#GACONF EU 2018

The first edition of #GAconf EU was held on 22nd October 2018 at CNAM, Paris, organised in conjunction with CapGame and CNAM

ALL PREVIOUS CONFERENCES

Chris Power

Why We Play Together

Christopher Power, AbleGamers / The University of York

With a huge design space available for creating accessible games, it is important that the games we create deliver the accessible player experiences that players with disabilities want to have. In this presentation, you will learn about the different motivations that players have and what experiences they value, as found in our games user research in collaboration with the University of York, with our player community in the AbleGamers Player Panels.


Mark Friend

For All The Players – Accessibility at PlayStation

Mark Friend, Sony

Accessibility is increasingly becoming a focus in game development, and especially so with AAA developers. Join Mark as he shares his stories from the last 5 years working at Sony PlayStation, the accessibility projects he’s worked on, and the lessons he’s learned along the way.


Douglas Pennant

Solving An Invisible Problem: Designing For Colour-Blindness

Douglas Pennant, Creative Assembly

Drawing from his own experiences as a colour-blind gamer and developer, Douglas goes into detail about how the colour blind see the world, and how this can make some video games very difficult to play. He also addresses the issue of why developing for colour blindness is so difficult, with anecdotal examples from the development of Alien: Isolation and Halo Wars 2, and why some colour-blind solutions can still fail to make the game more playable. The aim of this talk is to deepen delegates understanding of exactly what colour blindness does to a gamer’s experience and expose them to some practices and solutions that can help make their games more accessible to the colour blind.


Jamie Knight

Cognitive Accessibility 101: Gaming Edition

Jamie Knight, BBC

Join us as we explore gaming through an autistic lens. How can we aid users in receiving, processing and acting on the information found in the game world?

A talk about what cognitive accessibility looks like and how can we ensure the experiences we create are playful for the widest possible audience.


Cherry Thompson

Empower Us! Including Players With Mobility Disabilities

Cherry Thompson, Ollie Britton, Nu McAdam, Vivek Gohil

Join a panel of four subject matter experts with various types of motor disability as we give you insight into what it’s like to game with our particular disabilities, what our greatest barriers are and what we most want to see for the future of games. The inclusion of all disabled players starts and ends with empowerment, and that’s especially true for physical disabilities.

We aim to leave you with personal anecdotes, your new BFFs (expert contacts) and even a little practical advice for how to accommodate a wide variety of disability for the games we love.

Tara Voelker

Building An Inclusive Tech Lab: How And Why You Should Too

Tara Voelker, Mixer

Should studios set aside permanent spaces dedicated to game accessibility research, feedback, education, and design? Microsoft has done just that with its Inclusive Technologies Lab. In this talk, Tara will discuss the value of a dedicated inclusive technologies space, how the lab was launched, what went right (and not quite right) during the first year of operation, and provide detailed tips and tricks for setting up your own accessibility-centric space.


Carlos Coronado

Making An A11y Enabled Game Vs Adapting One: Koral And Infernium

Carlos Coronado, independent

Making a game a11y ready could be an easy or hard job depending on many many factors. In this talk we will take a look at the different paths a developer can take to implement accessibility features with real released game examples and also explore the difference between adapting a game to make it accessible vs making a game accessible from scratch


Meagan Marie

Accessibility In Shadow Of The Tomb Raider: Providing Player Choice

Meagan Marie, Crystal Dynamics

An exploration of the history of accessibility in Tomb Raider, culminating in an in-depth overview of how Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s player choice and accessibility features resulted in the of the franchise’s most accessible game to date. This talk will explore establishing and pitching an intelligent feature set, development, implementation, and reflective thoughts on the process. Presented by franchise Sr. Community Manager Meagan Marie.


Kirsty McNaught

EyeMine: Experiences Building An Eye-Controlled Minecraft Interface

Kirsty McKnaught, SpecialEffect

SpecialEffect have years of experience building bespoke accessible gaming setups through one-to-one work. More recently they have been taking their expertise and looking for ways to scale up their impact. This year SpecialEffect launched a free and open-source eye-gaze interface for Minecraft, exploiting the game’s moddability to add accessibility features and developing eye gaze interfaces to support both expert users and those with more limited eye gaze accuracy. Kirsty will discuss the development of EyeMine and share the lessons learned along the way, including technical considerations, game experience, UX design and more. You will also hear different user perspectives from their experiences exploring the game.


Cherry Thompson

I Took An Arrow In The Knee But I’m Still An Adventurer

Cherry Thompson (cherryrae), advocate & streamer

As the industry moves towards a more inclusive and diverse future, disability representation in games still has a long way to go. Cherry takes their passion for diversity in games and experience within the disability community to explore why representation is so powerful, why we keep getting it so wrong and how we might be able to do better in the future.

‘Hear it from the horse’s mouth!’ is a phrase Cherry would love a lot more if it didn’t mean they were a horse. It’s important and ultimately really valuable to center the voices of marginalized people in discussions of diversity and representation because this brings unique insights to the table.

The aim is for this presentation to not only be valuable to artists, writers and narrative designers but to the full spectrum of games development. Be prepared for some personal anecdotes and take-away ideas to get the industry moving in the right direction for positive inclusion of disabled players of all kinds.

GAconf Europe

22nd - 23rd April 2024

Pullman St Pancras, London

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