Accessibility and Ableism in Tabletop Business Games

Abstract

A business game is a participatory communication activity in which businesses use play to achieve a meaningful workplace purpose, including knowledge/skill development and teambuilding. This article assesses how tabletop business games in professional contexts communicate in ableist ways. These games promote the idea that the ideal skills of an ideal worker necessitate an ideal body. Consequently, people with disabilities are always presumed to function less effectively than this ableist ideal and, thus, are always-already rendered unqualified to meet workplace challenges. Building on Fiona Kumari Campbell’s critique of ableism and Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric, this article argues that persuasion in business games brings together game design and disability studies to show how games might ostracize employees with disabilities as well as other members of sexual, racial, or economic minorities. To demonstrate how, the article examines three tabletop business games from Elite Training: Colourblind II, The Minefield, and The Safari Park Sales Challenge. Directed toward instructors who teach game design or professional communication, the article ends with suggestions for addressing this issue. Additionally, the article offers a corrective to much of the work around accessibility and games, which often has ignored non-digital games while also connecting with an area of game play that is not frequently studied via a disability studies framework.

Introduction

To avoid conceptualizing disability entirely from the standpoint of the Other, disability studies has begun to focus on how social, cultural, academic, technological, and aesthetic mechanisms produce ableism, or the systematic oppression and prejudice against people with disabilities (Davis, 1995; Marks, 1996; Mitchell & Snyder, 2001; Goggin & Newell, 2003; Solis, 2006; Snyder & Mitchell, 2006; Siebers, 2008; Campbell, 2009; McDaniel, 2013; Davis, 2014; Goodley, 2016). Despite legal advances through American and British policies such as the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act and the Equality Act 2010, the needs of people with disabilities become afterthoughts, especially in the design and implementation of business games. A business game is a participatory communication activity in which for-profit or non-profit organizations use play to achieve a meaningful workplace purpose, including knowledge/skill development and teambuilding. Many times, these activities are ludic in nature, providing participants with opportunities for extemporaneous and undirected play. More often, they consist of virtual and physical simulations, video games, or tabletop games in which players attempt to reach a specific state of affairs while adhering to a set of rules. This article focuses on tabletop business games. Unlike tabletop leisure games, such as Clue, Magic: The Gathering, or Seven Wonders, tabletop business games intend to communicate best business practices, such as PwC Hungary’s Multipoly, which tests the readiness of job candidates who apply to the firm, or Qualcomm’s game that increases collaboration by awarding badges for answering questions posed on an internal discussion board.

This article assesses how many business games instantiate ableist communication practices promoting the idea that the ideal skills of an ideal worker necessitate an ideal body and mind. Business games convey a set of guidelines, expectations, and goals that workers need to follow and achieve. Moreover, business games employ what Ian Bogost (2010) termed procedural rhetoric through gaming processes that endorse methods for attaining those goals, understanding those expectations, and following those guidelines. In this instance, procedural rhetoric acts as a form of workplace rhetoric, intending to persuade workers that these management-approved methods provide the optimum pathway to promotion and better skills. However, many business games themselves treat disability as a challenge to be solved and do not afford employees with disabilities an accessible space at the gaming table. For example, if a business game represents Deafness as a negative state of being or if a Deaf employee cannot participate in a business game due to support videos lacking captions, then employees may feel as if they do not have adequate skills for a position, and employers may recognize Deafness as a negative quality. From the perspective of their employers, employees may not fully achieve workplace objectives or reach a level of adequate competence for promotion without disavowing or “overcoming” their disability. This point especially rings true in competitive environments where employers may assume without cause that people with disabilities are always functioning less effectively than this ableist ideal (in other words, of those employees with full hearing) and, thus, are always-already rendered unqualified to meet the challenges that accompany leadership positions. Employers may find it inconceivable that people with disabilities can function as effectively in their given roles as people without disabilities.

To this point, my article opens by connecting scholarship about business games with current approaches to accessibility in game design. Though many researchers in both industry and academia have developed strategies for creating accessible video games derived from existing web usability and accessibility guidelines, game designers have not always adapted these strategies to tabletop games or simulations. Video games support electronic technology and virtual representations of game elements in medium-specific ways that tabletop games do not. As a result, many of these tabletop games exhibit ableism. For example, countless tabletop games contain small pieces that are difficult to maneuver or game elements with poor color choices for colorblind players. In video games, colors are often changeable, affording better accessibility, whereas the colors of tabletop games are not. Building on what Fiona Kumari Campbell (2009) called “the maintenance of abledness” in modified bodies and Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric, I argue that persuasion in business games brings together game design and disability studies to show how games might ostracize employees with disabilities. To demonstrate how, I examine a selection of tabletop business games from Elite Training. I chose to focus this study on Elite Training because they are a major producer of business games, and they have a diverse client base that includes both public and private organizations, such as Bank of America, Delta Airlines, the Association of Business Schools, NATO, NBCUniversal, Walmart, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence, and a number of universities (Elite Training, 2017). Campbell’s analysis of the production of ableism involves three critiques of the ableist impulse: the internalization of compulsory ableism, tactics of dispersal, and defensive Othering. These critiques guide how I assess the business games. As managers integrate tabletop business games more fully into every level of workplace communication, instructors in game design and professional communication need to understand that business games affect daily business practices. Accordingly, through a focus on video game accessibility guidelines and participatory design, I end with a game development case study to outline ways to avoid the ableism and accessibility problems exhibited by the Elite Training games as well as strategies that teachers can use to better mentor and prepare their students who join the field of business game development or professional training to create accessible gaming experiences.

Business Games and Accessibility

Faria, Hutchinson, Wellington, and Gould (2009) traced support for incorporating games into modern business theory and practice back to 1932 in Europe and 1955 in North America, when managers created games to simulate a typewriter assembly process and the United States Air Force supply system. These games have evolved from hand-scored and mainframe business games to those presently running through central servers (Faria et al., 2009). Many companies have adopted gaming as a vehicle for business-related activities, from advergames that endorse products (external business games) to training games that introduce new employees to procedures (internal business games). Wolfe (1993) divided these internal business games into three categories: top management games, functional games, and concept simulations. In top management games, players fulfill administrative or supervisory roles, whether on an international/national level (top executives such as CEOs and CFOs) or a local level (owner of a franchise or manager of a shift). Essentially, these games focus on larger-scale issues in business operations. In contrast, functional games limit their scope to one area of business operations, such as production customer service, advertising, or financing. Finally, concept simulations focus on more intangible aspects of business, such as promotion, advancement, and leadership development of personnel as well as management of specific areas, such as sales.

