Increasing accessibility
When thinking of making our games more accessible, we often narrow our focus to the overall pacing and difficulty of in-game challenges. While balancing itself is important enough to warrant a whole chapter (and we’ve done just that in this book), we first need to identify ways in which we can make the core of our product fundamentally more approachable.
Reducing cognitive load
Games that require good memory, observational skills, abstract thinking, planning, and fact association are all at risk of being very cognitively demanding.
High-level games of chess immediately come to mind as an example of a difficult mental challenge. And yet, the base rules and mechanics of chess can be understood and memorized by young children, making chess an accessible game.
Complex and mentally demanding games only become inaccessible if the player is stuck, put under time pressure, or struggles to learn the rules and improve. To make the game more accessible...
