Is the battle for board game accessibility an unwon cause, or an unwinnable cause? I don't know the answer, and I invite you to join me in my own uncertain search for an answer.
This is a modified version of a post first published on Meeple Like Us.
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.
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‘You talk of Scotland as a lost cause’, John Steinbeck once remarked to Jackie Kennedy. ‘That is not true. Scotland is an unwon cause’. As a supporter of Scottish independence, I take those words to heart. Here we are, shackled to a political state that is alarmingly self-destructive in its excesses but I can hope for a better future. An unwon cause, versus a lost cause. It’s comforting, even in the face of unpalatable circumstances and unenviable difficulties ahead. The fight, this says, is still worth fighting.
At what point though do we transition? At what point does an unwon cause become a lost cause?
It’s something I think about a lot, because the answer to that question is bound up tightly with the future of this site. I’m prepared to put in the effort for an unwon cause, but I’ve tilted at enough windmills in my day to be wary of over-committing to a lost cause. Into what camp does the battle for meaningful and widespread improvements to board game accessibility fall?
Honestly – I’m not sure.
We can probably begin answering the question by first defining what we might mean by a lost cause in the first place. Generally, ‘A thing or person that can no longer be changed for the better’, but that’s distressingly binary. We live in a world of greys, no matter what people might like to think. As such, we need to soften this and consider the features that might be ascribed to the opposite scenario. What does a winnable cause look like?
I think there are a number of key features.
There is a target audience that can be clearly defined.
There is a desired state of affairs that can be clearly articulated.
The target audience falls short of the desired state of affairs which is advanced by advocates.
Advocates have a loud enough voice that their desired state of affairs can be heard by those in a position to make change.
The target audience is aware of the desired state of affairs as being an option.
The target audience generally agrees that the desired state of affairs is worth adopting.
The target audience is able to make changes in itself to bridge the divide between ambition and actuality.
The target audience has a willingness to make changes in itself to bridge the divide between ambition and actuality.
The target audience is confident that the effort expended in achieving the desired state of affairs is proportional to the benefits that are to be reaped.
When all of these line up it creates a circumstance that I tend to call ‘Pushing on an open door’. Sometimes a door is closed just because nobody realised there are benefits to be had in opening it. The door isn’t locked, it’s not stuck, it’s not keeping monsters at bay. It’s just in one state and moving it into another state might take a push but no significant other barriers will be experienced. It’s the ideal state of affairs for an activist.
We don’t live in an ideal world though. Sometimes the hinges of that door need oiled, and that’s where advocates come in. Their job is to make that door open smoothly by applying the necessary lubrication to the points where the resistance is most noticeable.
The amount of oil available to expend on a cause though is limited, and you only have so much to last you. If the door requires more oil than can be provided, it becomes – at least for the time being – a lost cause. If the supply of oil is greater than the surplus of resistance, then we have something more encouraging – an unwon cause. Struggle with the door long enough, and hard enough, then that sucker is going to burst open whether anyone originally wanted it to or not.
The oil we have as advocates is unfortunately drawn from precious reserves – it’s made up of time, it’s made up of effort, it’s made up of energy, and it’s made up of emotional capital. For a large-scale cause, there may be hundreds, thousands or millions of people who are sharing this cost and buoying each other up. For a small cause in a niche area, it might be a handful of activists. The problem with unwon causes is that they’re tiring. Actually, let’s go farther – they are exhausting. And because of that, we need to be very careful when assessing a situation. We need to be able to tell the point where a cause becomes unwinnable.
The problem there is that we aren’t dealing with fixed trajectories – we don’t draw a linear line from now and then and see where it converges with ‘meaningful change’. The lines that describe progress are curved, and occasionally they bend away from success. Sometimes the door gets creakier over time. Sometimes our oil supplies runs out before we expected. We’re aiming for a tipping point that may have seemed achievable from one vantage point but becomes ever more distant with time. Attitudes ossify. Sometimes people just prefer a time when nobody cared about the door and they actively work against anyone who would aim for otherwise. The convergence point between achievement and activity is forever shifting its position.
If you don’t recognise when that point moves from achievable to unachieveable you run the risk of wearing yourself out from root to trunk, and yet still fall far short of accomplishing your goals. The worst-case scenario is you put in the effort and nothing changes except you – in the process you become less than yourself because you spent so much of your own essence and never got anything back. Self-care demands knowing when it’s time to stop.
