Accessibility: Dumbing Down or Simplifying?

Games, and their target audience, have changed. This point can be contested and debated all we like but sometime or another it’s going to hit everyone that this hobby, past-time, whatever you like to call it, has evolved over time. Graphics, gameplay, story, battle systems – all of these things have come leaps and bounds since the 8-bit or even the 16-bit era. Graphics and story go hand-in-hand in some pretty obvious ways. Wider range of available character emotions, sophisticated animations and detail-rich environments allow for more storytelling than ever before. This is a great thing and while some people will argue that gameplay has suffered for it, this is really just a scapegoat. You can’t blame visuals or story for bad game design. However, I mentioned that the audience for gaming has changed – people who would have never played a game before the PlayStation are now the main demographic for most games and this is becoming more and more apparent the further along we go.