Ancestors

Written by SEGFAULT on 2025-01-11 at 18:31

"Can it run DOOM?"

"No; but that's 'cos it's owned by me, not some sad boomer trying to live out some fucked up faded power fantasy!"

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Toot

Written by SEGFAULT on 2025-01-11 at 18:37

Call me bitter if you must, but I am just sick of every piece of media involving retro computers leaning on the popularity of a dozen or so old games, most of which are incredibly violent, misogynistic, or accessibility nightmares.

(rant about how old gaming was and remains on of the least inclusive fields of media ever skipped)

Next time you're making a video about retro hardware and you're thinking of including footage of gaming on it, ask yourself why. Is it novel? probably not. Stop wasting our time.

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Descendants

Written by Anatol on 2025-01-11 at 18:50

@SEGFAULT do you have any reading recommendations re: accessibility?

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Written by SEGFAULT on 2025-01-11 at 19:27

@dngrs sadly not. I am basing this on the challenge in many early DOS and console games being about doing near frame accurate inputs to make jumps, kill enemies etc. But I don't know of any contemporary resources discussing the challenges this made for wide accessibility.

There is a excellent line in the Portal (1 or 2 can't remember) dev commentary (in game, enabled in the settings menu) about them trying to make puzzles where the solutions are hard to find not hard to execute, to enable players with impaired movement to complete the game. But in my own experience they fall short of this ideal too in late P2.

I think there are also some good GDC talks about accessibility. However most I have seen focus on visual or auditory impairment, and discuss little about historical titles.

It feels to me today that fast paced information processing (the one I struggle with) is a mandatory part of a skill floor in many games, and seems to be immune from the discussion about accessibility. Motor disorders that prevent users from making complex or quickly timed motions are similarly swept under the rug, except for a few bespoke (read expensive) hardware solutions. (if they are even permitted by anticheat)

I have put myself on a tangent here, although it was probably an important one. When I talked about accessibility earlier wasn't really taking about the ability to play a game, but more the welcomeness to want to.

I give two examples:

1. One of the top 5 games loved to be demoed by the retro gaming scene is "Duke Nukem 3D". The game is focused around player a protagonist that is depicted as a misogynistic and gratuitously violent man who's job is to save the world from a nameless enemy.

2. The steam game of the year awards 2024 were won by a first person shooter in all but one category. When asked for votes many categories did not have a non shooter game as an option to vote for.

As someone who finds the mix of violence and excessive machismo in games rather off putting (in the modem age no less, god knows how it was in the 90's, thankfully I was 3) These two examples highlight an media representation of gaming that doesn't include me.

I am not here to demand an end to video game violence, and I can live with a few macho guys in my games, but I am fed up with the fans of this stuff (and marketing teams who like their money) sucking all the oxygen out of the room for anything else.

Why is "can it run doom" am meme, but "can it run open TTD or SC1" not? Both of those games are of a similar age, have a similar cultural impact, and actually have lower hardware requirements. I bet you you could run SC1 on a TI81+ if someone could be bothered to. But the culture is so toxic at this point I thing anyone interested in doing so maybe just doesn't want to risk pushing back against the status quo.

Gaming had potential in the early 2000s to be a vibrant landscape where all forms of creative expression could be heard, because pixels are cheap. But I just don't think thats possible anymore... :(

@dngrs and anyone else who reads this meandering and off the cuff train of thought of mine, I am sorry the conclusion has nothing to do with the setup. I will maybe do a properly structured blog post on this one day, but I like those to be better researched than pure personal experience and conjecture. A lot of this metastasised before I was even born. I love games but have never felt welcome or safe in the gamer community, which means I just don't spend a lot of time playing games anymore. Yet somehow this still feels like my fight. I just rarely have the strength to fight it anymore.

(I think this is officially my longest toot ever thanks @dashie for increasing oldbytes' character limit to 5000. It's very freeing)

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