So, where does board game accessibility fall here? Let’s go step by step.
There are two, in fact – players that would benefit from greater accessibility in board games (pretty much everyone), and the publishers, designers and developers that can incorporate greater accessibility in their game designs. This part isn’t a problem.
Definitely. Board games are not as accessible as they could be, and this is a state of affairs that should be changed so that the audience of potential players is expanded. More people get to play games, more people buy games, everyone has more people to play with and games become more interesting as a result. The market expands, careers become more secure, and more and more people can make a living from this excellent hobby. If that’s not desireable, I’m not sure what is.
Our regular agenda of teardowns is the evidence we have of this. So are our ongoing graphs that show the categories in which board-games most often fall short of the target of being accessible. Our masterlist also shows this pretty clearly. Each individual teardown, while not necessarily being 100% accurate in every respect, provides comprehensive documentation for each data point. I think it’s a reasonable proposition that there are accessibility flaws, many of them avoidable, across the widest expanse of this hobby.
When I started Meeple Like Us, there were a handful of articles on the topic and they were usually scattered across multiple blogs and videos without any real coherent or consistent presence. I think over the past three years we’ve managed to create a vocabulary and a presence around the topic. Even so I really don’t feel, even now, like we have a sufficient voice to even make these concerns meaningfully heard. That’s not a problem in itself – it takes time for a cause to build up steam and attention. Video game accessibility is thriving and I can remember a time, not all that long ago, when nobody gave a damn about it. However, here we must acknowledge our shortcomings – our voice as a site is not loud enough, and that’s something that we need to address if we are to have any success in moving forward.
There are more sites out there now though, and that’s great – but honestly I still don’t think there are enough of them to break through the background hum of the crowd. At least for now. I certainly don’t think Meeple Like Us is sufficiently loud to do it alone. I suspect we’re probably the biggest ‘board game accessibility site’ by quite a long way, but that’s not really saying much. There aren’t enough of us, and none of us are drawing the kind of attention needed to make a convincing case that publishers should be doing better. If we are to ensure this cause remain winnable, we must make sure our voices are heard.
I think this is definitely true for gamers with interaction difficulties in games. I would like to think it’s true of publishers too, but it’s hard to say. This cause, the one to which I have dedicated pretty much all my free time over the past few years, is one of dozens of causes and many of them are likely to draw more obvious support and approval. We tag in every publisher when we put out a teardown so they must at least be aware that accessibility is an issue. Surely?
This is a major problem for this work. Honestly, I think 90% of publishers are utterly indifferent to the cause of game accessibility. Some have actively gotten in touch saying they are straight up disinterested in anything I have to say about the accessibility of their games. Some claim they’re ‘doing fine, thanks – not interested in working with you’. For at least two of the companies that have said this, I have teardowns that show their position is demonstrably untrue. Most publishers though don’t even respond when I send an email or tag them in on a teardown, not even privately. The 10% that do are marvelous and while I don’t want to single them out (this isn’t a naming names post) I am appreciative of each and every one.
9-1 is a shitty ratio though. I honestly think the largest bulk of publishers just don’t care, with a long tail willing to pay lip-service to the topic without doing anything meaningful to address it. The problem for us here is that often saying you’re in favour of something is enough to get pretty much all the social juice that would come from actually doing it, and it’s a good deal easier.
That can change, but it changes only with a loud enough voice. I am heartened at least by how over the past few years people now complain about inaccessibility rather than simply accepting it as inevitable. Sometimes the only way people will care about a cause is when it has an impact on the bottom line of a spreadsheet. There is a growing movement of people simply refusing to buy inaccessible games, and if that builds you can expect this problem area to become less bleak in a hurry.
This is definitely true, although it also has to be considered in line with the fact that not every game is going to be a candidate for being fully accessible. Almost every game I look at though has some way in which its accessibility could have been improved. This doesn’t require more, in most cases, than some consideration of the issue. A lot of the time it doesn’t even incur any extra cost. There’s very much room for improvement.
For those impacted by inaccessibility in games, hundreds of ingenious workarounds have been invented and applied. Gamers have shown a willingness to work around publisher indifference to accessibility that would be inspiring if it weren’t so one-sided. Even in 2019 we’re seeing games released that are completely inaccessible to a condition as easy to cater for as colour blindness. Again, this isn’t every publisher but it’s the overwhelming majority in my experience. Where games are accessible, it’s usually accidental.
