Building Inclusive VR Experiences
I’m a bit nervous about posting this. I’m finding myself on the opposite side of the fence on an issue that I care deeply about supporting — diversity. Please read the whole post if you start reading this, and I would appreciate any responses to help me continue to shape my views.
I was recently asked the following question:
“Whose responsibility is it to build for diverse audiences?”
Let’s first set some groundwork. VR is an extremely intimate technology. It’s important to encourage all creators to keep diversity in mind as they create. Women should not look down and see the body of a man when they’re playing a game. If you’re of color, you shouldn’t look in the mirror and see a white face staring back at you. This is the first time that the decisions made by a game developer will impose an entirely new identity on their audience. To be clear — everyone should build diverse experiences.
But I’d like to focus on the specific wording of “responsibility”.
“Whose responsibility is it to build for diverse audiences?”
Responsibility is a strong word. If you hold a certain responsibility and don’t uphold it, you are acting irresponsibly. So who is responsible? I originally thought that there may not be a ‘right’ answer. Maybe people who are building experiences to make money? Or people who are no longer in the early ‘learn’ mode of building for VR? I wasn’t sure. But it appears that there is some sort of consensus:
140 character responses wasn’t doing my thoughts justice, so here’s where my head is at.
Why is this even a debate?
Unfortunately, building for diversity is not easy. It depends on what you’re building, but in many cases, it’s not something you can just tack on. A prime example — my very first VR experience was something that was exclusive by design. I wanted to experiment with taking an existing Unity Store asset and turning it into an ironman style flying experience. The pilot in me was jumping up and down.
The feeling of flying around using handheld rocket engines made this experience actually quite fun — if you could stomach it. For most people, it’s quite nauseating. The established anti-nausea game mechanics that I could have implemented wouldn’t have been enough to make this a comfortable experience.
Despite knowing that this experiment excluded people, I’m glad I built it and showed it to my friends. I was new to VR, Unity, and C# — it was scary! But one of my housemates said that she got the same freeing sensation that she felt in many of her dreams where she flies. That was incredibly special to me as a first time VR developer. It motivated me quite a bit to continue learning.
How much work is it to actually build for inclusivity?
When building Kitten Cannon, I thought about supporting people of all heights by allowing the user to adjust the height of the cannon to match their height. Unfortunately, we would have had to redo the model of the cannon, and [at the time, I thought] it would have taken 5–10 hours to create some functionality that allowed you to adjust the height of the cannon. So I decided not to do it. 5–10 hours may not sound like a lot, but we were working on this game exclusively in our free time. We ended up shipping the game right on our deadline, and this feature would have put us over the top. Was this decision irresponsible? It’s hard to say exactly, but I think I’m still okay with the decision that we made.
Supporting a diverse audience is all about understanding these kinds of tradeoffs — and making a tough judgment call. By not implementing this feature, who am I excluding? Given the time or money that I have, is that ok? These judgment calls are something that everyone should explicitly make. Even if you’re just an amateur developer playing around in Unity, you may decide against implementing features that would widen your audience. That’s ok. But at least you stopped to think about it.
So where is the line?
I find it easier to think about it in terms of examples. Who of the following should be required to support inclusivity? If one of these doesn’t build for inclusivity, who should be called out publicly?
- A small game studio who has released a hit and is growing
- An indie developer releasing their first VR experience for free
- A few developers releasing a small 5 minute experience
- A high schooler learning to code
- A dying company pushing out a last ditch effort game
- A major corporation just starting to build for VR
- A small company releasing their first VR game for $20
As a PM at Microsoft, I had to answer some of these questions for a similar topic. Part of my responsibilities were to determine which teams needed to improve the accessibility of their products, and which teams could hold off to continue iterating. I can’t share the policy, but it turns out that people appreciate not having to draw a line themselves. They appreciate someone coming to them saying “you’re past the line” or “the line is coming soon”. They were aware that the issue is incredibly complex — but since I was in touch with accessibility advocates, they were comfortable with outsourcing the decision to me.
What do you think? Would it make developers’ lives easier if we, as a community, came up with some sort of guidance on the ‘line’, or even just guidance on navigating the gray area? Would we see an improvement in the number of inclusive experiences if we were to do that? I’d love to see this kind of information end up in VR Design 101 courses.
Regardless of where the line is…
I’m glad that this discussion is happening. Many of us have come from industries and locales where this isn’t even a concern, so thank you to all who are participating. My hope is that having this dialogue about the ‘line’ will help us as a community focus our diversity efforts in the right places and the right times. And I hope it will also help developers who may not be familiar with building for diversity and inclusivity to understand where and how they will need to adapt their process. As long as we keep talking, the creators will listen.
Looking forward to hearing your opinions.
Chris
Thanks to Becky R, Estella T, Alyssa L, and Ryan H.
