Good response, exactly the sort of push back I wanted to get from my strong premise.
I wasn't aware of Chee's premise; interesting and it makes sense given the nature of the game. I would agree with you that we should be seeking the actual heart of a given genre of games rather than seeking to specifically copy a particular game's features. But there is a large and vocal subset of our community that remembers playing video games and/or has found work-arounds to play these games without vision who advocate the creation of audio translations of these experiences, rather than seeking to extract the central part of playing those games, i.e. forcing the player to make particular choices at a particular time scale that have effects on the game world. There have been times when I would have thought, based on the list and other for a that we wanted our developers to recreate Call of Duty, rather than finding the choices and time scale at the heart of that game and creating something that preserves those factors while working with the UI limitations that we have. I wanted to point out the limitations of that view. It's true that we've seen some beginnings along these lines. Aprone has put forward games that represent experimental forays into the FPS and resource allocation sort of games with Swamp and Castaways. Time of Conflict is also headed this direction to some extent and provides some neat concepts for managing massive amounts of information that make larger military simulations possible. We have the beginnings of good vehicle combat games in GMA Tank Commander, Lone Wolf and I suppose 3D Velocity, though that one never caught my interest, even though I have actually flown aircraft and would love a good pilot sim. I'd like to see efforts of this sort continue, with an emphasis on solving the problems of conveying the experience abstraction rather than fussing over details of making this or that game conform more to a mainstream paradigm. For the reasons I discussed, I do think that seeking to replicate the visual detail in an audio form has limitations imposed by physiology. Now, I think it entirely possible that one could create an artificial audio environment that translated visual cues into some kind of audio symbology that, given sufficient training, one could learn to use in ways much more akin to vision than normal representational hearing, and perhaps that's a path to follow in game development, as well as orientation, mobility or other tasks currently closed to those with nonfunctional vision. I certainly don't have the cognitive science, hardware engineering or marketing chops to bring such devices or systems to a marketable product, but I'd surely love to be in on designing a sound scheme and experimenting to see how far one could take it. But I digress, as I suspect that most people wouldn't be willing to spend tens or hundreds of hours rewiring their brains to process audio in a more visual fashion, especially for a game. I'm hoping some game devs will chime in here. Chris Bartlett -----Original Message----- From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of dark Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2013 6:58 PM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind. Hi Chris. This was an interesting discussion to read, and I agree in part, it is trivially true that if all human sensoary input or even the approximation of those senses were equally functional via sound as opposed to vision, blindness would be not be a disability. However, I disagree that attempting to represent information and game concepts is a chimera or a less than crytical attempt, simply because there is far more to games than just the graphics. Player interaction, apprehention of game factors, construction of explorable environments etc. I myself have been fully able (and still am aable), to play a number of visual games with if not quite the same ease as a sighted person (especially as regards text), at least with enough to success to appreciate what aspects of those games made them unique. Other genres such as fps have been closed to me. When I started playing audio games with shades of doom, what convinced me that the idea of games via sound was a worth while exercise was the fact that shades, for all it might not be up to the same level of information or play speed as a sighted game, had the same factors which made a game like original doom a good example of the fps genre. Exploration, atmosphere, compelling story, and semi tactical combat. I would myself suggest it is these elements and how the inofrmation processing qualities of sound can be made to enhance these elements which should be the focus of game developers when creating an audio version of a visual game, hence the clock and map elements in castaways, the overview and the ned to play reactively which ultimately matter far more to the stratogy game than whether you see everything on the map, have an obscuring fog of war etc. So, before developing audio mine craft, before even deciding how to represent information the question should be "what is valuable in the experience of mine craft and how should this be bought to an audio game" To take your roguelike example, I've been able to myself play Angband (and some varients there of), through a combination of big viewable tyles and readable text with supernova. Yes, I agree that despite a huge range of factors presenting the information inherent in angband, everything about each level to a blind player would not produce something which was easy to play. However then we have kerkerkruip. Though thus far a shorter roguelike, (far shorter than kerkerkruip), Kerkerkruip replicates random monsters, tactical combat against multiple enemies, one time character death, and many other staples of a roguelike but in the utterly accessible medium of a text game. In the same way, Entombed in it's original concept was not merely turn based combat but was planned to have as much of the environmental traps, chests, even food as a game like angband (sadly these got lost in developement though if jason ever makes an Entombed Ii we might see them). This is the sort of question I'd personally ask of developers. As regards uses of sound, welll to be honest I'd myself argue this is already being done by games like Papasangre, where the atmosphere and challenge is directly related to sound, indeed when i showed a sighted friend of mine who is a huge doom series fan Shades he stated Shades was if anything harder and more terrifying than graphical doom because! of the lack of sound and, the need to imagine the appearence of monsters and rely on what were to my sighted friend unfamiliar senses. So, this is in some sense already being done. I personally would not be as much a fan of games written expressly about blind super heroes or blind martial artists, but that objection is more cultural than anything else since it smacks of elitism, and also can produce somewhat condescending sounding games. I also do confess Che martin's rail racer, set in a day of the trifids style future where most of the world's population is blind so cyber motor racing happens on rail tracks made me very much rethink my view on games which show an exclusively "blind" experience, since Rr is a really well put together and awsome game with great mechanics which preserves everything good a racing game should! have but utilizes the "blindness" exploration of the plot to allow the need for sound kews for the action. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
