So what is the problem with action games? I think a big part of it, as with a lot of other design issues, is our heritage in the arcades, when we had to make money by forcing the player to lose frequently. Arcades are dead, but the arcade design mentality is still with us, and it's an outmoded approach.

Games are typically hard for one or both of two reasons: their user interface is awkward or complicated, or their core mechanics are set up to make the challenges difficult to overcome. Let's look at each of these in turn.

If you want to make an action game accessible, either to the handicapped or to the merely thumb-fingered like myself, think very carefully about the user interface, especially button assignments. I won't touch most fighting games with a bargepole - they require me to memorize a complex sequence of button-presses and to execute them rapidly within a very narrow time window. That might be worth it if I got a big bang out of beating people up, but I've never found fisticuffs rewarding in any case. I prefer shooting them with powerful long-range weapons.

One thing I hate about a lot of action games is that if you miss a jump and fall down in a canyon (assuming you survive), you have to hike all the way back up to the top, typically repeating several more jumps along the way, before you can try again. Once again, that just punishes the player who's not very good, without providing any compensating benefit to players who are good.

This brings up the issue of landscape design. While we can easily adjust hit points, powerups, enemies, and a large number of other internal variables to make a game easier, we typically supply only one landscape. But the landscape is often the biggest problem. It's the source of the infamous Twinkie Denial Condition "You must stand on exactly the right pixel in order to succeed at this jump." Long sequences of jumps that must be executed perfectly, and even worse, under time pressure, really penalize the poor player.

But there are even workarounds in landscape design. Offer two routes, an easy one and a hard one. Give extra rewards for taking the more difficult route, but don't actively penalize the player for not taking it. On the higher difficulty settings, lock off the easy route; that's fair, because the player chose that setting.

Now, you may be thinking, "Who cares about disabled players? Who cares about players who suck? Why should I mollycoddle people I can't respect as gamers?" If that's your attitude, you're a bad game designer - you're basing your design decisions on your own abilities as a player rather than a desire to entertain other players.