Recent studies have shown that frequent gamers play with headphones more than 50% of the time. While increasing immersion (which is what we try to do!), the prolonged use of headphones at high volumes is a significant contributor to hearing damage.

There are things we as game developers can do to help mitigate impact on players’ hearing health, and it turns out many are small tweaks to things we currently do for player accessibility. Accessibility and player sensory health are close cousins, from a developer perspective.

This talk will look at some the basics of hearing safety and go over the work the World Health Organization has done in hearing safety and health in esports and video games. We will also show how incorporating simple recommendations for game software and systems can have an impact on our players’ hearing health, and how your game may be doing something very similar already.