作者：Michael Heron

全身心融入流行文化中能够提供给那些致力于创造文化资本并在社区中与别人进行社交互动的人巨大机遇。特别是对于年轻人来说，文化素养包含各种超媒体产品，包括电影，音乐，小说，电子游戏和桌面游戏。对于现代流行文化产品的欣赏不再是一种被动的消费行为了，相反地这变成了通过解释，争论以及具有建设性的批评角度进行个人或公共建设的过程。对于流行文化产品的欣赏将进一步推动日常交流，并通过分享文化体验而推动人们去建立友谊。但并非所有个体都有机会参与到这样的过程中。许多文化产品，不管是否流行，对于很大一部人来说，不管是从身体上还是社交上都是难以触及的。对于某些人来说这便意味着看不到文化元素的价值。而对于其他人来说这种价值虽然非常明显，但是产品本身却因为未能考虑到肢体障碍和认知障碍而未能被接受。

大多数产业都付出了巨大的努力去提高产品的易用性，例如加了字幕的电影或电视节目；或将书籍内容录成磁带或加入盲文。但是在很多情况下游戏产品还是顽固地缺少着易用性。如今，开发具有易用性的电子游戏的难度受到了产业的广大关注。虽然激发人们的热情的速度还太慢，但毕竟情况开始有所好转了。然而比起受欢迎的电子游戏，游戏更像是包含各种形式的休闲活动。如今，在桌面游戏和纸牌游戏领域正上演着一场轰轰烈烈的复兴活动。过去的20年是这个产业发挥着最大经济影响力和号召力的时期。但现在，像《Monopoly》，《Cluedo》和《Risk》等老式的经典桌面游戏已经被具有创造性和国际性的现代游戏设计所取代了。像《Settlers of Catan》，《Carcasonne》，《Pandemic》, 《Ticket to Ride》和《Dominion》等游戏便吸引了一大批死忠粉，并带动了无数具有才能的设计师去专注于开发新游戏或往之前的内容中添加具有创意的内容。因为Kickstarter等纵筹平台让初创公司的准入门槛大大降低，2014年单单在美国业余游戏市场便创造了8.8亿美元的收益，并且其中有2.2亿美元是来自桌面游戏。我们很难以一个数值去形容当前这个产业的规模，但我们却可以相信在未来它将以每年双倍增长的态势继续发展下去。而尽管桌面游戏是广受人们欢迎的一种娱乐活动，但关于如何将其变得更加广泛且更具包容性却不存在足够的学术或商业研究。

monopoly（from gggipad）

桌面游戏是一群人坐下来分享游戏体验最简单的方式之一，不需要太多成本但却能够帮助人们建立起朋友与亲人间良好的社交关系。显然除了提供给朋友和家人彼此娱乐的机会，游戏（特别是桌面游戏）也能鼓励人们通过游戏去放松身心。但是当提到产品的易用性时，桌面游戏却远远落后于电子游戏。易用性是一种多重挑战，在这里任何轻微的互动伤害都有可能会创造出像交叉性结果这种复杂的关系。这意味着我们很难找到一种正确的补偿方式，特别是像基于正式的规则系统的桌面游戏这样。

对于那些拥有身体障碍的人，如果没有任何第三方的参与，他们将很难真正融入到一款游戏中。而大多数桌面游戏都是和身体有关的产品，即带有基于空间的复杂游戏状态以及基于某种方式相互联系的多种组件。标准的纸牌游戏可能会要求多个玩家每个人必须管理多个桥牌。有些游戏会要求玩家亲自去拨动游戏组块，如此作为游戏状态的这些视觉标记布局便会发生改变。还有些游戏会要求玩家不断收集并抛弃一些较小的方块，并在代表魔幻城市的复杂空间代表物中放置一些物体（游戏邦注：即在桌面游戏种被称为“Meeples”）。还有些游戏会要求玩家从更高的角度以长远的观点去做出更具策略性的决定。

游戏状态经常会以主题的形式表现出来。而这对于那些具有视力障碍的人来说便是一种弱势。就可读性而言字体选择可能是次优选择，或者说桌面游戏中很多选择都要求文本规格尽可能的小。许多游戏都包含了多种组件，有些游戏可能带有色彩标记，或很难从游戏桌面背景中凸显出爱。桌面游戏中所使用的物理定向组件都带有特殊意义，所以即使某个标记从视觉上看来是确定的，但它的具体位置可能并不是那么好断定。而纸牌可能还拥有许多密密麻麻且包含复杂指示的文本内容。

