How a Game About Mail Delivery In a Small Town Helps Pave the Way On Accessibility

“We’re founded on the idea that games ought to be approachable for everybody.”

That’s Dr. Matthew White, CEO of Whitethorn Games, an indie publisher based in Erie, Pennsylvania. Their games include the calming mail delivery experience Lake, developed by Dutch outfit Gamious and released this year; and 2020 crafting adventure game Wytchwood from Canadian developer Alientrap, among many others.

White grew up playing “cozy stuff” like Harvest Moon and Pokemon, while his friends were out “crushing beer cans” and playing Halo. “Generally speaking, the [games] industry is full of all kinds of ways for you to run down a hallway and kill somebody, so I really wanted something a little more interesting,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. As he dug into the audience of people over age 27 who tend to have families and restraints on their time, but who do prioritize the games they want to play, what became apparent to White was that the audience was “way less homogenous” than what some consider the typical “gamer audience” of 17-24 year old “angry white kid[s].”

White discovered that like-minded groups of gamers, including developers and customers, were different and diverse — and so the games that Whitethorn looked to publish would need to be easy to pick up and easy to put down. “Perhaps challenging, but not menacing,” says White.

A natural extension of the ease of use aspect was an emphasis on accessibility. “People who are disabled in any way, from the most profound and visible all the way down to the most invisible thing that you would never know the person next to you has, that vertical is very much included in our concept of when we say we want [games] to be literally for everybody.” Of course, the “everybody” specificity simply means as many people as possible, given the resources and technology available.

Color blindness, dyslexia and deafness are among the conditions that Whitethorn confronts in the area of accessibility, as well as attention-based conditions that might result in a player simply being overwhelmed by a busy menu screen. But it extends “all the way up to the most profound interventions,” says White. And we’re not just talking about players with disabilities; but the idea of focusing on accessibility that includes the developers who work with Whitethorn. White expresses the importance of seeing “not only characters, but creators who represent the people like you.”

Britt Dye helms usability and accessibility at Whitethorn, studying gamers and what they might need to pick up information as they play and progress through games, what the barriers are to playing games, and aims to remove those barriers to make the games more playable.

Dye thinks of accessibility as a core concept that’s put into a game’s design through the development process. Her work includes utilizing baseline accessibility guidelines that are given to developers, playing the games through in order to test all the features, and using her knowledge and feedback obtained from individuals with specific lived experiences to pick up and fix “glaring issues” in the process. Playtesters — some of whom self-identify with certain disabilities — will then come in and test games for usability. Whitethorn also works with local non-profits on consultations and testing for players, such as The Sight Center of Northwest PA for players with blindness and low vision, and The Barber National Institute for players on the Autism spectrum.

“From a philosophical mindset perspective, we think of accessibility as just, making games for human beings,” says White. He points to practical elements in the home, such as the fact that some kettles have spouts and doors have different doorknobs: “You’re designing products for humans.”

While the kinds of things that Whitethorn does on a day-to-day basis are, in White’s words, “ultimately pretty mundane,” they tend to “make a huge difference to people’s ability to actually experience the game itself.” For example, when considering a player who is not neurodiverse or who can’t differentiate red and green, that changes what the game looks and feels like. Usability often comes first, White says, because it’s for literally everybody, and even the people with disabilities benefit from the those options. And then from there, they move into the accessibility pieces. And because it’s a business, the company goes in a list-wise way and aims to attack how they can “hit the largest number of people with the most disabling issues” and then continues to iterate from there.

White and Dye explain that it will be rare for any indie, Whitethorn included, to offer a profoundly accessible game that supports, for example, something like a complete loss of vision — because of the associated expenses involved and the fact that they’re often working with solo developers or micro-teams. “But we do try to hit as many as feasibly possible,” says White.

For Dye, the biggest wall that she comes across in this line of work is the limited amount of time, especially the time that developers have (or don’t have) to implement and change things. And then as a publisher, Whitethorn is not always coming in at the beginning of the process, but sometimes more toward the middle or even the end, when things can be “kind of a scramble” to see what they can do to help the most amount of people for the effort that they’ve put into it.

“In a broader level too, the tech kind of sucks right now,” says White, putting it bluntly. He mentions that one of the most interesting pieces of accessibility tech right now is the Microsoft adaptive controller, which, as he points out, is for the customer and not so useful for Whitethorn as a publisher. But what it does for gamers is crucial. “There’s millions of reasons you might be limited on mobility, and they’re all very different and very unique to the body of the individual who has that disability,” says White. That means they might have a custom mobility device, like a wheelchair, rigged up to pieces that meet their disability to overcome those issues wherever possible. “But they may be fundamentally and totally different from another person’s mobility device.”

The aforementioned controller uses accessibility equipment standard plugs, so that any device can plug into them and cross over to Xbox controls. “That tech is really cool,” says White, adding that seeing a company like Microsoft invest in it is “awesome.”

However, game engine tech accessibility is not quite as advanced. “We still need a human being with a masters degree or a doctorate to sit down with volunteers and manually comb through [games],” White explains. “Every time we’re doing accessibility work, its like deriving Newton’s original equations over again. That means the expertise of accessibility is in the heads of people, not in tech.” And there lies the problem: “The entire accessibility vertical hasn’t matured to the point where people think of it as its own vertical in the industry.”

That’s not to say there aren’t a plethora of passionate people who work to innovate, raise awareness and advocate at every opportunity for accessibility. There absolutely are, from sectors of gaming giants and smaller companies dedicated to just that, to various academics and doctors who devote their studies to this issue, to the many non-profits and advocacy groups, such as Steven Spohn from Able Gamers, and beyond. But in terms of game development and publishing, having more tools built into the workflow to detect more advanced issues would change and challenge perceptions on accessibility.

Ultimately, it’s about remembering that people are literally different. “Every human being who plays this game is not necessarily going to have 20/20 vision and be 6 feet tall and 180 pounds, like they’re this Adonis in your mind,” says White. “You’re making your game for somebody. But until you actually sell it and see them playing it, that person isn’t real.”

A quick instinct for any kind of creator, White says, is to look at a thing and relate it to their own experience. So in terms of games, a developer might say, ‘Nobody’s going to look at a map to be immersed in a space.’ But what that person is really saying, is ‘I wouldn’t look at a map to be immersed in a space.’ “That’s what’s critical,” White continues. “There’s this really easy extrapolation from ‘I’ to ‘nobody’ or ‘everybody.’”

He adds: “It’s the human condition that we all have a certain solipsism where we’re the only real person.” He considers his own present situation, sitting next to Dye in the studio for this interview. “I can never see the world through Britt’s eyes, even if our eyes are very similar in terms of their function,” says White. It couldn’t be put simpler than that.

That’s what’s important to remember in terms of accessibility. “It’s very easy to just say ‘nobody’s going to … [insert word here]’” says White. But wait, he warns: don’t be so sure that nobody will.