Abstract
This executive summary addresses the Capstone Project and the STS Research Paper conducted in Chris Cheng’s graduating year. These projects represent parts of the learning experiences gained going through UVA’s undergraduate CS engineering program. The Capstone Project reflects on technical learnings and realizations, in this case reflecting on how certain courses in CS could be more effectively taught. The STS Research Paper regards ethical concerns in the area of video game accessibility. Although these projects are separated in their domains, they both concern the effective presentation of information to as many people as possible. Effectively teaching a course allows for the maximum number of students to substantially learn the material, and strong game accessibility options allows the widest range of players to experience the game.
The Capstone Project addresses the difficulty of teaching computer science, especially due to the balance between giving answers to students vs letting the students problem-solve on their own. The project proposes that courses should lean more towards letting students problem-solve with less rigid guidelines given to them. There are many algorithms taught in the class, but oftentimes they are explained in full without an opportunity for the student to reason through the problem. The expected outcome of this change is that the course may become more difficult to teach but will become more fulfilling for students who prefer to learn in a different way. This work could be expanded by testing a less guided, optional version of algorithms courses. These changes could also yield interesting results in math education and other problem-solving classes.
The STS Research Paper poses the research question: “How do developers incorporate suitable accessibility considerations in their game while weighing how the core experience may be affected by certain accessibility features?” The paper posits that developers accommodate for accessibility through a wide range of methods, each of which addresses a different aspect of the player experience and achieves inclusion to varying degrees of completeness. These methods range from in-game options such as adjustable difficulty and customizable subtitles, to entirely separate game modes, to hardware solutions crafted by third-party organizations outside the development studio. What unifies all of these approaches is that every accessibility accommodation implies a decision about what the game fundamentally is. As the field has grown, that tension has proven stubborn to easy resolution, making game accessibility less a collection of engineering problems to be solved and more a set of wicked problems: complex, contested, and deeply embedded in cultural assumptions about who games are for and what playing them should feel like. At the same time, a general lack of accessibility options persists across many genres, and competitive games in particular have been slow to adopt meaningful accommodations. Developer resources are constrained, and accessibility features are frequently treated as a last priority rather than a core design concern. The result is an industry where individual studios make ad hoc decisions about accessibility in relative isolation, guided by incomplete standards and uneven community pressure, while disabled players and advocacy organizations work around the margins to fill the gaps that published games leave behind.
Working on both the Capstone Project and the STS Research Paper simultaneously offered a perspective on software development and human-centered design that neither project could have provided on its own. The most significant insight from this dual engagement is an appreciation for the complexity of the people that software serves. It is easy in an engineering program to become absorbed in the technical dimensions of a problem. But both projects, approached together, served as a consistent reminder that the end product of engineering work is not the software itself; it is the experience of the person using it. This principle cuts across both technical work and ethical analysis in a technological context: good engineering is human-centered engineering. It is easy to get lost in the craft of software, but the discipline only fulfills its purpose when it remains oriented toward the people it is meant to help. Working on both projects at once made that orientation feel less abstract and more tangible in the work done. Targeted questions like “who is this for?” and “does this actually work for them?” became regular in designing the projects throughout the year, and carrying those questions into future work is the most durable outcome of the thesis experience.
