What do people here think about the link between a game design tool's accessibility and how representative or diverse the games they've created are? Reading Anna Anthropy's Rise of the Video Game Zinesters is making me wonder whether the accessibility of some tools (like Twine or designing tabletop games with word processors) is what contributes to Twine and tabletop games having more diverse play options than in games made using more commercial tools.

A lot of commercial tools are powerful, but have very bad UX... everybody I've ever talked to about 3D modelling software has complained about the tool they've been using (usually Blender), for instance. I think this barrier of entry, even if it's not necessarily intentional, helps reducing diversity. People need to not only have all the functional appendages necessary to operate the tool (which in the case of Blender is at least 8 human arms, 5 eyes and 1 elephant trunk for comfortable operation) but also the dedication to persist through that difficult phase when you're struggling with the interface and everything you create looks like garbage.

...or you could just skip out on all that and pick a different tool instead, which lets you do the thing you want with less obstacles. If you just wanna tell a story, you don't need to make high-definition 3D models in the first place, you could scan in hand-drawn (or foot-drawn / mouth-drawn) art and make a two-dimensional game. Or make everything from cubes since they're easy to model programmatically.  So a lot of people do that, rather than trying to climb up the motivation-breaking wall the tool put up.

I think effects like these just perpetuate existing patterns - as long as there's a great barrier of entry, people will only bother getting past it if they need to use the tool for the thing they want to make; tools are usually made for one specific thing; ergo, only people that want to do that specific thing will learn using that tool. The lower the barrier of entry, the greater the diversity. Coding itself is a pretty big barrier of entry (which is easy to forget when you've done it for a dozen years or so) so I'm not surprised RPG Maker (which has built-in systems for dialogue, panning the camera and so on) is still a popular choice for aspiring creators that want to tell a story in game form. And with tabletop games, you don't need to worry about syntax errors and formatting in the same way as you do with digital games, since humans have more forgiving parsers.