Video Shows What It's Like To Play Games With Partial Blindness

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An open letter from YouTuber Sid, also known as Leonardo da Sidci, illuminates the trials of playing third-person action games with partial blindness and calls for a minor change in the way these games are made. Accessibility is a constant concern for the gaming industry and changes like the one Leonardo da Sidci is after are often necessary to ensure that as many people can enjoy a game as possible.

The third-person action game is one of the most prevalent genres on the market today. It seems that most of the biggest names in gaming right now are third-person games like these. Control, Ghost of Tsushima, and Red Dead Redemption 2 are just a few outstanding examples of this widespread genre. It's not hard to see why these games are so common. They can offer some deeply satisfying combat experiences and give players gorgeous and immersive environments to explore with a level of freedom that's much harder to accomplish in another medium. And they do well, too. Red Dead Redemption 2, for instance, is still one of the best-selling games of all time, and has left a lasting legacy on the industry that persists two years after its release.

But the genre isn't without issues, as highlighted by Sid's recent video. The video is an open letter to developers of third-person action games, and it comes with a simple request: the ability to move a character from one side of the screen to another. Sid lost vision in his right eye years ago, making everything on the right side of his field of vision blurry and indistinct. He illustrates this in the video so that the viewer can understand his position, and it's pretty jarring. Half of the screen is affected, and it's all but impossible to gain any visual information from that side.

Sid has had a lot of time to adjust to this mode of vision, but it still comes with a lot of hurdles when it comes to third-person games. A lot of these games put the player character on the left side of the screen, so that the average right-handed player can prioritize the information they're receiving on their primary side. But for people like Sid, this means that most of the side of the screen that's visible is taken up by the player character's back, further reducing how much the screen can convey. To rectify this, Sid wants the option to move the player character to the other side of the screen. A few third-person games already do have this option, including Control, but there are many more that don't.

Sid says that this is a very niche issue, and one that's unlikely to have ramifications for the vast majority of gamers. Still, as Control has already illustrated, it isn't impossible to implement. The process of creating a video game is a very difficult and intensive one, whether it's being made by a huge AAA studio or a small team of indie devs, and in all the struggle and turmoil, it can certainly be hard to budget time for accessibility changes like this one. But if the end result is even a few more people who get to enjoy the game, it's an effort worth making.