The Quixotic Engineer

Diagram via LoL Esports

Back in 2011, a friend gently guided me through the steep learning curve of League of Legends, and I’ve been playing it on and off ever since. For about as long, I’ve been casually following the competitive LoL esports scene, especially enjoying the Worlds championship tournament that caps off each year. Worlds 2023 has been particularly great thanks to a big change: Riot Games replaced the traditional “groups” stage with a “Swiss” format stage instead. Examining this change through a game design lens helps reveal why it has been so successful and impactful.

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At the beginning of 2022, I embarked on a project of drawing once per week for the entire year. On Christmas day I completed my 52^nd and final sketch.

Among all the possible hobbies out there, why pursue sketching? I think on some level it’s an opportunity to revisit a beloved childhood hobby. Growing up in Quebec, I pored over my local library’s collection of Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées and Japanese manga imported from France (before it was widely available in English), then spent hours trying to recreate Akira Toriyama’s spiky-haired characters and incredible action shots. When this passtime suddenly became embarrassing in my self-conscious teenage years, I abandoned it entirely.

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Back in 2020, I wrote about co-heading the accessibility effort on The Last of Us Part II and the incredible reaction to our expansive set of features. Later that year we were also honoured to receive the inaugural “Innovation in Accessibility” award at The Game Awards. In the years since, we’ve seen awareness and support grow for accessibility across the games industry, and many new games that have pushed the frontiers in novel and exciting ways.

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As a longtime fan of the Halo series, I’ve enjoyed seeing its evolution over the years. Each game builds from the strong foundation of the “golden triangle” (guns, grenades, melee) and sandbox combat design (vehicles, enemy AI interactions, wide open levels, physics, etc.) From there, several games in the series have experimented with various new player abilities. For instance, Halo 2 and 3 dabbled with dual wielding, and later entries added sprinting and clambering.

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Eurogamer recently invited developers from Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games to share their thoughts on accessible game design. I was thrilled to relate some anecdotes of working with our terrific accessibility consultants, and how novel features and mechanics emerged from our collaboration. I also got to express my viewpoint that accessibility is an exciting frontier in game design, and there are still so many foundational design and implementation questions waiting to be explored.

Eurogamer – How Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games think about accessibility

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