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As someone with an unlimited movie pass, a birthday gift from my lovely wife Jane, I go to my local cinema pretty regularly.
However, recently I’ve noticed something new snuck in between the trailers for new movie releases and information about age ratings for the feature film.
Seemingly regardless of the film I’m seeing, there appears a generic warning informing me that “content” in the film may be unsuitable for those with photosensitive conditions.
The message doesn’t differ from one film to the next, the wording is always the same.
Every movie, the same warning that something in it might be a problem for photosensitive guests, without further extrapolation.
As someone who grew up playing video games in the 90’s and 2000’s, these kinds of generic photosensitivity splash screens are nothing new to me. I remember them becoming particularly common in the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube era, where it felt like a big wall of text appeared among the logos on first boot of nearly every video game that got released by many of the major publishers.
Given how wordy these generic warning screens were, it’s amazing honestly how little useful information they conveyed to help photosensitive gamers make informed decisions about the games they were going to play.
When every movie, from the calmest to the most visually intense, all contain near identical photosensitivity warnings at my local cinema, that ultimately tells me nothing useful. The same is true for video games.
If you place a generic warning on everything, all that tells people who are photosensitive is that every film or game allegedly poses an identical level of risk, and any responsibility for that risk is on you as the consumer.
The game or movie warned you there might be photosensitivity triggers present, so it’s your fault if you played it anyway, because you rolled the dice to find out if you’d be okay or not.
And what kind of photosensitive conditions might they affect? Are these potential seizure triggers? Are they potential migraine risks?
Often Epilepsy is explicitly stated but not always, sometimes it’s just generically stating “photosensitive” people are at risk.
These kinds of generic warnings feel born more out of an obligation to limit legal liability than out of a desire to protect end users.
We’ve seen them employed in the video game industry as early as the early 1980’s, where academic studies into the photosensitivity risks of playing Space Invaders started early discussions of overall video game photosensitivity safety.
We’ve known for a long time that video games potentially pose these kinds of risks, and for many decades the answer to that has seemingly been to put a warning at the start of games so that developers can wash their hands of responsibility for the impact of choices they may make in their designs.
While it’s not possible to ever call a piece of media photosensitivity or epilepsy safe, given the wide range of potential photosensitivity triggers out there that exist, it is possible to identify common triggers present in a piece of media, and be open about them in advance of release to help people make informed choices.
Imagine a photosensitivity warning that said something like “Includes potential photosensitivity triggers including but not limited to full screen high contrast strobing lasting 4 seconds, flash bang effects, and full screen static distortion”.
I feel like that would likely be more useful than “Photosensitivity risks, be aware”.
Doing so would make it clear that a piece of media actually posed legitimate risks to specific individuals, rather than being presented in front of a relatively safe to engage with piece of media just as a way for someone to cover their own liability.
Tara Voelker, Senior Accessibility at Netflix Games, who inspired this script via a recent post on BlueSky, had a really good suggested starting point for how a developer might create this kind of specific list.
“I think a good place to start is literally labeling warnings that software like IRIS by EA or Harding have identified. If you have a warning, it’s going to be uncomfortable at best for SOMEONE.”
“(Of course you should remove failures)”
But I suppose this is where we get into the complexity of things. If something wasn’t listed in that initial set of examples that is a photosensitivity trigger for someone, and they experience negative health effects, could the fact that you specified some triggers but not the one they needed to know about be argued to be a lack of diligence resulting in injury?
Is the risk that someone engages with your media and has a negative experience that you failed to foresee worth keeping photosensitivity warnings generic and vague?
Harri, Accessibility Lead at Limit Break and a gamer who experiences photosensitivity triggered migraines, believes that when posed with that set of choices, specificity about potential risks is vital, and there are ways to safely communicate specifics without suggesting overall safety.
“I tend to put myself at risk every time I play games because, well, what else do I do? Not play any games or watch any films or TV ever again just in case?”
“For me, as long as a warning was along the lines of “this product could potentially trigger photosensitive conditions, here is a list of specifics that we know about, but we can’t guarantee there won’t be specific triggers elsewhere”, I think that would be totally understandable”.