Scholarship on these business games has tended to fall in one of two categories. In one category, researchers examined gaming’s role in training future business professionals within business education courses, such as business policy (Walters, Coalter, & Rasheed, 1997), decision support systems (Ben-Zvi, 2007), cultural values (Witte, 2014), and professional ethics (Heywood, McMullen, & Wygal, 2004). In the other category, researchers studied games within businesses themselves, focusing specifically on methods (Smeds, 1997), effectiveness (Herz & Merz, 1998; Gosen & Washbush, 2004), and external validity (Wolfe & Roberts, 1986; 1993). I concentrate on games in businesses instead of in classrooms. I also note that research has rarely considered audience in evaluating the efficacy of these games, despite their long history in the professional world. Articles neglected issues of identity through race, sex, gender, class, and ability, except for a few cases concerning internationalizing business curriculum through simulations (Klein & Fleck, 1990; Klein, Fleck, & Wolfe 1993). The ways that educational and workplace scholarship evaluated performance on business games, then, tended to view audience in terms of the average student or worker through ability (measured by grade point average), motivation, interest, confidence, cohesion, organizational formality, and involvement without considering how aspects of identity might affect a game’s outcomes, a player’s responses, or the preparation that the games supposedly teach players (Gosenpud & Miesing, 1992; Wolfe & Luethge, 2003).

These gaps are particularly challenging due to the typical goals of business games. After a review of 304 articles on business games, Faria et al. (2009) identified nine major themes as the most often cited reasons for integrating business games, which included using games for the experience they bring to the participants, instructing participants on strategy, teaching decision making, accomplishing course learning outcomes and objectives, promoting teamwork, motivating participants, applying theory in a practical fashion, learning in an active way, and integrating ideas. These themes mark vital measures of employee productivity. However, if the mode of active learning requires fine motor skills or if a game’s experience does not allow for people with visual or auditory impairments to compete in a teambuilding exercise, then employees with disabilities are disadvantaged.

Most gaming accessibility guidelines are devoted to accessibility for video games, not tabletop games (Squire, 2011; Grammenos, Savidis, & Stephanidis, 2009; Andresen, 2002). Heron (2016) of the Meeples Like Us project suspected that the lack of accessibility guidelines for tabletop games comes from the additional complexities associated with designing them, including more market rewards for accessible video games and the inflexibility associated with building a tangible game instead of a virtual game. Whereas video games often allow for changing colors to heighten figure-ground contrast or adapting controller sensitivity, tabletop games cannot easily follow the same tactics. In developing distinctive new tactics, the company EnableMart produced accessible leisure and educational tabletop games for school settings and acted as a global resource for assistive technology. Additionally, companies 64 Oz. and Accessible Games offered resources for players with visual impairments, typically braille covers for games with cards, braille dice, or information for designing role-playing game guides. These advances in tabletop games revealed that accessibility through Universal Design is on the radar of some game designers, and that fact is heartening. Despite these advances, problems still exist. In each of these instances, these companies concentrated mostly on leisure and educational games, not business games. Additionally, these adaptations focused on “adding on new material or accessible elements in response to user feedback,” indicating that game designers do not always design with the widest possible user in mind. Walters (2010) argued that impairment-specific adaptive approaches are limiting, especially with “invisible disabilities” (p. 429). If a player cannot retain new information or quickly process new information due to a cognitive impairment, then an action game with a complex storyline or map can prove difficult. No-fail modes in video games address these cognitive impairments, and some leisure tabletop games have followed suit with variable difficulty levels, such as Forbidden Desert and Pandemic. However, none of the business games I examine for this project integrate adaptable gameplay.

Persuasive Games, Procedural Rhetoric, and Ableism

Workplaces that mandate the use of ableist and inaccessible business games generate both the assumption that employees will play and the impression of inadequacy if employees are unable to participate. This external impression of inadequacy may lead to serious internal damage, such as anxiety about acceptance, disability negation, and unnecessary and involuntary exposure of personal medical information. To these considerations for making more accessible tabletop games, I add the persuasive role of business games. Whether through a business game that improves teamwork, teaches decision making, or helps players complete a task, each business game communicates an argument to its players about the most effective ways of accomplishing a workplace goal (risk taking, for example) and the best way players can develop skills to accomplish that goal (through gaming, as opposed to attending lectures, mentoring, or reading books). Persuasion sets apart business tabletop games from leisure tabletop games, and it ties together each of the nine business game themes that Faria et al. (2009) outlined. For example, one theme involved instructing participants on strategy. Business games must convince players that the games’ approaches to business strategy are both effective in the real world and achievable by the player. The strength of business games’ persuasive appeal relies upon their applicability to real-world workplaces, their generalizability to a variety of professional situations, and their ability to make players feel as if they possess and can adapt the skills fostered by the game, or learnability.

These games with specific persuasive purposes go by many names: gamified instruction, serious games (Abt, 1970), as well as “meaningful play” experiences (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003, p. 30). I favor Bogost’s (2010) term persuasive games due to the important ways that persuasion works in how players interact with the mechanics of business games and with other players. A persuasive game employs procedural rhetoric effectively. Bogost (2010) defined procedural rhetoric as “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures” (p. ix). He continued by writing that procedural rhetoric is “a subdomain of procedural authorship; its arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models” of real-world processes (p. 29). In short, the process of interacting with the game board and with other players becomes a persuasive act. By selecting these “rules of behavior,” designers of persuasive games create “dynamic models” of real-world processes, thereby communicating claims about the function of these processes through player interaction with a game’s mechanics. The importance of the visual, aural, and textual characteristics of games lies in how they communicate the models of real-world processes and instigate player interaction, and not as persuasive elements themselves. Despite his affinity for video games and his emphasis on computing as an inherently procedural medium, Bogost wanted “the reader to see procedural rhetoric as a domain much broader than that of video games, encompassing any medium—computational or not—that accomplishes its inscription via processes” (p. 46). Whether they are digital or tabletop in nature, persuasive games use a simulated process (for example, buying properties, charging rent, and building hotels in Monopoly in an effort to bankrupt competitors) that makes a claim (market capitalism can be cutthroat and unethical) about how a real-world process (market capitalism) works.