那些带有认知障碍的人可能会遭遇到更多问题—规则太复杂，并最终导致像“如果恶棍的桥牌中拥有这张纸牌，那么只在这一轮所有这张类型的攻击都是基于＋1，但是如果他们拥有的是不同纸牌，那么他们所创造的所有伤害点便是－1，除非这是一种基于电力的攻击”这样复杂的组合情况。对于我们中的大多数人来说这是很难完全理解的规则，而某些规则本身经过优化与基本规则集达成一致的游戏中也很难去简化参与者的认知成本。同样地，游戏状态本身可能会很复杂，即使规则很简单，游戏的最终阶段可能会与玩家的身体相关联。许多游戏会整合失败作为一种可能的结果，这对于那些已经因为游戏的复杂性而受挫的玩家来说便是另一种层面的打击。大多数要求特定符号，场所和方向在游戏状态中必须具有特殊意义的游戏是很难再吸引玩家去理解游戏状态本身和抽象的游戏机制的。

我们可以找到各种易用性游戏版本，如象棋和《Monopoly》。而这些游戏虽然是善意的，但它们却只是问题的部分解决方法，因为它们都不能有效处理流行文化中全民参与的问题。不管是象棋，《Monopoly》还是《Scrabble》，易用性都是广受欢迎的，但是将人们限制在这些游戏中也就是限制了桌面游戏的参与者范围。现在有一种能够提供现代桌面游戏易用性版本的定制项目，但是这种解决方法也只是部分解决方法，因为这只是针对于熟悉盲文的盲人玩家。甚至在这种有限的解决方法空间里，基于有限的物理标记或纸牌，有些较长的文本信息是不可能被转变成可触摸到的内容。一个真正的解决方法必须包括将所有人都带到同样的标准上，而不只是尝试着为那些具有身体障碍的人创造一个截然不同的易用游戏类别，或者只是专注于像盲文骰子这种无效的补偿策略。

在某种程度上，Meeple Like Us项目便是致力于帮助我们解决这些问题，我们会在此谈论我们基于这一主题所进行的研究，我们与学生们所进行的尝试，同时我们也会检测今天大受欢迎的桌面游戏所伴随着的易用性问题。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

On Board Game Accessibility

by Michael Heron

This is a modified version of a post that first appeared on Meeple Like Us, a blog with a strong focus on the accessibility of tabletop games.

Full participation in popular culture offers an important opportunity for people to build cultural capital and socially integrate with others in a community. For youth in particular, cultural literacy involves a wide-variety of transmedia products, encompassing movies; music; novels; video games; and board games. Appreciation of modern popular cultural products is no longer simply a passive act of consumption, but instead a process of individual and communal construction through interpretation, debate and an emergence of collaboratively constructed critical perspectives. Appreciation of popular cultural products facilitates the building of common conversational ground, and permits friendships to accrete around a set of shared cultural experiences. It is not however the case that all individuals have equal opportunity to participate in this process. Many cultural products, popular or otherwise, remain either physically or sociologically inaccessible to large segments of the population. For some, this may be a case of simply not seeing how cultural elements have value. For others, the value is apparent but the products themselves are exclusionary because they do not, or cannot, take into account physical and cognitive impairments.

Most industries have made considerable effort to increase the accessibility of their products, for example with close-captioned movies or television shows; or books on tape or braille. Gaming products though remain in many cases obstinately inaccessible. The difficulties and complexities of developing accessible video games are now receiving some attention from the industry. Progress is being made, albeit at too slow a rate to generate great enthusiasm. However, gaming as a recreational activity encompasses a wider range of forms than popular video games. There exists a vibrant, and growing, renaissance in the area of tabletop board and card games. The past twenty years have been the best years that the industry has known in terms of economic impact and popular appreciation. The stuffy reputation of board games as being centred around old family classics such as Monopoly, Cluedo and Risk is being replaced by a marketplace of innovative and impeccably designed modern titles with a distinctly international feel and appeal. Games such as Settlers of Catan, Carcasonne, Pandemic, Ticket to Ride, and Dominion have each spawned dedicated followers of fans, and inspired hundreds of talented designers to focus on developing new titles and innovating upon the ones that have come before. Buoyed by relatively easy access to startup capital through crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, the hobby game market in 2014 swelled to an estimated $880m in sales in the US alone, with almost $200m of that being directly linked to board games. It is difficult to truly put a figure on the current size of the industry, but there is every reason to expect that it will continue to grow by double digits on a yearly basis for the foreseeable future. Despite the significant growth of board-gaming as a vibrant hobby, there is very little academic or commercial research into how to make it more broadly inclusive.