Clearly not. This is something else that needs to be aggressively addressed. This is likely to be a stick and a carrot issue. The carrot is the expanded marketplace that comes from board-games being a hobby that is friendly and inclusive of people with disabilities. The stick is the eventual backlash that will occur for a hobby that isn’t.
It’s a mixed bag, then – and therein lies the problem when it comes to assessing if this work is worth continuing. Given the overwhelming wall of indifference I face when trying to advocate for accessibility in games, do I have the oil left for the hinges? Do we, as a community of activists, have enough oil between us to make something happen? Perhaps this door is going to stay shut for the time being and we just need to make peace with it. Perhaps my role in proceedings is simply going to have been the one that pushed hardest for a while before others came along and forced the door open after I collapsed from the exertion. I’m an old man, after all.
Part of the problem I have is that the questions to which I have to say ‘no’ are inextricably linked and they rely on factors beyond me. This isn’t simply a case of doing more work – it’s doing work that this site is not well positioned to do. All it would take I think is for an outlet like Shut Up and Sit Down or the Dice Tower to make accessibility a focus in how they review games and the entire industry would come to heel. I don’t have that kind of reach, or that kind of audience. The entirety of three years worth of work in this site could be superseded by a single SU&SD video. It would be a revelation to people – the first time it was ever raised and why haven’t people been talking about this before? Meeple Like Us wouldn’t even merit as a footnote in the attentions of people in that event. Believe it or not, that would still be a win for me. The cause would be advanced. For what it’s worth, I have made several attempts to get larger sites to cover the issue but to no avail. Again, usually what I get back is silence. Some people have success in getting their causes addressed by larger outlets, and that is a force multiplier on impact. We on the other hand have to build that impact largely brick by brick. It’s slow, ponderous, tiring and frequently disheartening work. I can point to signs of progress, but also to periods of the past few years where I’ve almost given in to despair.
I spend a lot of time feeling like I’m yelling into a void. Sure, we get hits and attention. Both are at least an order of magnitude less than where is needed for us to be an influence, and at least two orders of magnitude less than what is needed in order for us to make a difference. All the things I’ve done over the past few years are suffering from diminishing returns. Where we need to be kicking into a higher gear, we’re just idling in neutral. That means I spend a lot of time wondering if this site will ever be able do what I want it to do. I spend a lot of time trying to drive attention to the site not because I want it in and of itself but because that’s a tool that lets me address the other things. Without an audience, I can’t exert pressure.
On the other hand…
Ah, that’s always the trouble with a sober assessment of a situation. There is always that optimistic spirit that says ‘You’re just in a funk, snap out of it little buddy’. After all, I’m comparing a site that is three years old to sites that are much, much older with all the network effects that age brings. It takes time for momentum to build up. Even massive blogs were once where we are. It’s important to be patient. It’s important to let matters take their course. The world has no obligation to speed up according to your own self-important timetable. Stay the course. Stay strong. Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes. Hold the line.
Maybe that’s even true.
In the end, that’s probably the biggest issue I have at the moment with Meeple Like Us as we wrap up our third year of operation. I honestly don’t know if this cause is unwon or simply unwinnable.
If board game accessibility as a whole were an unwinnable cause, I’d probably in a perverse way be happier. I would feel like I could stop without it being a premature reaction. Where I am on the spectrum of opinion on this wavers on a day to day and even hourly basis. I wrote this editorial a few weeks ago during one of the extended down-slides in my optimism and this conclusion was unremittingly negative – ‘This is an unwinnable cause’ I had written. I’ve softened a lot of the sentiment in this post and it’s still pretty downbeat. Brexit has weighed heavily on me for quite some time and honestly it has made me a lot more negative about everything around me. I feel sad, anxious and powerless in the face of an impending tragedy that is utterly pointless and equally utterly preventable. It’s no co-incidence that I’m in my darkest moods just after seeing the news.
This isn’t my resignation letter from the site. This isn’t me throwing in the towel. It’s just me trying to set the groundwork that explains, when I perhaps do, that the towel’s trajectory was probably inevitable. I probably have another year in me with the current state of affairs. I can probably keep my sword up that long. More than that though is going to need a increasing sense that the sword is occasionally finding its target.
In other words, it sure would help at the moment if I could see some evidence for the winnability of this cause. How are you applying oil to the hinges? And if you are, has that been at least in part as a result of the work we’ve done over the past few years? Think of this as an informal survey – testimony, or silence, will be valuable evidence for us going forward in the future.
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