Bogost (2010) offered Molleindustria’s McDonald’s Video Game as a particularly effective example of a persuasive game using procedural rhetoric (Molleindustria, 2006). In this game, players simultaneously run various aspects of the McDonald’s restaurant empire, including raising cattle in a nation resembling Brazil, processing the cattle into hamburger product, selling said product in a local franchise, and managing public relations. To succeed in the game, which means establishing and building cash flow, players must select questionable business tactics that the game seeks to critique. Players might bulldoze rainforest to make room for additional cattle, put too many cattle in too small a field, feed cattle dubious food or hormones, underpay workers at the franchise, or bribe scientists to write articles about the healthiness of their food. Because players collude with the corporation, the game attempts to convince players to question the necessity of corrupt business practices. The game wants players to refuse to patronize companies like McDonald’s because their business practices violate players’ ethics and because of the guilt players would feel now having simulated the processes of the food-industrial complex. In persuasively communicating this argument, the game produces interactive and expressive vividness. In McDonald’s Video Game, players can manipulate game controls to make a large tractor demolish areas of rainforest or indigenous housing to create room for additional cattle or soybeans. In response to this haptic input, the software mounts written, oral, and visual rhetorical responses, using simulated anti-globalization groups to launch negative publicity and to boycott the company. Additionally, players must quickly shift among four different screens to play the game in their attempt to maintain control, which sometimes leads to cutting corners. At the same time, they see how these ethically dubious methods do not save or produce much money. Though McDonald’s Video Game is not a tabletop business game, it demonstrates the characteristics of persuasion via gameplay that delineate tabletop business games from other types of games. The games want to convince players of the applicability, generalizability, and learnability of the skills they teach.

Persuasive gaming and procedural rhetoric incite several issues with business games vis-à-vis disability studies. Organizations use business games as a form of communication to train new employees and to prepare managers; these games mount claims about the best ways to handle customer service or to tackle a team project. However, if these business games are not accessible or demonstrate ableism by preventing the interaction essential to persuasive games, then people with disabilities may not get jobs easily, may be less likely to receive a promotion, may feel ignored, or may internalize hate. In other words, internalized within their procedural rhetoric, many business games implicitly claim that people with disabilities can never achieve these business methods.

Also, vividness through interactivity and expressive content are key components in procedural rhetoric. Bogost (2010) wrote that “procedural representations with high process intensity and with meaningful symbolic representations in their processes—specimens like interactive fiction, software, and especially videogames” create a more vivid user experience than something like a moving image (p. 35). By “high process intensity,” Bogost referred to the type and amount of interactivity that occurs between a player and a game. For McDonald’s Video Game, this interactivity includes moving among the raising, processing, selling, and managing game screens and choosing among the actions available on those screens. By “meaningful symbolic representations,” Bogost referred to the simulation of expressive content (images, sounds, movies, and others) that stands in for the procedures that occur in real-world processes. For McDonald’s Video Game, this expressive content includes the sound and animated images of angry customers or sick cows. However, types of vividness in business games change from one situation to another. For example, business games often deliver an ocularcentric application of visual images in their expressive content to the exclusion of haptic, aural, or other means of communication via the senses. These games assume sightedness as a standard, though people can experience vividness in multiple ways. If a business game relies solely upon color to differentiate teams or to complete objectives, an employee with low vision may not perform as well on the task. In the workplace, absent diverse sensory expression in business games may encourage people with disabilities to attempt to pass as abledbodied or may discourage alternative gameplay strategies for achieving a business game’s goals while preserving the game’s rules.

Fiona Kumari Campbell’s critique of ableism provided a valuable disability studies framework for examining how business games—through the communication of procedural rhetoric—might marginalize people with disabilities in the workplace. Campbell (2001) defined ableism as “a network of beliefs, processes, and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human. Disability then is cast as a diminished state of being human” (p. 44). Campbell modified the prevailing perspective in disability studies, shifting away from a focus on the person with a disability or the disability itself. Instead, she identified the strategies defining the cultural standards of an ideal body and mind, an approach that removes the spotlight from the disability and turns to the systematic ways that people with disabilities are socially constructed as less than human and acceptable forms of difference are socially constructed as not-disabilities.

Campbell’s analysis of the production of ableism highlighted three critiques of the ableist impulse that frame my reading of business games, starting with the internalization of compulsory ableness. Campbell (2009) built upon Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its scrutiny of internalized racism to provide a context for internalized compulsory ableness. CRT views racism as an entrenched part of American society instead of as an anomalous, peculiar, or localized practice. As a result, according to CRT, the law addresses only the worst forms of racism, leaving in place what Delgado and Stefancic (2000) and Campbell (2009) have called “business-as-usual forms” of racism—the daily trials, challenges, and tasks that people of color must live with (p. xvi; p. 18). According to Davis (1989), these “microaggressions” have bolstered negative stereotypes about African-American citizens, such as lower intelligence and laziness. Campbell (2009) regarded ableism in ways similar to how other scholars have applied the concept of microaggressions from CRT to gender and sexuality (Sue, 2010; Basford, Offermann, & Behrend, 2014). Due to their ingrained nature, the business-as-usual microaggressions of racism, sexism, and ableism appear natural, ordinary, and inconsequential. The normalization of ableist microaggressions offers two equally negative options for people with disabilities: either to hate one’s self as culture requests or to have no sense of self at all. Thus, the resulting problem is essentially an ontological one; not acknowledging ableism implies that disability does not matter. Involuntary disavowal results from recurrent negative images and the relegation of disability to the background, which helps to control behavior through the therapeutic enforcement of cultural definitions of normality. Therapy without respect for the personhood of people with disabilities or that focuses on “normalizing” one’s self creates other kinds of injuries and losses, such as self-hatred. Alongside supposed therapeutic fixes for disability, culture tolerates disability or seeks to “fix” it rather than as another equally valid means of existing. As cultural artefacts, business games reveal these larger social attitudes toward disability in workplace and gaming discourses.

The second aspect of Campbell’s critique of ableism involved “tactics of dispersal,” or the distancing of disabled people from each other (p. 22). She argued that many prominent approaches by disability service workers explicitly discourage community making among persons with disabilities and other minorities. This strategy of dispersal, predicated on the belief disabled people should not draw attention to each other via mixing, generates internalized ableism “in that mixing with other people with impairments is interpreted as a negative, inadvisable choice” (p. 23). Campbell endorsed “sub-cultural spaces”—not segregated or institutional environments—in which “within group” processes “act as a sanctuary for healing internalized oppression” (p. 24).

The third and final aspect of Campbell’s critique of ableism called attention to “defensive Othering” (p. 24). Campbell recognized the disabled body to be a colonized body. The disabled, colonized body occurs because of several assumptions: ableist assumptions about the body, assumptions about its ability to function in manners perceived as normal, and the disabling environment a disabled body must contend with in workplace interactions. Campbell wrote, “Defensive Othering occurs when the marginalized person attempts to emulate the hegemonic norm, whiteness, or ableism, and assumes the legitimacy of a devalued identity imposed by the dominant group…” (p. 24). Due to the internalization of compulsory ableness, “In order to attain the benefit of a ‘disabled identity,’ one must constantly participate in the processes of disability disavowal, aspire towards the norm, reach a state of nearabledbodiedness, or at the very least to effect a state of ‘passing’” (p. 25). Such passing is about keeping the colonizer happy by not disturbing the peace and containing the matter that is potentially out of place. Within this context, internalized ableism often places a disabled person in a liminal position.