Board gaming represents one of the easiest ways for groups of people to sit down and enjoy a shared gaming experience, with relatively little cost and with considerable opportunity for building social capital between friends and relatives. There is a growing body of evidence too that suggests beyond offering opportunities for friends and family to enjoy each others company, gaming (and board gaming in particular) offers an effective avenue to explore play therapy interventions. However, board gaming lags considerably behind even video gaming when it comes to the accessibility of the products that are on the market. Accessibility is a multi-channel challenge where subtle and nuanced interactions of impairments may create complications as a result of intersectionality. This means that there is rarely a single correct compensation, especially when considered within the context of the complexity of formal rules-based systems such as board games.

For those with physical impairments, it is often simply not possible for them to fully engage with a game without the intervention of a third party. Most board games are physical products, with spatially complex game-states and multiple, often small, components that are interrelated in often subtle ways. A standard card-game may require multiple players, each managing multiple decks of cards, with some communal representation of game-state between them. Some games require the physical flipping of game tiles, and the layering of visual markers on these as the game state changes. Others require a constant stream of collection and discarding of small cubes, and the placement of small figures (known in board gaming jargon as ‘Meeples’) within a spatially complex and state-dependent representation of a fantasy city. Some games require the ability to take a long term view from an elevated position to consider the strategic implication of decisions.

Game-states are often represented in heavily thematic ways. This disadvantages those with visual impairments. Font choice may be sub-optimal for readability, or the sheer number of choices on a board may require text size to be uncomfortably small. Many games involve lots of components, some of which may be colour-coded, or difficult to make out against the backdrop of the game-board. The physical orientation of pieces played on a board may have special meaning, so even if symbols can be visually ascertained, they may have subtleties of positioning that complicate interpretation. Cards may have considerable amounts of text, densely written and full of complicated instructions.

Those with cognitive impairments encounter more problems – rules may be complicated or heavily state dependent, resulting in complex compound conditionals such as ‘If the villain has this card in their deck, then all attacks of this particular type are at +1 for this round only, but if they have a different card then all damage they do is at -1 unless it’s an electricity based attack’. Such rules are difficult enough for most of us to fully understand, and in some games where the rules themselves are modifiable familiarity with the base rule-set will not meaningfully simplify the cognitive cost of participation. Similarly, game-state itself might be complicated – even if the rules are simple, the end stages of a game may involve highly interrelated physical state, where ascertaining the best way to contain an escalating situation is part of the logic puzzle involved. Many games embrace failure as a likely outcome, which can add an additional level of frustration for those that feel already disempowered by complexity. Most require specific symbols, locations and orientations of both to have particular meaning within the game-state, adding a burden of recall on the player to understand not just the game-state itself, but the abstract mechanism that exists for representing it.

There exist a variety of accessible versions of games such as Chess and Monopoly. These are well-meaning but at best a partial solution to the problem because they do not address the issue of full participation in popular culture. Accessible versions of chess, Monopoly and Scrabble are welcome but limiting people to these titles severely restricts the scope of participation in board gaming culture for those with impairments. There exist some bespoke projects to offer accessible versions of modern board. However, such solutions are also only partial because they are of use primarily to the blind, and only to the subset of blind players (estimated by the National Federation of the Blind to be around 10% of the legally blind population) that are conversant with braille. Even within this limited solution space, the nature of braille means that certain long text passages would not be possible to convert into a tactile format within the narrow confines of a physical token or card. A real, lasting solution must involve raising everyone to the same standard rather than attempting to create different, incompatible categories of accessible games for those with impairments, or to focus on ineffective compensation strategies such as braille dice or overlays.

The Meeple Like Us project is, in part, aimed at helping address these problems – we’ll be talking about the research we’re doing on the topic, the work we’re doing with students, and also examine the accessibility issues associated with popular tabletop titles available today.（source：gamasutra）