“A link to a webpage with specific timings/locations where triggers occur would also be ideal, and the ability to toggle any functionality that causes those triggers!”
Information like this can by its very nature never be fully comprehensive, but I don’t think on balance that means we are better off instead choosing not to provide specific information at all.
I think about this a lot in regards to another area of video games often given vague boilerplate warning splash screens, content and mental health trigger warnings.
If we look at a game like 2021’s The Medium, we can see an example of how useless a boilerplate content warning disclaimer can be.
“[The Medium] touches on highly sensitive subjects with the intent of treating them seriously. Despite this, some players may find certain scenes and themes triggering”
Like, what does that actually do to help anyone?
Is it a story about being gaslit where the player will experience being told that they’re remembering things incorrectly? Will it be a game about experiencing abuse, or bullying, or suicide? Will it feature graphic bloody violence of a sexual nature? Literally any of those could be true, or false, and you’d have no way to know.
A generic warning like this on a horror game doesn’t do anything to help the people who might be personally impacted to know that in advance and make an educated choice about whether to play or not at that moment.
It tells you it’s a horror game, and not much else.
That said, Bloober Team is an example of a studio who have improved in this regard in the years since, specifically improving their content warnings screen on first boot of the 2024 Silent Hill 2 Remake by being considerably more specific.
Their latest title opens on a screen detailing that the game contains themes of domestic violence, emotional abuse, sexual assault, mental illness, child abuse, and other “mature themes”, before linking to mental health resources.
These content warnings are all pretty accurate, covering the major themes of the game, and are a dramatic improvement compared to Bloober Team’s prior output.
It’s not the greatest example of content warning application in video games, but I do think it’s a great recent example of how a studio being more specific in their content warnings screen makes a huge and noticeable difference.
Players have a lot more information available here from which to make educated choices before playing.
It’s an example of a warning that exists to benefit the user, not just to shield the creator from critique or liability.
Of note, 2021’s The Medium also featured a generic photosensitivity warning on the same screen as their boilerplate trigger warning. It’s part of why I think this is an interesting example. Blober Team updated one of those two in their follow up game, and I do think something similar could go a long way to helping make photosensitivity warnings more actively useful.
Charlotte Callister, Accessibility ERG Lead at Team Junkfish and gamer with Photosensitive Epilepsy, agrees that video games moving to a model of more specific photosensitivity warnings would be a positive direction for the industry to move toward.
“A lot of people defend the generic warning by saying “it’s better than nothing” as if we’re supposed to be grateful for the bare minimum. Whereas any indicator of what could be a potential trigger would help me to decide if the gamble of playing or watching something is worth it. It is continuously disappointing to look forward to new releases only to find them inaccessible”.
A big factor that generic boilerplate photosensitivity warnings also fail to account for is frequency of risk. Is the warning there because there’s a visual effect that appears every time your health gets low, or a commonly used attack that’s the source of the issue? That’s a far harder thing to avoid for a player than, for example, a flashing effect that occurs once in the game and then never again, during a non-interactive cutscene.
For many thar I spoke to, these kinds of specifics are the difference between whether a game is going to be playable or not, and boilerplate warnings simply do not give enough information to be useful in these cases.
While obviously it would be great if we progressed toward a world where these warnings were not needed, where video game design either inherently reduced potential photosensitivity triggers or provided accessibility settings to turn off potentially triggering effects, that still feels like it’s going to be an uphill climb for the industry.
Until then, warnings are important, and making sure that they’re specific and detailed reduces the risk of people being hurt while trying to have fun playing games in their free time.
I certainly don’t have all the answers about what a more specific photosensitivity warning system for video games would look like in practice, but from those I spoke with while working on this piece, the message was pretty clear. The system as it currently stands is inadequate, boilerplate warnings aren’t useful accessibility in practice, and increasing the level of specificity provided to players would help those impacted to actually make informed decisions about the games they play.
The video game industry at large, as well as other segments of the entertainment industry, need to take a step back and assess the way these generic warnings are being presented.
There needs to be an effort made to explore more specific forms of photosensitivity warnings, and to find ways to better assist those with photosensitive conditions to find video games that they can make an educated decision whether or not to take the risk to play.
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