In so many circles have I seen walkthrough use lamented as the actual bane of other people’s existences — the idea that other gamers might need enough help to use them, or the idea that other gamers would use them. Allegedly you are not a “hardcore enough gamer” if you need to use them. Some people devote way too much of their time to defining what is a “hardcore enough gamer” to come up with arbitrary requirements as to what this… entails, and I try to avoid these conversations and associating myself with these people, but I’ve seen enough peripheral complaining about walkthrough use that I had to mention it.

You are not a bad gamer, or “not hardcore enough of a gamer”, if you need to use a walkthrough.

Even if you need to use a walkthrough for every single game you play, that does not define you as a gamer.

You are not “less than” for needing assistance in games.

This is an insiduous form of gatekeeping, and I dislike it a lot. God only knows that I’ve used walkthroughs when playing games, especially with Bub, to cut down on the amount of screen time that I expose myself to in the name of not giving myself an unnecessary migraine. If I can plan out what I’m going to do in a game when, I can shorten my exposure to the screen, which is an extremely good thing. This allows me to continue to enjoy something that I love, let me play video games with Bub, all while not walking myself into a particularly severe migraine — for me — because I spent hours wandering around lost in a video game.

So far, walkthroughs have allowed us to enjoy games in that they allow us to shave off time that would otherwise have been spent wandering around absolutely lost causing a migraine for no reason. We achieve short objectives, frequently save the game just in case, I monitor for symptoms, and we continue from there…

But there is a reason that there is the ongoing joke that our backlog is far taller than Bub. No shame in that.

Whenever games allow you to use the microphone, Bub and I opt out of this without fail. We also tend to mute the mic on games that allow us to do this. But whenever games force you to use the microphone and listen in on others’ conversations and there is no way to prevent this, even if this game is otherwise the best game, this is a game that we take a hard pass on. And we have to do this because Bub has to be protected.

Bub’s vocal inflections let everyone know that he is disabled, and this is something that he can not hide. It would then make me make the incredibly hard choice of not playing the game with him so that people on the other end of the game did not hear his vocal inflections, or having him play alongside me and risking being asked inappropriate questions about him (“is he retarded?”, “is your son retarded?”), or making fun of him for the way he sounds. So I would either play the game that I had bought him without him to protect him, which would exclude him, or I would run the risk of Bub being bullied and made fun of by attempting to include him if a bully is on the other end of the mic. So the easiest way to solve both of these problems is: don’t buy games that force you to use the microphone. Research the game, find that out, make that decision. Done.

The only way that we work around this is if you can choose who you party, or team, up with. If I can select friends of mine who I trust to play the game with, that’s different. That makes the game playable. But if it’s a random distribution of players and there is forced mic use, I don’t purchase the game and we don’t play it.

I wish more game developers took this into consideration, because I am sure that Bub isn’t the only person that something like this applies to. I am sure that there are many other disabled individuals out there who have to stay completely silent on the mic during games like this in fear that they will be bullied if if they speak. There may be individuals who have severe social anxiety for whom forced mic use petrifies them, and this may apply to them too. There are aspects of gaming culture that need improvement. This is one of them.