Photo by Alicia Christin Gerald on Unsplash
Game design job posts still love the phrase "passionate gamer." The uncomfortable part is that the numbers studios publish about their own players suggest being a hardcore player is a weak proxy for being able to design for players.
The cleanest natural experiment in the industry
Ubisoft ran it without meaning to. One variable changed: the default.
| Title | Subtitle default | Players with subtitles on |
|---|---|---|
| Assassin's Creed Origins | Off | ~60% turned them on |
| Assassin's Creed Odyssey | On | 95% left them on |
| Far Cry New Dawn | On | 97% left them on |
| The Last of Us Part II | Off | 63% turned them on |
Same feature, wildly different uptake. The only thing that moved is the assumption about who is holding the controller.
It is not only subtitles
From the same body of first-party disclosures collected by accessibility consultant Ian Hamilton:
- Roughly half of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 players opened the accessibility settings menu.
- 35% of Sniper Elite 5 players increased the text size.
- More than 40% of Modern Warfare II players tuned analog deadzone.
- Into The Dead shipped gyro-only, then added right-stick, left-stick and on-screen buttons. Each of the four schemes ended up used by about a quarter of players, so roughly 75% of the playerbase was on something other than the original default.
Newzoo's gamer sentiment work puts around 30% of US and UK players as identifying as disabled.
Read those together and the framing flips. An option menu is not a concession to a minority. It is how most of your players configure the game before they will commit to it.
The designer who says the same thing from the inside
The source article for this piece is a profile of designer and developer Christina Lassheikki, and her self-description is the interesting part.
She calls herself an average gamer. Plays in bursts. No single favourite genre. Hundreds of hours in Dragon Age: Inquisition and Breath of the Wild, significant time in The Sims and early RuneScape, plus console fighting games, Overcooked, and board games from Betrayal at House on the Hill to Dominion. She also says outright that she has struggled with mechanics, including estimating depth.
She treats that as a qualification rather than a confession, because it produces empathy for the player who fumbles the controls and quietly stops playing.
Two more things from her path that are worth flagging for anyone breaking in:
- She is technology-agnostic about immersion. Board games, TTRPGs, MUDs and mobile get the same respect as console, PC and VR. Different affordances, same potential for a world that holds you.
- She did not come in through competitive play. Art teaching at Aalto, then a Global Game Jam in 2015, then a master's in game design. For scale on that on-ramp: GGJ 2026 ran 824 sites across 94 countries with 39,197 jammers and 9,874 games, and 41% of surveyed participants were first-time jammers.
Stating the evidence limits
Hamilton's collection is exactly that, a curated set of separate studio disclosures spanning different titles, genres and years, not one controlled dataset. The "around 30% of players identify as disabled" figure shifts with how each study defines disability. And option-usage telemetry tells you what players changed, not why.
So: strong, repeatedly reproduced pattern. Not a single clean measurement. That is still more evidence than the "passionate gamer" heuristic has ever offered.
The practical takeaway
If you are building something right now, the cheap version of this insight is:
- Audit your defaults before you add features. The Ubisoft numbers are a defaults story, not a feature story.
- Put the options menu before the first hard encounter, not behind it.
- Instrument which settings get changed. You will almost certainly find your "edge case" is a plurality.
- Watch someone who is not you play it. Ideally someone who plays in bursts and does not care about your genre.
Gamer cred tells you what a designer has played. It tells you very little about whether they can model a player who is not them, and that second skill is the one the telemetry keeps rewarding.
Which setting was the one that made a game finally click for you: subtitles, remapping, aim assist, motion blur, or something less obvious?
Full article: https://global.krizek.tech/feed/the-art-of-immersion-unpacking-the-philosophy-of-game-design-thaen
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