Brendon Gabriel
Play2Gether is an assistive technology design made predominantly for women.
Play2Gether
Play2Gether is an assistive technology design made predominantly for women. It’s an app that was structured around women being able to socialize with other women, people, and groups based on similar gaming interests. Play2Gether was produced to help women in the gaming industry have a safe space and platform without dealing with ill-mannered people.
Project Details
Background
Motivation & Goals
Female gamers don't feel welcomed in the gaming community. They experience harassment, flirtatious, and abusive comments.
Are more likely to get harassed because of their gender.
Hide their true identity in order to avoid harassment or quit playing video games all together.
Female characters often have weak and distressed qualities in order to fulfill male fantasies.
Female gamers want to see a stronger network of female gamers, consists of mentors and allies who can help provide a safe space for female gamers to discuss how to combat discrimination and feel more comfortable playing online.
Process
Discover
Women Gamer Statistics
User Insights
Empathy Map
Persona
Comparative Review
Keyfindings
Things to Avoid
Final Design
Accessibility Design
Accessibility Annotation
Reflection
Our group was interested in exploring how we can make the gaming community more inclusive for Women/POC/PWD.
Currently, the video game community is dominated by male players. On the developer end, there is a lack of research done on people of color, women, and people with disabilities. As a result, video games offer 4x more male protagonists than female protagonists. The opportunity is to make the gaming industry more inclusive for everyone. Also expressing the importance and lack of diversity in the gaming community.
Team
Brendon Gabriel
User Research
Designing a safe community for gamers especially female gamers to enjoy games together
Ting Wang
Angela Wang
Accessibility Design
My Role
Project
We’re interested in creating this inclusive platform for gamers because we strongly believe that there should be a safer gaming community for everyone. We want to discover how we can create features to connect gamers with similar interests and goals while using a variety of strategies to encourage users to show respect, empathy, and care for each other.
1. Bring awareness to the gaming community
2. To express the importance of diversity and inclusion
3. Bring a safe and enjoyable gaming experience to all
For this project, we wanted to design an inclusive design with accessibility awareness. After a round of discussion and many possible topics we witness in our daily lives, we would like to focus our project on female gamers in the gaming community. The reason for that is because we read an article criticizing how unfair the gaming world is to females regardless of the large number of female games. Research has shown that the gaming industry still considers female gamers as an afterthought -- a minority in the industry.
Discover
Define
Design
Accessibility Design
of female gamers in the gaming industry.
of U.S. female gamers want to see less
trolling/more moderated content in the
gaming community
play a variety of different games depending
on the time of day or to match / manage mood
playing games several times a day or week,
who feel they belong in the gaming community
“I’m in a League of Legends team and I’m the only girl. They don’t treat me any differently but when I play alone I’ve had men completely shut me down in game, try to leave the game because they “don’t want to play with a girl” and I’ve had a huge amount of sexist and derogatory comments.”
-Ting Wang (Team Member)
We created this map as part of our research to get a clear understanding of the users.
These personas were created to target our users. We created 3 women personas showing their unique backgrounds.
I enjoyed learning about accessibility in the digital world.
Rebecca is a single mother of her seven-year-old son and works part-time as a civil engineer. She is working hard to maintain the balance between family and work. During her free time, she enjoys playing Call of Duty as a way of relaxation. But due to her colorblindness, game choices are limited, and the game community by nature is brutal. She also found it hard to play with other people who do not understand her struggles and often felt insulted. She is looking for a group of gamers that can understand her and enjoy games together.
Goal
Communication and work
Colorblind accessibility
Relaxation
Barriers
Unable to read color (Deuteranopia: unable to perceive green light, resulting in red and greens looking murky, and blues and yellows stand out)
Stress and anger with others do not understand her colorblindness
Devices
Android phone
Window PC
Ipad
Jules is a transgender girl from Brooklyn, NY. She goes to Parsons New School for Graphic Design. When Jules feels emotional she grabs her sketchbook and starts drawing animation characters for a video game that she wants to design one day. She doesn’t play her games anymore because during her transitioning she noticed how toxic masculinity has really shaped the gaming industry and she rather play in a safe space with women, who are looking for the same gaming experience. She really just wants a safe space for everyone to do one thing and that's to enjoy video games.
Goal
Communication and work
Socialize in safe chat rooms
Mental stability
Barriers
Unable to find a group of accepting people of the LGBTQ community
Looking for a safe space to talk to people with the same mentality
Can’t seem to grasp why the world can’t be more accepting of people's conditions
Devices
Gameboy Advance
MacBook Pro
iPad
Tina is a successful entrepreneur who has built a successful small business from the ground up. Even though Tina is very successful, she has struggled with dyslexia her entire life. Reading out loud, spelling correctly, and understanding complex reading passages are often difficult for Tina. Tina recently learned that playing action video games may help improve her attentional and perceptual skills. She is willing to give video games a try even though she is not very comfortable using technology and she has the perception that video games are not made for people like her. She hopes to find a gaming community where she can find players from similar racial and demographic backgrounds as her, where she can learn how to play certain games and share her video game journey with other players.
Goal
Be able to turn speech into text easily and vice versa.
Be able to change the font size and space between text for easier recognition.
Understand the meaning of text through voice.
Barriers
Difficulties in writing and spelling words correctly.
Trouble reading out loud.
Trouble understanding complex text and grammar.
Devices
iPhone (Dictation feature)
Alexa, Siri
Reader Pens (Text to speech)
Jules
Student
22 | Transgender
Rebecca
Engineer
34 | Single mom
Tina
Business owner
45 | Dyslexia
Lack of visual hierarchy and lack of spacing between lines could cause challenges for some users.
Stay away from this color scheme since it may be challenging for people with color blindness to read.
Link to Prototype
(Tritanopia: Yellow-Blue Confusion)
(Deuteranopia: Red Green Confusion)
(Protanopia: Red Green Confusion)
(Monochromacy: Black&White)
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