Business games’ procedural rhetoric and their potential use in decision making complicate questions of accessibility, leading to instances of internalized ableism, tactics of dispersal, and defensive Othering. These results of ableist practices manifest in game content and mechanics. Subsequently due to their inaccessibility, business games enact workplace microaggressions toward players with disabilities by collectively contributing to negative stereotypes concerning the value of a “broken” body and its ability to advance business goals.

Disability as Metaphor, Deterrent, and Absence in Tabletop Business Games

In this section, I analyze three different tabletop business games through Bogost’s procedural rhetoric and Campbell’s critique of ableism. A twenty-year veteran of producing tabletop business games, Elite Training created Colourblind II (Elite Training, 2002), The Minefield (Elite Training, 2008), and The Safari Park Sales Challenge (Elite Training, 2013). I chose these three because they represent different genres of business games (top management games, functional games, and concept simulations), employ diverse game mechanics, and remain three of the most popular according to Elite Training.

Colourblind II: Disability as Metaphor

Colourblind II (Elite Training, 2002) is a concept simulation tabletop business game that promotes prior knowledge in solving communication problems. The game consists of thirty-six plastic pieces in six irregular shapes and in six different colors. Before the game begins, the facilitator removes two random pieces from the set and does not allow the players to see any of the pieces. In the game, players put on blindfolds and are assigned an equal number of these plastic pieces. While blindfolded, the players work together to determine the shape and color of the two missing pieces. The players cannot exchange pieces, but the facilitator does correctly answer the question, “What color is this?” each time the players ask without a limit, except for the colors of the two removed pieces. Elite Training recommends a thirty-minute time limit for each session, not including the debriefing.

Colourblind II’s procedural rhetoric uses a gaming process (collaborating to discover the two missing pieces) to mount a claim about how a real-world business process (achieving a communication goal despite challenges) works. Elite Training writes in its supplemental materials that the game serves as “an introduction to a culture change programme: using the metaphor to explore how to reach common understanding of organisational mission and values,” as a metaphor for “language difficulties,” and as “an enjoyable aid to realising the unique value of those around us.” Thus, the designers view Colourblind II as a game about overcoming communication challenges. The game puts forth the major claim through its procedures that using a metaphorical challenge—as opposed to a real-world communication challenge—is the best way to help workers learn about how co-workers can contribute to the workplace.

Unfortunately, this game replicates a major way in which people with disabilities are often represented by authors and filmmakers in their works, what Mitchell and Snyder (2001) called “narrative prosthesis.” The concept of narrative prosthesis maps how literature and film have historically and frequently depended on disability for two purposes: as a stock characterization tool or as “an opportunistic metaphorical device” (p. 47). In the case of Colourblind II, blindness serves as an opportunistic metaphorical device that stands in for a negative state of being. The game depicts blindness as a communication challenge, not unlike those you encounter daily, but no one ever wants to experience this challenge no matter how briefly. Indeed, the whole premise of the game turns the experience into “inspiration porn,” a phrase that refers to inspirational stories depicting people with disabilities supposedly overcoming obstacles when in actuality they are simply performing actions that people without disabilities do on a regular basis (Young, 2014). Colourblind II presents blindness as an almost insurmountable challenge, and players should be praised for completing the task successfully. The supplemental materials repeatedly mention the high difficulty level of the game. Thus, the game makes it tough for players to develop a procedural counterargument, outside of a counterargument that poses one of two ideas: if successful at the game, that blindness is not so bad, and if unsuccessful, that blindness is a diminished state of being. By using a combination of winning conditions that involve both loss avoidance and goal attainment, Colourblind II’s procedural rhetoric cultivates a situation without winning conditions for players with disabilities. This issue deflects Campbell’s idea of embracing disability as a fundamental part of existence by maintaining focus on an individual disability (blindness) and using it for metaphorical purposes. By likening blindness to a professional communication challenge that employers must overcome, Colourblind II reinforces common negative stereotypes associated with blindness, such as helplessness and dependency. Correspondingly, the game’s central metaphor invalidates a body that fails to achieve the sighted ideal.

The game also integrates metaphor into its interactivity and expression. Metaphors in the game parallel Campbell’s (2009) discussion of compulsory ableism in language, such as “retarded” to mean “frustrating,” “crazy” to mean “intense,” or “lame” to mean “bad.” Colourblind II’s misnomer as a title—the game has nothing to do with colorblindness but instead uses that term as a potentially less offensive replacement for blindness—works similarly. More so, the title deploys humor in a way that validates compulsory ableism while also making players participate in an ableist joke. The game replicates blindness through the required interactivity among the players and depicts lack of vision as an impairment rather than as simply another way of experiencing the world. In this way, the game imitates a version of passing but in reverse, namely that players without visual disabilities pass as blind through simulation to demonstrate their strong communication skills. Usually, the danger involved in passing is the danger to the person who has tried to pass as ablebodied but has failed. Cox (2013) provided the example of people diagnosed with a mental illness who may confront “nonconsenual treatment and involuntary hospitalization” as a result of failing to pass as “sane” (p. 100). In Colourblind II, however, passing becomes a core part of the gaming experience as all players mimic blindness. This instance of passing more closely follows Boster’s (2013) description of a slave in the antebellum South pretending to act both mentally impaired and hearing impaired to lower his value and increase his odds of escape; owners would not expend resources on property of little value. Players in this game “overcome” blindness to display their value—their ability to communicate effectively. This simulation occurs without major consequences; at the end of the game, players remove their blindfolds and regain their sight. The blindfold’s removal indicates the objectionable nature of blindness and implies that it requires a cure to sweep in and restore sight. The curing of blindness in Colourblind II implies that “curing” players by relieving them of simulated blindness acts at least as a positive, if not ethically purifying, experience.

Unlike the stated goal of helping players realize “the unique value of those around us,” Colourblind II tries to place everyone on an equal ableist playing field, devaluing the contribution of people with disabilities. By making a weak procedural argument about the best practices of professional communication through using an ableist simulated process that overcodes disability with metaphor, the game represents a missed opportunity because it could easily use a less ocular channel but still communicate the same lesson through the supplementing visual cues with tactile cues. In addition to using color to distinguish among the six pieces, the game could produce different textures.

