Games Inclusion Lab: Accessible Games with Neurodivergent Adults Through Iterative Play and Design

Abstract

The benefits of games, widely studied and described today, extend to audiences with specific accessibility needs. However, for these people, their therapeutic function tends to be prioritised over entertainment, creating phenomena of exclusion of players in all their fullness (Spiel and Gerling, 2021; Wästerfors and Hansson, 2017). In the Games Inclusion Lab (GameIN) Action Research Project, some basic premises were proposed for the creative processes of games that, instead of being for a specific target audience, were created in frequent contact with their everyday contexts, promoting accessibility through constant iteration. Thus, its primary objective would be to promote playing together, regardless of the skills and specificities of each person, with inclusion in the daily contexts of neurodivergent adults in Portugal as a case study. This paper aims to describe a crucial part of this process, which includes the operationalisation of the premises of co-design, ethics and research in the context of developing a games kit accessible to this audience. To this end, monthly sessions, 30 in total, were held with three groups of neurodivergent people, in particular autistic people and/or people with intellectual disabilities, including a total of 28 participants, aged between 19 and 54 years old (M = 30.70; SD = 9.94).  The games kit was implemented with a set of three games (digital, tabletop, and physical platforms) within a common narrative element (Monsters), plus two published tabletop games that were adapted to better fit the cognitive accessibility needs of the participants. This study illustrates how an iterative co-design approach, involving neurodivergent stakeholders, can successfully foster the development of playful and inclusive games while ensuring that diverse perspectives are integrated into the game design process.