridge, poker);
  • It doesn’t bother me.

Lumping the responses for the first two statements together, gave the following results:

As you can see, the vast majority preferred standard cards (or didn’t care) with only 10% preferring mini cards. On top of this and to our surprise, we had numerous comments showing us there were mini-card haters out there that would refuse to buy games that use mini cards, especially if you have to hold them during gameplay. 

When we reviewed these results, we saw that almost half (44%) of those we asked would be happy with mini cards. We thought great, almost everyone wants mini cards like us! You see, we loved the mini cards and the tiny box. 

Then Janice listened to a podcast about accessibility where they explained that mini cards were not compatible with most of the shuffle machines used by people with physical disabilities and Assembly requires regular shuffling. We wanted to ensure that we didn’t exclude people, but now we were knowingly excluding people from being able to enjoy Assembly. We tried to push this aside in our minds as we loved the mini cards and we had already chosen to use thick wooden tokens instead of punchboard which would not only feel nice but make it easier for people with issues with their hands to pick up and manipulate.

We then had people pointing out that they struggled to see the icons without their glasses. Janice spoke to Meeple Like Us on Twitter who do great accessibility tear-downs. They said mini cards can be okay, but standard cards are better especially for people with visual impairments. Janice also spoke to someone who uses hand braces who explained they cannot play with mini cards as it’s just too difficult. We now knew we were excluding two groups – visually impaired (from reading glasses to more significant impairments) and those with physical disabilities. We were making an effort to be as inclusive as possible by including a sign language sheet to educate gamers, using icons to help with colour blindness and using multiple pronouns in the rule book but the use of mini cards now felt wrong

And then it hit home – as much as we loved mini cards we needed to start listening to our market research.

Our solution

We realised we had been overly hung up on mini cards and the tiny blue box. We then we asked ourselves a question: Are people really going to put this game in their pocket? And we realised, in the most part the answer would be no; it’s going to go in a bag and an 8x8cm box or 10x13cm box doesn’t really take up much more space. Plus the new box is actually a little shallower! On top of that, the layout using bridge cards doesn’t take up much more table space, in fact it only takes up an additional 7cm! 

And so, less than a week before we launched the Kickstarter campaign, we finally made what we felt was the right decision. We were going to go with bridge-sized cards as we didn’t want to knowingly exclude parts of the gaming community and when you look at the market survey results this is what they had been telling us all along. We could finally sleep easy.

Conclusions

We hope that this description on designing to be inclusive has provoked a few thoughts at how small changes can make big differences and ultimately make your game more accessible and relevant to a wider group of gamers. As much as you may love something, like us with the mini-cards, the question you have to ask yourself is: can you sleep easy knowing you are deliberately excluding some people who may love to play your game? If you’ve done everything you can to include them (this may include reaching out to others to get suggestions on how best to tackle the problem), then sleep easy, not every problem is surmountable.

If you’d like to learn more about accessibility in games then I strongly recommend that you read the Meeple Like Us blog – they regularly do accessibility tear-downs of games from various points of view which you’ll hopefulyl find very educational!

What have you done in your design to ensure accessibility and inclusivity?What have you appreciated in someone elses deisgn? What have we missed?

TLDR

When designing your game have you considered the following?

  • Is there adaptation you could make such that your game is immediately accessible to deaf players?
  • Are your cards/components suitable for both left and right-handed players?
  • How have you dealt with colour blind accessibility? Colour pallet? Icons? Both?
  • Have you ensured gender equality in both numbers and stereotypes?
  • Have you considered how to incorporate other cultures?
  • How can you make your game easier to play for those who speak a different language or have differing reading abilities?
  • Is there anything you could do to improve accessibility for those with a physical disability?
  • What about gamers with a visual impairment?
  • Can you sleep easy at night knowing you haven’t deliberately excluded gamers? i.e. could you small (or big) changes to your game to include them?

What have you incorporated in your design to ensure accessibility and inclusivity? What have you appreciated in someone elses deisgn? What have we missed?

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Kenneth M Thomas
Kenneth M Thomas
5 years ago

Thanks for making it easier to use. I actually put the game into my jacket pocket to carry it to work.

Glenn Saitch
Glenn Saitch
4 years ago

I love this. Your thoughtful and transparent approach to accessibility and inclusivity means I’ll be backing your new projects on day one.

If the wider games industry sees projects like this succeeding, it won’t take long until these considerations are seen as the standard.

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