The Reasons Against Accessibility in Souls Games Is Bad And Ableist
Dumb Ass Argument Felled
FromSoftware has graced us mere mortals with an Elden Ring DLC that is basically the spongebob flash meme - Want to see me create one of the best games ever? Want to see me do it again?
And once again, just like clockwork, for the 10 billionth time, the discussion of difficulty has entered our little hearts and minds.
Let me catch you up on how these discussions typically play out.
In one corner, we have Miyazaki, who takes a rather classical and seemingly logical standpoint on Souls games and their difficulty - The games are excruciating by design, because the greater the challenge, the greater the reward (feeling).
In another corner, we have people who just want the game to be easier. That’s it. Total skill issue, noobs who can’t git gud.
In the last corner (its a triangle, if you can’t tell), we have someone with some kind of disability that makes playing video games in general a pain in the fucking ass. They really want to play Souls games, and would really prefer the games support accessibility options rather than having to hope and pray (and literally setup) a third party device will support their endeavor.
And then in the crowd are all the folks who look at group 2 and 3 and say “wow, they’re the same people. Timmy with a motor skills disability should actually just fuck off and die or git gud.”
To put this into perspective for you, remember the ‘Equity’ picture of the folks standing on boxes to see a ball game? Accessibility is basically that, and in gaming context, its essentially just options. Equity and accessibility go hand in hand, but most people who die on the cross of “never alter the difficulty in souls games” fail to understand that. Now, I know what you’ll say - Yeah but Pixel, won’t people who don’t have disabilities use those options to make the game easier for themselves? And my response would be - Who the fuck cares and why the fuck does it bother you?
It’s these types of questions that demands the response - Don’t you know that people just mod the game to make it easier anyways? Over on NexusMods, we can see that over 300,000 people downloaded a Sekiro mod that allowed you to do a lot of things, like changing aspect ratios, unlocking FPS and CHANGING THE SPEED OF THE GAME. And yet we collectively act like adding similar accessibility options to a video game about difficulty is somehow going to take Miyazaki’s dream and butcher it.
At this point in the argument, people switch their strategy from outright denial of accessibility to the classic “not everything is for everyone,” as if they’ve just whipped all 5 pieces of Exodia and you’re cooked. But let us not be so hasty in our response, because such a statement does not deserve to be legitimatized just because it was spoken.
We are talking about a piece of entertainment becoming ACCESSIBLE. And when we say accessible, we don’t mean accessible in the Hollywood Exec way where we fundamentally change a work of art to appeal to the masses. We all saw how that worked out for the original theatrical cut for Blade Runner, which can only be described as the spit foam that occurs when your dog is eating the food out of his bowl like a rabid freak.
Elden Ring already has mass appeal. IGN reported in February that the title has sold 23 million copies. Most games never break that number, ever.
So when it comes to accessibility, we aren’t talking about the masses, cause the masses are already in. We are talking about options being added that allow a range of people to decide for themselves whether a souls game is right for them or not.
And just for some perspective, imagine how fucking stupid you would look if someone complained that Elden Ring wasn’t purchasable in their country and you said “noT eVeryThiNg iS foR EveRyoNe” like some kind lobotomized basement dwelling salmon flip flopping in the shallow water of your own sweat after you’ve died to Mogh 120 times.
I cannot overstate this point - We are denying an entire population of people from making a choice because some chemicals in our brains make it feel good to overcome hardship in a fucking video game.
This is one of those topics that gets my blood boiling because it feels as if we are just looking at a group of people who want to play these games and are telling them to fuck off because they were born differently or life took the ease of use we all take for granted away from them.
After conceding all the points before, the crowd decides to go for a hail mary - “We must protect the developer’s vision though!”
Okay, here’s the response to that - What do you do with the people who have disabilities that beat these games using highly specialized tools and equipment? Surely you must acknowledge that doing so is in direct contradiction of Miyazaki’s vision, right? What should we do?
This ultimately leads people back to square one, where they attempt to knead their ableism into something, anything, that protects the real thing at the heart of the conversation - Their cowardice. Their lack of discipline.
At the end of the day, the issue was never about protecting the developer’s vision, in the same vein that the protect the kids movement was never about protecting children. It’s a Trojan horse argument meant to protect the egos of people who are uncomfortable with the idea of having options that they know they’d cave to.