The Minefield: Disability as Deterrent

The Minefield (Elite Training, 2008) is a concept simulation tabletop business game that stresses the role of written and oral communication in doing business. The game consists of forty-two mousepads that the facilitator lays on the floor in a six-by-seven grid. The mousepads represent locations in a minefield upon which the players step, and twenty of these locations symbolize unexploded landmines. Teams navigate the minefield from one side to the other in less than thirty minutes to gain a theoretical £2,000. The game has several rules for achieving the task. The mines are pressure- and voice-activated, so no players can talk once someone enters the minefield. Each time a player speaks, the team loses £100. The players cannot write anything, cannot leave anything on the minefield, and cannot touch the player on the minefield. The players can enter the minefield one at a time, and only one person can be on the minefield at a time. Players may step in any direction but must move one mat at a time. The facilitator will activate a bomb noise, produced by an included sound maker, when the active player steps on a mine. Stepping on a mine results in a £100 penalty, and mines do not go away leaving a safe square but instead “reset” for future players. When the active player steps on a mine, they must exit the minefield in the same way they entered it. Players must go in sequence, and if a member goes out of sequence, the team loses £100. This process continues until all players make it across the minefield or until time expires.

The Minefield uses the process of finding a safe path across a simulated minefield to argue for the most effective methods in handling a team experience within the business world. According to the Elite Training support material, the game develops teamwork through risk taking in problem solving, planning, communication, and leadership. Therefore, the game claims that risk taking is the most important factor to creating a successful teamwork experience. In addition to the imaginary monetary penalties, the supplemental guide suggests that the facilitator blindfolds the players after stepping on a bomb, telling the group that they now have players “who have lost their sight as a consequence of the exploding mines. These people must wear blindfolds, and they will have to find ways of communicating to them without talking.” In this context, the penalties act has deterrents. Players can view the penalties for stepping on the mines as either mistakes in strategy or as valuable feedback, one of the discussion questions for the after-game debrief.

However, the game’s interactivity and expression positions disability as harmful and as a predicament to be feared or pitied. In short, disability becomes a deterrent. Because the game’s interactivity relies upon the facilitator asking players to traverse a simulated minefield, players confront the idea of their own temporarily-abled bodies, or TAB. TAB is a contested term in disability studies alluding to people’s inevitable decline, through age, disease, or accident. In defining TAB, Hamilton (2009) wrote that “most of us will face disability at some point in our lives; whether it comes sooner or later varies depending upon one’s circumstances.” Stepping on a mine amplifies this fear of, symbolically, perceived somatic fracture and, within the rules of the game, blindness. The game equates blindness with failure to adequately maneuver the minefield; the game’s mechanics, then, negatively depict disability. At the same time, though, the game imitates the problem that some disability studies theorists have with TAB as a category. In her critique of TAB, Sauder (2015) wrote that she sees “the term TAB as more of a threat (at least in how it is perceived, regardless of the intent of the user) than anything useful. It is saying, you will be like us someday and how will you get around the world then?” The fact that ability is not necessarily temporary reinforces her argument; old age does not always bring disability as is often implied in discussions of TAB, and many able-bodied people die at any age. Likewise, disability is not always a permanent condition. This idea reflects the choice of seeing a player’s incorrect movement on the minefield as a mistake instead of helpful feedback, and the game communicates that idea through blindness as a penalty along with the loss of money. Disability is a mistake that one pays for, and if you’re unlucky enough to experience disability, then you will become permanently dependent upon others. Creating an incentive to make players adverse to risk taking, the game bolsters the illusion of permanent dependence due to disability.

In contrast to regarding risks and mine explosions as mistakes, the game also promotes the charity model of disability if players consider the simulated blindness as helpful feedback. Cultural artifacts, such as novels, films, and games, often depict characters or people with disabilities as morally superior to abled characters, as well as ethically purified. They are worthier of our help, admiration, and sympathy. In some of these instances, the characters with disabilities perform personal sacrifices for the betterment of those around them. In others, the character, such as Charles Dickens’s Tiny Tim, establishes pathos in contrast to others, such as Ebenezer Scrooge. Similarly, in The Minefield, the players who become blindfolded by stepping on a mine are helpful when sacrificed for the good of the group. A primary focus of the game becomes selecting who should take risks by venturing into the minefield first—in essence, choosing the best sacrifice—and who should remain behind to develop strategies for completing objectives. The game depicts the results of risk taking as a virtuous act resulting in simulated blindness, yet it possesses several accessibility risks. People using wheelchairs or who may have other types of mobility impairments may not easily play the game according to the rules by maneuvering through the minefield one spot at a time. Additionally, the use of a sound box to contribute to the game’s expressive vividness assumes all players have adequate hearing to perceive the sound box’s bomb, which has no volume control and cannot connect to an amplifier. These last two points are problematic because the game is marketed as an “activity…used by people of all abilities,” according to the game’s supplemental materials. In this instance, the word “abilities” seems to refer to an employee’s affinity for game play rather than the game’s accessibility. As a result, the language found in the game’s guide acts as an empty acknowledgment of inclusivity because the game excludes players with visual, auditory, or mobility impairments.

The Minefield uses a procedural rhetoric of risk management that makes its players place people with disabilities in one of two groups: the “sacrificial lamb” who takes a risk for the good of the group and the “mistake” that costs the group capital. Under these circumstances, defensive Othering occurs as in Colourblind II. Though the danger with passing typically lies in trying to pass as ablebodied but failing, these business games encourage passing that simulates a visual impairment and that leaves players feeling as if they have experienced an “authentic” disability. In The Minefield, the players without blindfolds may see a player simulating blindness as a kind of hero through the results of their risk taking that helps with the success of the group. The Minefield players who take the “risk” of simulating blindness and succeed at the game—in essence, “overcoming” their disability—promote a binary opposition of survivor or victim, of actively helping the group to survive the game’s tasks or becoming a victim of the game’s mechanics. Tactics of dispersal follow from this mindset in two ways. First, the strategy in the facilitator’s guide recommends not sending two blindfolded players in the sequence at the same time. This strategy presupposes that two blind players cannot contend with the gaming situation. Relatedly, this strategy assumes that blind players cannot develop other successful strategies of their own. However, players with disabilities often establish strategies for gameplay. For example, in Goalball, players use sound to locate the ball and keep their heads in the direction in which they wish to throw the ball. The second way in which tactics of dispersal operate in The Minefield involves if people with various impairments attempt to play the game. Suggested as a strategy in the The Minefield’s facilitator guide, dividing players according to strengths (good memory, detailed note taking, agility, among other characteristics) is also a strategy often employed in tabletop leisure games, especially cooperative ones in which players all work toward a single goal. To avoid risk, players might strategically separate employees with mobility impairments from employees with visual impairments, thus establishing a type of hierarchy based on perceived ability or inability to contribute to the game’s goal. Even if players do not group people according to impairments, they may disperse disabled participants among “ablebodied” participants to help account for any supposed deficiencies resulting from disabled players. In this light, the strategies in the facilitator’s guide assume that people with disabilities are naturally unprepared to address professional tasks despite any examples to the contrary.

The Safari Park Sales Challenge: Disability as Absence

The Safari Park Sales Challenge (Elite Training, 2013) is a mixture of a top management and functional tabletop business game that requires players to build their own safari park. Players divide into multiple teams of buyers and sellers. Acting as managers who the facilitator has assigned an animal park that exhibits a randomly selected set of characteristics (such as start-up capital, annual budget, and amount of space), the buyers must negotiate with the sellers, who play the roles of park suppliers. The buyers must purchase park materials, including a variety of common and endangered animals from the sellers, all while keeping the bottom line in mind as costs change in response to deals and decisions reached during the game. Sellers attempt to match animals with the animal park providing the best fit given the animals’ traits and the needs of the buyers; animals have rarity, visitor, and sponsorship ratings as well as feed, space, and care costs. After three rounds of negotiations between buyers and sellers, the facilitator inputs each team’s numbers into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, which calculates figures to show which team of buyers and sellers is most successful in terms of longevity and cash flow. The computer arrives at this conclusion via an algorithm that Elite Training has developed based on research into zoos and safari parks, including maintenance of the park, visitor attendance, and animal care.

The game simulates the process of managing a safari park to argue for the best tactics in negotiating sales and opening a new business. According to the Elite Training support material, “People often buy for emotional reasons” and then will create rationalizations to validate their positions and practices, so players should “focus on the customer and what [they] can achieve together” and not only on their desires as sellers, such as meeting a monthly sales quota. Therefore, the game claims that employees must first learn to like and respect the product they have to offer before they can communicate the value of that product to a potential customer. The focus, then, is put on creating a sense of empathy with customers to provide ways that they connect with the product.

The Safari Park Sales Challenge is the most interactive and expressive game I examined. Gameplay consists of negotiation sessions between buyers and sellers as well as time for creating the park with the players’ purchases. The game’s supplies include images to build the park, such as a picture of an aardvark, a lion, a penguin, and other animals for purchase; it is not abstract like The Minefield and Colourblind II. Due to the Excel algorithm that determines the outcomes of building decisions, the facilitator can provide data to the players’ groups so that they may adjust strategy, which highlights the players’ abilities to make counterarguments by selecting alternate strategies for buyers and sellers.

However, the level and type of detail also become its main problem, particularly in how the game fails to address diverse forms of corporeality. Despite the intricacies of the game, including the ways that buyers and sellers engage with each other and the multiple paths that a team can take in creating their safari park, the default audience for this imaginary park is the able-bodied and average consumer-at-large. In other words, nothing whatsoever is presented in terms of disability as if none of the game’s aspects, such as animal exhibits, could ever require accommodation. Though disabled employees might participate in the simulation, they will not find any buyers or sellers to represent the concerns of people with disabilities. Corporeal diversity, while acknowledged in the types of animals for sale, remains invisible when it comes to the game’s human element. Campbell (2009) wrote, “The ethically unsayable becomes legitimate in the ‘voice’ of the knowing expert” (p. 109). For example, approaching disability through the medical model, some members of the medical profession offer “cures” for disabilities, and many patients fail to question the efficacy of treatment due to the ethos of the medical profession. In the case of The Safari Park Sales Challenge, negating the agency possessed by people with disabilities via the expertise of the game and its facilitator furthers compulsory ableism. The game does not account for those consumers or sellers with other diverse needs despite its focus on empathy as a core virtue of sales management. The game does not create multiple ways to negotiate if a buyer decides to focus on diverse audiences. Instead, the Visitor’s Score relates highly to the rarity of animals available in the park. Success, then, has little to do with good customer service communication or inclusionary communication practices but only with the type of product the business possesses.

This game also shows how the proprietary nature of tabletop business games affects accessibility. The game developer provides no alternate digital or print versions. It does not provide alternate text due to copyright issues and has no braille copies available. This omission is notable because of the hefty price tag of £495 attached to this game as of this writing. Unlike Colourblind II or The Minefield, this game uses a large amount of printed paper for instructional purposes, and the game’s manual reminds facilitators that copying is prohibited, though the 1996 Chafee Amendment allows for the reproduction of nondramatic works available for the public (Copyright Law Amendment, 1996: PL 104-197).

Unfortunately, the absence of people with disabilities as potential consumers or employees in this vivid business game runs throughout a similar game that focuses on customer service skills from Elite Training: Customer Service Decisions. Out of the ten scenarios available in the customer service game, none involve people with disabilities as customers or cover issues of accessibility. This absence pinpoints a rhetorical weakness in both games. The guidebook for The Safari Park Sales Challenge emphasizes that a seller’s identification with a buyer should be a top goal because a sale “is not about talking prices, it is about communicating values [sic].” Another key learning point offered in the guidebook involves “building a relationship” through “empathy, personality and adaptability.” Burke (1969) argued that persuasion can happen only when two actors share common interests and identify those common interests with one another to the extent that they are “substantially one” (p. 1020). As the game’s guidebook promotes, sellers must create a sense of identification with buyers by displaying shared values through empathy, personality, and adaptability, yet the game does not consider diverse buyers, whether through race, gender, sexual orientation, class, or disability. This lip service paid to relationship building and adaptability comes off as manipulation rather than empathy. Depicted as a homogenous group possessing all normative traits and only those traits, the customers and the game’s lack of detail about them, despite having other vivid game elements through the Excel spreadsheet and pictures of animals, prevent players from having a fully persuasive gaming experience. The process fails to provide a persuasive procedure by relying on a single version of corporeality: the supposed average, ablebodied buyer. Therefore, the game is less effective because it allows players to practice only one form of identification.

By promoting ableism, the procedural rhetoric of these business games fails to effectively persuade employees of best practices in professional communications involving teamwork, risk taking, and negotiation. Campbell (2009) wrote, “The disabled body is constantly in a state of deferral, in a holding pattern, waiting for the day it will be not just repaired but made anew (cured)” (p. 26). These business games offer opportunities for employees to learn, yet people with disabilities are left in this holding pattern, not wishing to be cured but instead valued for their contributions that are automatically degraded and disregarded.

Developing a Professional Writing Business Game and Avoiding Ableism and Inaccessible Tabletop Gaming Experiences

Professional writing teachers should concern ourselves with helping to create accessible business games that do not exhibit elements of ableism. As an instructor who teaches courses in game design and document design in a professional writing program, I understand the excitement yet frustration that can occur when trying to develop an accessible simulation or tabletop business game, especially due to the lack of resources and guidelines that consider the special persuasive and interactive characteristics of this medium. In collaboration with Morgan Ebbs and Gage Rogers, two students in Pittsburg State University’s Professional Writing Program, we have created a professional writing business game. The game, called Scare Solutions (Ebbs, McDaniel, & Rogers, 2016), gives an idea of the roles available in professional writing as well as the knowledge/skills and kinds of projects completed in the field. Thus, it is a persuasive game that applies procedural rhetoric to help people understand the field of professional writing through its card-game, shufflebuilding mechanic. Though I hesitate to call education a business, Scare Solutions exhibits some of the same characteristics as the business-oriented tabletop professional games I examined. Using the video game accessibility guidelines available at the Game Accessibility Guidelines website (Barrie et al., n.d.), I end with this exposé on the development process for Scare Solutions. I want to indicate some of the challenges and future pathways that research into tabletop business games might address, especially in terms of accessibility. By “accessibility,” I stress the literal definition of the word, namely the quality of being available when needed, as well as the definitions of accessibility established in approaches such as accessible design (with its focus on the needs of people with disabilities), Universal Design (with its focus on the broadest audience possible), and participatory design (with its focus on bringing in all stakeholders at all levels of the design process). In other words, business games should be widely available and inclusive.

Game Overview

As a professional writing teacher, I find that students do not fully understand the breadth and depth of opportunities available to liberal arts majors generally and in the field of professional writing specifically. Consequently, many students go a more traditional route in English (studying primarily literature) and only later realize that an education in professional writing aligns more fully with their personal and occupational goals. Therefore, we have produced a professional writing card game informed by Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric to offer a meaningful persuasive game. Scare Solutions (McDaniel, Ebbs, & Rogers, 2016) puts players in a workplace atmosphere filled with ghosts, demons, zombies, mummies, shapeshifters, vampires, werewolves, and aliens all seeking to provide “quality scares” for their clients (the game’s tagline). Modeled after the game mechanics in the popular leisure games Smash Up! and Lords of Waterdeep, Scare Solutions asks players to team up two individual factions to show the power of collaboration in professional writing. Each faction of monsters possesses a special power that reflects a skill in professional writing. For example, the ghosts serve as editors, using their power to get rid of cards and increasing their potential victory points. Players compete to gather resources by using their cards to complete minor and major professional writing projects, such as composing grants or writing social media posts, which earns points for the players. The first player to ten points wins the game, and length of play is flexible.

In developing this game, we have five primary goals:

To begin the process of making an accessible business game prototype
To avoid supporting compulsory ableism, defensive Othering, and tactics of dispersal
To more fully engage and inform potential students on the variety of opportunities in professional writing,
To promote professional writing, a field whose occupational outlook is quite positive, to traditionally underserved student populations, especially in terms of disability and socioeconomic status
To market PSU’s Professional Writing Emphasis

Given our starting goals, the game can work in several different types of classes: high school English courses, English major gateway classes, first-year experience courses, or even introductory classes in a writing major. One characteristic of our game that helps it avoid the features of Campbell’s critique of ableism is the fact that participants play Scare Solutions with cards featuring cartoon-like depictions of vampires, mummies, and other creatures. In the three professional games by Elite Training, real people are the pawns of the game and make up a large part of the games’ mechanics. Additionally, though the game adopts classic monsters as characters, it attempts to avoid assigning the monsters any deeper metaphorical meaning. They stand in for workers at a business. As a researcher who also writes about disability and metaphor in horror films, I understand the troubled history of “monstrous” depictions of people with disabilities in various media. Yet the tenor and vehicle of the metaphors in this instance works to avoid marginalizing people with different somatic experiences by showing how the creatures have strengths and weaknesses in gameplay. Thus, everyone has an equally valuable contribution to the success of the company. Finally, in the roles that the monsters take on, we make sure to include positions such as accessibility coordinator. Because both students had taken disability studies courses, we had wanted to engage in the principles of participatory design while creating the game by including people with disabilities throughout the development process. Because two major opportunities to work with local organizations disappeared, because this experience served as the students’ required internship in their Professional Writing major, and because the students had graduation deadlines, we had to forego what we had hoped would be a key part of the project. Nonetheless, because of our backgrounds in professional writing and disability studies, we worked to make accessibility a priority by adapting the digital Game Accessibility Guidelines (Barrie et al., n.d.) for Scare Solutions (McDaniel, Ebbs, & Rogers, 2016).

Focusing on video games, Game Accessibility Guidelines (Barrie et al., n.d.) is a collaborative website built by a number of game development studios, specialists in usability and disability studies, and gamers themselves. This group divides their guidelines into six areas: General, Motor, Cognitive, Vision, Hearing, and Speech. Each area is further categorized into Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced guidelines that range from simple-to-integrate recommendations, such as “Provide details of accessibility features on packaging and/or website,” to more sophisticated standards, such as “Base speech recognition on hitting a volume threshold (eg. 50%) instead of words.” As you can tell from the second example, many of these guidelines specifically reference elements of video games. However, several of the guidelines can be adapted for tabletop game development. In the following, I discuss the ways we adapted these video game guidelines (Barrie et al., n.d.) during the development of the tabletop business game Scare Solutions (McDaniel, Ebbs, & Rogers, 2016), what we want to do in future iterations of the game, and what we would do if we had adequate resources.

Adapted and Adopted Guidelines

General

Provide details of accessibility features on packaging and/or website
Offer a wide choice of difficulty levels
Offer a means to bypass gameplay elements that are not part of the core mechanic, via settings or in-game skip option

Motor

Ensure controls are as simple as possible, or provide a simpler alternative
Ensure interactive elements/virtual controls are large and well-spaced, particularly on small or touch screens
Ensure that multiple simultaneous actions (eg. click/drag or swipe) are not required, and included only as a supplementary/alternative input method
Do not make precise timing essential to gameplay – offer alternatives, actions that can be carried out while paused, or a skip mechanism
Allow interfaces [such as the digital window displaying a video game on a computer] to be resized

Cognitive

Use an easily readable default font size
Use simple clear language
Use simple clear text formatting
Include contextual in-game help/guidance/tips
Indicate/allow reminder of current objectives during gameplay
Indicate/allow reminder of controls during gameplay
Employ a simple, clear narrative structure

Vision

Ensure no essential information is conveyed by a colour alone
Use an easily readable default font size
Use simple clear text formatting
Provide high contrast between text and background

The game offers a variety of difficulty levels. As part of the instruction set, we rank the monsters’ abilities in terms of simplicity and complexity. Monsters that depend upon chain reactions to build power, such as ghosts who serve as publication specialists adept at design and efficiency by getting rid of cards from their hands to increase their power or werewolves who serve as digital media specialists adept at networking through bringing out cards in chains, requires additional complexity in gameplay. Vampires require fewer physical and mental movements to play because they primarily affect the difficulty of completing Major and Minor Projects. The game can bypass Scare Solutions’s “Major Projects” game mechanic without harming gameplay, and we provide alternative instructions on how to accomplish that setup. Players can adjust the number of Major and Minor Projects that players must complete to win the game in order to adjust complexity. We have summarized many of these elements on the box. The icons on the cards are well-spaced, and none depend entirely upon color for understanding. A player cannot confuse a shapeshifter with an alien, for example. Unlike Colourblind II (Elite Training, 2002) and The Minefield (Elite Training, 2008), Scare Solutions does not require multiple simultaneous actions, as it is a turn-based game. The game applies the best practices of document design in terms of text selection and card design. Though we initially had selected normal playing cards as the size of our monster decks, these cards could be made larger to increase readability of text on the card or to include braille, such as a tarot-sized card. The idea of variability and flexibility in card size means that players can choose the size cards they feel comfortable with through The Game Crafter site that publishes the game. Current objectives are given on the Major and Minor Projects cards, and players receive a gameplay card to help them remember the rules and procedure of the game.

Future Additions

Include tutorials
Ensure no essential information (especially instructions) is conveyed by text alone, reinforce with visuals and/or speech
Ensure manual / website are provided in a screenreader friendly format
Include every relevant category of impairment (motor, cognitive etc) amongst play-testing participants, in representative numbers based on age / demographic of target audience.

We are creating a website to feature gameplay tutorials to increase the accessibility of the game. Including a screen reader friendly manual, this website will also allow us to make sure that essential information, especially in terms of instructions, will not be conveyed by text alone, though visuals in the print instructions do help. Finally, we are working with our local Center for Student Accommodations to recruit participants interested in developing the game and acting as play testers. We also plan to contact disabled student email lists to try to find local students interested in the project. Of course, there are many challenges in this process, especially concerning privacy.

Unlimited Resources

Provide very simple control schemes that are compatible with assistive technology devices, such as switch or eye tracking

If we had unlimited resources, we would take advantage of the accessibility that technology offers by creating both an app that supplements the tabletop game as well as a full version of the game for digital play. For example, a player with an eye tracking device could select the monsters they want to play from the game and play with other gamers who have the print cards. Game companies and designers have completed similar projects with various other popular entertainment tabletop games, such as Sentinels of the Multiverse and 7 Wonders. Unfortunately, my technical expertise and the lack of time and money prohibits this next step. I am looking for opportunities to collaborate with colleagues from computer science and other disciplines that already have a vested interest in game design and professional writing.

Ultimately, this final point about expertise is instructive. My article builds on the idea that the field of professional writing can inspire businesses to make common training practices more inclusive. However, to do so, the shift toward developing competencies in designing for accessibility must start in educational curricula. First, participatory design is key. Buchenau and Fulton Suri (2000) argued that when user experiences resonate with personal experiences, designers obtain a deeper understanding of the user experiences. Not only should teachers introduce students to the concepts and principles of the practice of participatory design, but they should also seek out opportunities to collaborate with students or community members with disabilities on campus- or community-related projects. Also, the interactivity inherent in participatory design practices—direct participation of users, feedback, and iterative prototyping—ties participatory design directly to interactivity in gaming. Second, professional writing programs should more fully engage with the scholarship of teaching, learning, and education to incorporate elements of instructional design across the curriculum because at their root, business games are instances of instructional design. For example, professional writers can adapt many of the core concepts of document design, such as Williams’s (2014) contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity, to an instructional design experience like a tabletop business game by grouping similar information, repeating core concepts, and demonstrating how those core concepts support and align with one another. If instructors are uncomfortable or unaware of game theory and design, they can instead focus on the more familiar topic of instructional design to prepare future communicators to deal with increasingly diverse demands. Third, instructors should discuss the role that gaming often plays in the workplace and in the professional writing discipline, especially given the rich body of research on business games. At the same time, though, instructors should remind students that key principles of the discipline, such as genre, the rhetorical situation, and audience still apply. Even if students gain no direct instruction in disability studies, game theory, or instructional design, they can at least rely on these principles to address unfamiliar communication territory.

Of course, workplaces must play a role in creating accessible business games that avoid ableist practices. First, if businesses and human resource specialists continue to view business games as a core part of professional development, then they should be ready to create their own accessible business gaming experiences or to adapt or revise business games purchased from companies like Elite Training. Second, managers must understand the seriousness of inaccessible business games. Given that people typically view games as lighthearted fun, managers may ignore complaints about business games. However, implicitly or explicitly endorsing a business game’s ableist content and inaccessible mechanics would perform a role similar to microaggressions by validating negative self-worth for people with disabilities. Finally, if professional writers are to address issues of accessibility in training, then workplace professional development opportunities must include topics on accessibility, participatory design, and usability.

Due to the complexities of creating a fully accessible business game, professional writers must think interdisciplinarily and in ways not dissimilar to what current trends in Digital Humanities exemplify. Digital Humanities projects typically involve faculty stakeholders from multiple disciplines, representatives from offices of information systems, and digital initiative librarians, to name a few. The field of professional writing provides an excellent location to ignite this kind of work due to its focus on collaboration, usability, persuasion, and audience. In the best of all possible worlds, accessible business games should be available as open source games, perhaps in a peer-reviewed clearinghouse or collective like Molleindustria, who produced McDonald’s Video Game. Professional writing teachers, specialists who create business games within industry, and companies who create business games for business applications would have greater availability to these open source games, which would simultaneously invite feedback and innovation, leading to improved accessible business games for all employees.

Dr. Jamie L. McDaniel is an Associate Professor of English at Radford University (VA), and the editor of The CEA Forum, an online, peer-reviewed journal devoted to pedagogy in English studies. Publishing in journals such as Gender and History, The Midwest Quarterly, and Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, he is the author of articles on disability and adaptation studies, ableism in horror films, and legal, economic, and political theories of property in contemporary British women’s writing. His current work combines the frameworks of procedural and constitutive rhetoric with disability studies to show how tabletop gaming – as both an increasingly important economic sector and as a communication practice within businesses – remains a particularly inaccessible and ableist part of the commercial world.

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