Accessibility and burden distribution
Active research program. Resonance currently focuses mainly on access to practice: cognitive load, preparation, improvisation, the blank page, and GM burden. This page does not claim to cover accessibility as a whole.
Calling a game “more accessible” is insufficient until we ask for whom, to which activity, and where the burden went.
A game may remove rules while demanding more improvisation. It may remove the GM by distributing GM functions among all players. It may reduce preparation by asking for more real-time coherence. It may offer very few options because it has sharply reduced fictional space.
Resonance therefore treats accessibility as a problem of function and burden distribution, not as a synonym for minimalism.
The control question
When something becomes easier for someone, what happened to the work that used to be necessary?
Possible outcomes include:
- removed — the function was unnecessary or redundant;
- pre-structured — the designer performs part of the work in advance;
- externalized — a material or interface carries the function;
- distributed — several participants share what one person carried;
- localized — a difficulty is handled only when it becomes relevant;
- carried by fictional causality — the Situation tells us what can react without arbitrary invention;
- transferred — somebody else simply carries the difficulty;
- removed through fictional reduction — the game is easier because it allows or means fewer things.
The last two can look elegant without solving the accessibility problem.
Three forms of access
Procedural access
Being able to understand what the game expects and perform its gestures without disproportionate prior learning.
Typical questions: how much must be memorized? How often is lookup required? Are procedural decisions themselves interesting? Can a player know what they may attempt without mastering a catalogue of abilities?
Generative access
Being able to continue playing when one does not spontaneously know what to invent.
A rule such as “improvise an interesting scene” is short but may demand major implicit expertise. Resonance looks for devices that provide handles without deciding in the participant's place.
The player's blank page and the work on Situation are the clearest experiments in this direction.
Access to otherness
Being able to play from a position distant from one's own habits: another subjectivity, culture, cosmology, or conception of what matters.
Accessibility must not mean assimilation here. Reducing an unfamiliar cosmology to familiar categories may make play easier while destroying the difference the game meant to make playable.
See Access to fictional otherness.
Player and GM: a symmetry
The GM's entry cost reveals hidden burdens especially well. One person may be expected to know world, rules, and scenario; play NPCs; improvise; preserve coherence; pace the session; and ensure that something interesting happens.
“GM decides” or “GM improvises” does not reduce this burden; it merely makes it less visible.
The same is true for players. “You can do anything” may be liberating to an expert and a blank page to someone else.
Resonance aims to reduce dependence on implicit expertise without reducing fictional freedom.
A provisional topology of burden
A game can be analyzed by asking where world memory, rule memory, situation generation, relevance, uncertainty, causal coherence, decision authority, inspiration, pacing, and cultural or genre knowledge primarily reside.
Those functions may live in the GM, a player, the group, the text, a procedure, a material device, a digital tool, or already-established fiction.
This map is more useful than rule count alone: it shows who or what actually carries play.
Accessibility is not ease
An accessible experience may remain demanding, disturbing, tragic, or intellectually complex.
Unmind, for instance, need not be emotionally “easy.” The question is whether players must master a complicated psychological model before complex psychological relationships can emerge from play.
Making a practice accessible does not make its experience harmless or trivial.
Current limits
Sensory, motor, neurocognitive, linguistic, economic, and social accessibility each require real work, affected participants, and specific testing. The current corpus mainly supports research on entry cost, cognitive and procedural burden, inspiration, GM burden, and fictional distance.
Questions to test
- Does reducing rules actually reduce burden for a beginner?
- Which devices narrow the gap between experts and beginners without constraining experts?
- How can burden transfer to the GM or social negotiation be observed?
- Can a procedure teach its own gesture through practice?
- How far can a game support a player with no inspiration without taking decisions away?
- What forms of support provide access to unfamiliar fiction without normalizing it?
Who can now play, what can they access, and what had to be moved or preserved to make that possible?