Meeple Like Us, January 2018

You can read more of my writing over at the Meeple Like Us blog, or the Textual Intercourse blog over at Epitaph Online.  You can some information about my research interests over at my personal homepage, or on my profile at Robert Gordon University.

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A month of the year gone already, who would have thunk it? Life comes at you fast. Faster every year it seems. Only 327 shopping days left until Christmas!

We've had a busy month, as increasingly seems to be the case. We talked about Terror in Meeple City and looked at its accessibility profile in our usual fashion. Dexterity games don't really do well in these analyses because - well, for the obvious reasons. Ice Cool is about as accessible a dexterity game as I've ever seen, but I still wouldn't really recommend it for a lot of the categories we examine.

The meatiest review that we published this month was Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization - a massive game with a review to match. Its accessibility teardown is similarly hefty and probably shakes down in the way you'd expect.

We looked at Super Motherload which is especially interesting for being a deckbuilder that is actually better for its simplicity. Its design has a corresponding impact on what we had to say about its accessibility.

Finally in terms of our normal game coverage we looked at the Unlock series of escape rooms. No accessibility analysis yet - that'll follow next month. We'll also hopefully at that point have published our review and teardown of the Exit series as a comparator.

Off the beaten track of our game coverage we have a special feature on how we've been using board games to teach user centred design at Robert Gordon University. Yesterday was the first week of version 2.0 of the approach and it seemed to go very well. Our students made paper prototype versions of Skull and One Night Ultimate Werewolf and then tried to work out why their modifications just made everything worse. An important lesson on the value of testing again and again and again.

We talked to Brandon Rollins about game accessibility in a three part series. We spoke about accessibility in its more traditional senses, how it functions for cognitive and emotional considerations and the persistently controversial inclusive accessibility. You'll find all three posts linked here.

Finally, inspired by a twitter topic I posted some of my own personal tips for content creation. This started off as a twitter thread that seemed to resonate with people, so I worked it up into a special feature. I can't guarantee you'll find any of it useful, but I will say this approach is what keeps me going on a day to day basis.

See you all next month!