Celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day with Xbox Mental Health Best Practices for Developers

The team at Xbox Accessibility have just released their Mental Health Best Practices Guidelines as part of their accessibility resources, and we were excited to play a part in it.

The guidelines are aiming to educate developers on ways to create inclusive and safe experiences within their games for all players, by providing content warnings, content customization options, and avoiding the use of stereotyped or stigmatized representations of in-game characters with mental health conditions.

The guidelines are thorough, and contain support around the initial concepts and scoping of developing content that will elicit a challenging response in players, depict trauma, mental health conditions and behaviours.

The detail where mental health considerations can be important within game development and player experiences, and provide examples of ways this has been done well in other games.

We can create safer experiences for everyone by:

• highlighting the best practices that exist already within these spaces
• empowering developers to be more inclusive when portraying mental health

We’re happy to see such a detailed resource aimed at game developers within mental health and to have been involved. We look forward to continue to see growing accessibility guidelines from Xbox, and encourage developers to embrace these discussions as part of every day development. Please check out the full guidelines here.