I love co-pilot. Throughout the pandemic my fiancé and I used the feature to play different sections of single player games as though they were multiplayer. I don’t think either one of us would consider ourselves to have a disability.

I used to work on games at Microsoft and they put their money where their mouth is when it comes to accessibility. I had spent multiple days in the accessibility lab interviewing and understanding how to make games easier for people with various disabilities. One of my managers encouraged me to test my features using the controller with one hand and farther away from the screen where bad font decisions were more obvious.

Two things I remember in particular from that time at Microsoft:

* The claim that making games better for people with disabilities makes them better for everyone

* The claim that most people will have a disability (not necessarily permanent) at some point in their life

I feel that those two lessons have permanently impacted my design lens.

Also, the Xbox Adaptive Controller deserves a lot of respect.

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/controllers/xbox-adap...

That’s not a token effort or a cash-in. The team behind it really gave a damn.

Microsoft has done a lot of things that they didn't "need" to for the sake of accessibility and I think that's worth celebrating. Particularly when it comes to something as simple as this I think there's no reason why it can't exist on every other console. As mentioned in other comments, their adaptive controller is also great.

This co-pilot mode sort of reminds me of Starcraft: Brood War where there is a cooperative mode where two people can control the same set of buildings and units. The amount that each player contributes to the game can be as variable as you need it to be, as far as one player not doing anything at all. Or if you were both skilled, it could simply augment what you could do. One person could be making sure you're spending resources and building the base while the other focused on controlling the units fighting the enemy, for example.

Overall I think the video games industry is very very behind in accessibility, though. Even some relatively simple accessibility options are absent from some of the biggest games. I believe Ubisoft has made great strides to make their video games more accessible to everyone and there are some notable ones such as The Last of Us 2 [1] and Celeste [2] that go above and beyond to ensure that anyone that wants to play the game can.

Accessibility can be expensive to implement and gaming isn't really considered an essential, even in terms of entertainment, but I think it's worthwhile to try and encourage even smaller developers to try to make their games more accessible.

[1] https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/the-last-of-us-part-... [2] https://celeste.ink/wiki/Assist_Mode

I am terrible at video games. It's not what my brain does well so I miss out on playing computer games in general, I'm more interested in board games or cards. Not long ago I was waiting for laundry to be done with a friend who had a Nintendo Switch on her, and we started a game of Mario Kart. The entire time we played, maybe 15 mins, I thought wow, I'm better than I think! Then after the game I told my friend and she says, the whole time she was racing behind me to kill the bad guys so I could enjoy playing. What a beautiful gesture!

my youngest is 2.5, a survivor of bacterial meningitis at birth, the results are tragic. she has soft tone cerebral palsy and cortical visual impairment, imagine being stuck in a kaleidoscope for life.

as part of my journey, trying find answer and heal. i stumbled across the fact that Microsoft's current CEO Satya Nadella son Zain is a legally blind quadriplegic with cerebral palsy. his book refers to the first few years of his sons life as "a dark place". Satya is fairly older than me, I admire him very much.

I have no doubt that it bring great joy and comfort to Satya that he's been able to drive Microsoft to be a leader in accessibility. Most great efforts have great stories. This is one of them.

Co-pilot is a really great idea, and also so simple. Definitely one of those "why didn't we think of that before?" moments.

That's a very touching story. Although most of us don't work in the consumer hardware business, many of us work on frontend web design. This post serves to underscore the importance of accessibility in our designs.

My 3 year old is very interested in playing video games, but her hands are too small to hold a standard controller and reach everything. We've been playing Carto a bit on gamepass (no enemies, moving around, no timing constraints).

Just out of curiosity I checked, and co-pilot seems to be available on Windows too (within the Xbox sphere at least). I will try that out, looks like it could have potential for us.

My neighbor has MS and can't physically move ( his head and he can still talk, but not the rest of his body)

Is there anything that i can buy to improve his quality of life with? Even something small could be useful.

I wonder if they could make an AI co-pilot for those who don't have someone to company them as they play.

Game design is hard and asymmetrical game design is incredibly hard. Game developers can hardly make symmetrical cooperative systems that properly take advantage of the multiplayer aspect. Borderlands, for example, doesn't add unique systems that take advantage of the fact that there are multiple players. There's no unique mechanics to bosses or enemies. There's not really interesting synergies that you can take advantage of by the different classes.

When games do coop well, it's usually an inherent part of the game. If you can make the assumption that there is at least two players playing together, you can create unique and interesting ways for the two players to interact on screen. "It Takes Two" is a recent game that was designed explicitly for two players and you can immediately tell the difference from it to a game that cooperative modes were an afterthought to the solo mode.

Games requiring more than one player immediately alienates a lot of players and limits your audience a lot, so that's probably why pure coop titles are extremely rare.

As for asymmetric titles like Mario Galaxy where the second player is not essential, it's pretty hard to make the gameplay satisfying for the secondary player while not impeding the first player or making it feel essential to the gameplay. The "little brother" mode costs a lot with little perceived benefit for the developers.

In Sonic 2 and later for Sega Genesis/Megadrive player 2 can control a second character and also help in limited ways.

Platinum Games and some other studios are now in the habit of putting "easy automatic" (not always using that term) modes in, where you can set the game to automate some or all of its inputs. If you turn all the assists on in Toylogic's "Nier Replicant" for example, the game basically plays itself during combat but you still have full control so you are effectively orchestrating the action on screen instead of mashing the buttons. It's nice for people revisiting the game (it's a remaster with updated content) who don't want to do all the combat again. For some titles, this is a great accessibility feature since you can turn it on only for particular mechanics that are hard for you to keep up with (dodging, aiming, etc) and still play "the rest" of the game.

I think their first game with this feature was Bayonetta (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6nkc6GQ-B8) but at this point a bunch of other games have it. I think every action game should have this where possible, and you can find testimonials out there from people who love these features despite not having major accessibility concerns, like https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgx8nz/auto-battle-is-the-be...

Increasingly I think we're discovering that there's a class of temporary accessibility issues that can get in the way of using a website or video game - you have trouble focusing because your kids are distracting you, you can't remember what your current objective is because the last time you played was a week ago, etc. It's great for games to provide assistance in those cases too.

You're already overthinking it with AI and stuff; there's games (especially on mobile) with minimal input requirements, think flappy bird, runner games, some of the racing games, etc. Even Epic's first major mobile title, Infinity Blade, played more like a slow interactive story than something needing lots of control input.

I mean I won't claim they're fun, just that they're easy to play.

We're not anywhere close to just having a general purpose game playing AI for the current gen (though there is that Atari playing one)

But there are a lot of affordances devs can make in individual games. Someone else mentioned Celeste and Last of Us, but Microsoft's Forza series has a bunch of options, like brake assist or turning assist, that can take a lot off your plate.

Won’t that be cheating ? (That’s how aimbot work on warzone and many fps on PC )