“Maedhros did deeds of surpassing valour, and the Orcs fled before his face; for since his torment upon Thangorodrim his spirit burned like a white fire within, and he was as one that returns from the dead.”
resentfully throwing this ginger mass murderer into the tumblr void because i’ve been trying to get his eyes right for weeks to no avail and now he’s been bumped down to my second favourite character accordingly.
kink at pride is easy af to explain to kids, idk what yall are talking about. “mommy, why is that mostly-naked man wearing leather?” because lots of gay men think it looks nice. “why is that guy on a leash with a mask?” hes playing pretend. “why does she have a whip?” she thinks its fun. you know how you like to play with water guns? its like that but only for grown-ups, and she wont play with anyone who doesnt want to play with her so we’re all totally safe
if your 6yo’s next question is “is that a sex thing?”, thats fucking wild and a completely different problem. for you. not really an “Us Problem” collectively for all pride-goers, tbh. something’s going on there thats hard to call the dominatrix’s fault
homophobes think that being gay is already a weird sex thing thats hard to explain to kids. did yall forget that already? why are you trying to play respectability politics for people who will never respect you?
jk rowling’s new reputation will never not be funny to me. when you see her name now you dont think “oh yeah thats the chick who wrote harry potter” you think “oh lord, this TERF bitch again” like bro how do you fuck up so bad that your fuck ups overshadow writing the third most read piece of literature in existence
“I went to school for game design! I am highly qualified to talk about any game out there!”
I bet you don’t even know how big an 8 year old’s hands are.
You cannot meaningfully understand a great deal of Nintendo’s game development decisions without understanding how a child holds and uses a modern game controller. People love to critique game companies like Nintendo, especially core gamers and educated developers, as if they are some authority on game design but in twenty years I have never seen this type of individual talk about how Nintendo’s game design is constrained by the size of a child’s hands.
So…how big are they?
Big enough to use a dpad on the playstation controller but not large enough to use the analog stick comfortably. The opposite is true on the xbox controller. The shape of the joycon is designed for easy access for small hands for both.
Still, the kid’s thumb will have difficulty reaching both so rapid switches are not possible. On the left hand of the switch the stick is above and the dpad below, and the opposite is true on the right. This is a direct consequence of how a kid might use the controller. In most games the left hand controls movement - meaning an analog stick - and the right hand controls discreet inputs - meaning the dpad/button diamond.
Children’s also struggle to reach shoulder buttons and have lower grip width, so the natural gamer grip in which two fingers are resting on the shoulder buttons does not work at all for children. They usually have to use all four fingers to hold up a heavy device. The shoulder buttons go from being the most easily accessed buttons on the controller to the most difficult.
A child’s grip strength is lower, and thus so is their ability to hold a heavy controller comfortably, especially one not designed for their hand size. A single joycon in sideways mode, often used in child’s party games on the switch, is a far better controller size for a child while it is uncomfortably cramped for an adult.
It is not a coincidence that the Switch, which is marketed as a family console, comes prepacked with the controllers that are kid friendly and adult friendly controllers are a secondary purchase.
There are more things you can point out, but in a practical sense you can see these design principles applied by comparing something like Kirby vs Metroid Dread.
Kirby is almost entirely controlled through the face buttons, with only the rarely used defense button mapped to the shoulder buttons, and you can really get by with never using it. The triggers are not used at all. You rarely have to combination press anything. If my memory is correct, the shoulder buttons are never used for any temporary transformation abilities. The difficulty of using new abilities should not be compounded by hard to reach buttons.
Dread on the other hand uses combination presses a lot and ties three critical abilities (free aim, missile use, and sliding) to the shoulder buttons. The omega cannon, a rarely used but critical and time sensitive ability, is tied to the shoulder buttons for the easiest and most intuitive possible use. The stress of defeating an emmi should not be compounded by fumbling with controls.
Smash Bros in particular is pretty cool in how its control scheme is set up. The most basic functions that a child might use are very simply mapped to the single stick and face buttons. As you learn to play better and try more advanced techniques (like an adult might) like timed grabs, dodging, and shield use you move away from the face buttons, incorporating more and more use of the shoulder buttons. It splits the difference for the best of both worlds. You can trace the principles of this design all the way back to the N64 and I would not be surprised to learn that the in game mechanics were built specifically to compliment this novice to expert transitional design, which is what makes smash bros so friendly to novice and expert gamers alike.
This is an excellent point as well, something I wasn’t going to get into but so much of game design just ignores accessibility issues like this all together. So many of the basic assumptions of game design from input device to button mapping to in game accessibility features are built around the assumption of fully abled adult between late teenager and middle age.
And yet they still got rid of one-handed mode for Pokémon Scarlet & Violet :/
Yeah Nintendo doesn’t give a shit about disabled gamers. Or, for that matter, not shipping broken products, or a lot of other things.
Like don’t get this post wrong, it is not pro Nintendo in the traditional sense. They care about being kid friendly because it sells units, end of story. Their interest in that extends only so far as it helps them sell more units. There is so much low hanging fruit they could go for in the name of accessibility and they just don’t (though, of course, they are not alone in this, the game industry at large is pretty aggressively shitty about even the most basic and easily implemented accommodations).
Also Nintendo is aggressively anti consumer. I could fill a book.
This post wasn’t supposed to be pro Nintendo. It wasn’t even necessarily about controller design. It was in response to a specific thing I was seeing at the time, where a bunch of people claiming to have studied game design were directly comparing Elden Ring and Kirby and the Forgotten Land (they came out within a few weeks of each other) and talking trash about Kirby in the most asinine, “I think all games should appeal to me specifically” sort of way. In particular, lots of them were hating on features that were especially kid friendly, and features that made it the first major game my disabled 7 year old daughter could actually really get into.
If you are the kind of hardcore gamer into Elden Ring, maybe the game for babies isn’t for you. That isn’t some critical flaw. Not everything has to be for you.
The hand size thing I brought up specifically because the very first thing you should be considering is how your player interacts with the game, and it’s one that most people never think about, even many game designers, and it is very clear once it is pointed out to you.
I read an article many years ago about the development of Ratchet and Clank. They wanted their game accessible to children, so they actually created an oversized, working playstation controller so they could better understand what it was like to play their game with small hands, and then they built the controls and aspects of the game itself like level design around the difficulties they encountered using the over large controller.
Tragedy! You set out to read a negative review of a piece of media you dislike, only to find that the critic is being completely unfair to it and making a bunch of bad, unsupportable arguments.
Me: “Disney live action remakes are soulless cash grabs that deny the original writers and artists the credit they deserve” Some fucking chud: “Exactly! They never should have started wokeifying all their movies” Me:
