Video Games and Epilepsy, Why Slapping On A Warning Label Isn’t Good Enough

Some games will offer an epileptic warning to help prevent players from experiencing seizures and while many developers are aware of the problem epileptics face when picking up that controller, it still seems wildly overlooked by many during actual development.

Backstory time:

Up until my mid-twenties, I’ve never had a single seizure. I’ve been gaming for the better part of 30 years now, so for most of my life being wary of epileptic triggers was just never a concern for me. When I was 23, I joined the military and was eventually medically discharged due to an incident that unfortunately – resulted in seizure activity. Ever since my discharge, I suddenly had this entire world of awareness that I never knew existed and for many, that’s been their existence for their entire lives. Suddenly movies, television shows, and even games could potentially pose a huge health risk. It also meant I couldn’t play some of my favorite games any more, like Dead Space.

What brought this up again for me is this past week. I was playing a round of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 TDM — minding my own business — but there’s this feature that one of the specialists has where they can hack the enemy team. A small feature, easily tweakable. It causes the bottom half of the screen to phase out into a static that flashed a light grey / red sequence for a prolonged time.

Usually when I have an epileptic episode, I have some warning first. Sometimes I’ll lose sight in my right eye, other times I’ll have this dropping sensation in my arms and legs. Usually when I feel those tells, I’ll stop what I’m doing and give myself a rest. Unfortunately, this time there were no tells and I had a seizure right there mid-match.

After everything was said and done, I reached out to the developers with little success, even trying the Twitter route for an extra boost, but it did have me thinking: That hacking feature is cool, but it’s so inconsequential to the game. If the feature needs to be there, there is absolutely no reason why it can’t be done in a way that won’t trigger an epileptic episode. Now some games the environment is almost imperative. Like Dead Space, despite me not being able to play it anymore, I couldn’t imagine the design being any other way. But other games, like in this instance — Call of Duty — just a small attention of detail could mean the world to people that suffer from seizures.

I recently had the amazing honor of speaking with BioWare’s Mike Gamble about Anthem and just the studio in general and we spoke a little bit about this issue following a discussion about the colorblind options they implemented. His response, though very respectful and honestly made me feel hopeful, did put a spotlight on a bigger problem: Most game developers just aren’t aware. And that’s OK! That’s expected! There is so much that goes into game design, so many factors and different teams, the oversight is understandable. But what if it didn’t have to be an oversight anymore?

“We don’t have any features that really prevent [seizures], that’s a good point though, we didn’t really think about that,” Gamble mentioned when I shared the earlier TDM story with him. He then asked what about games have triggered that reaction in me personally to which we talked about the flashing and the color schemes that are common triggers. “That’s a relatively new thing that we would have to look into. There’s always more and more we could do and people like yourself bring up and that helps.”

So what are the most common triggers that developers could look out for? According to a Pokemon epilepsy study:

• Flashing images, especially those with red, should not flicker faster than three times per second. If the image does not have red, it still should not flicker faster than five times per second.

• Flashing images should not be displayed for a total duration of more than two seconds.

• Stripes, whirls and concentric circles should not take up a large part of the television screen.

And I get it, the flash – it’s dramatic, it’s impactful, but it can also be really dangerous and more times than not, there is a safer alternative that doesn’t compromise the integrity of the experience. There are also programs in place, such as the Harding Test, that devs can use to test data capture for any epileptic triggers.

I feel like this is something that is only an issue because it’s still relatively new in terms of entertainment awareness. A lot of devs I’ve talked to have admitted that the thought never even cross their minds when it came to their development process. Do I expect this article to be a total game changer? Well, no, but if it helps raise that awareness even a little, I hope developers can take that to heart when creating these wonderful titles that people like me can’t wait to dive right into!

You can contact the author of this story over on Twitter @DirtyEffinHippy!