Welcome to Press Play, POPSUGAR Australia’s first-ever gaming initiative focused on accessibility. Our aim is to shed light on the experiences of people with disability who play games, while helping to identify the features needed within games to make them truly accessible to all players.
The initiative includes interviews with key figures in the gaming space as well as first person pieces produced by writers with disability who can speak from experience about these features. Press Play is supported by our newly launched text-to-voice feature. You can find all the pieces here.
In Life is Strange: True Colours, you play as Alex as she explores Haven Springs, Colorado after her long-lost brother dies in a mysterious “accident”. You use Alex’s power of empathy — bearing witness to the emotions and memories of those around her — to build relationships and seek the truth of what really happened to her brother, and your choices affect the unfolding story.
It also has a refreshing suite of accessibility options. There are settings to accommodate colour blindness; subtitle, captioning and readability settings; and optional warnings that mark when intense auditory or visual scenes are about to occur. The game also allows you to have a longer timer to make key decisions as well as the option to completely skip quick time events (QTEs) or any gameplay that involves quick movements — which is pertinent to me as someone with mobility restrictions in my hands and wrists.
QTEs involve performing specific actions on your controller or keyboard which correlate with or cause a character’s action, often at a quick pace. In the Life is Strange franchise, they tend to be used sporadically for things like mini-games, but sometimes QTEs are of consequence. One memorable scene in the original Life is Strange game has the main character, Max, navigate through a maze in her nightmare, quickly hiding from spotlights to avoid detection. It’s a scene I disappointingly haven’t managed to get through more than once because it’s too difficult for me. The idea that I can still complete games like True Colours despite lacking the dexterity for QTEs is a huge relief because it means I can follow a story through to its end without penalty. In fact, if you skip QTEs you’ll be assigned the more favourable outcome — like automatically winning a mini-game. Skipping QTEs is a key design feature for anyone with fine motor control, coordination or reflex-affecting disabilities.
Although unpopular among many gamers, QTEs can support immersive storytelling — if they’re implemented well. In a game like Heavy Rain, performing QTEs as your car careens down the wrong side of the road introduces stakes that a cutscene couldn’t, induces heart rate-fluttering stress and makes the player’s and the character’s interests converge in a way that could be difficult through other gaming mechanics. QTEs can help players shake off the feeling that they’re simply in a walking simulator, especially when they’re playing games that are more narrative-driven rather than skill-based. So, by skipping them, am I changing my gaming experience? Where is the challenge? Is it “cheating”?
The answer, I think, has to do with your motivations for gaming — which can be altered by disability. Before I had trouble using my hands, I enjoyed the satisfaction of winning, getting through challenges and beating difficult levels. These motivations still hold true, but now I’m more interested in games which immerse me in a story and make me think, which allow me to emphasise with the characters and explore the world. Physical challenges that force me to pause the game because of pain are a frustration, not a motivation.
QTEs are especially frustrating when they’re gratuitous or if you have to do them over and over again to progress (the reason why I never got through the original Life is Strange for a second time). While Heavy Rain’s use of QTEs was innovative, it also got weird. There’s a scene where you’re playing as the father of a missing child and the game compels you to search a shopping centre and mash the X button to call out their name. This causes nothing consequential to happen. In other scenes you use QTEs to juggle, use the toilet, drink juice and so on. It’s an inaccessible nightmare.
In other parts of Heavy Rain, or in games like Detroit: Become Human, or Until Dawn, your ability to perform QTEs has huge, irreparable implications on the story going forward. Failing or succeeding a QTE is treated as you making a decision and you can be deprived of entire subplots — just because you aren’t great at mashing buttons on time. Of course, in real life, running away from a killer or failing to defend yourself quickly enough can lead to death, and QTEs may be a close enough simulator of physical skill to keep players in the moment when the stakes are high. Still, I wonder if these games would be improved by basing grave ramifications on player’s choices — which are equally engaging to make — rather than their button pressing reflexes.
The fact that I don’t feel I’ve missed out on anything I value from skipping QTEs in Life is Strange: True Colours is an indicator of its accessible design. Players who like an action-oriented challenge can engage with QTEs, while people with relevant disabilities aren’t deprived of the game’s flow and story. Skipping over QTEs is only cheating if the challenge they present forms part of the reason you play. Otherwise, skipping them enables you to realise your individual motivations for gaming, and more developers should incorporate this accessibility setting in the future.
