Hi Dark, As usual, I respectfully disagree about some of that :)
Granted, it would be much much simpler to send electronic content in to a bunch of organizations and let them handle production. The same could be said for the print and Braille versions. Tbh, I've got nothing at all against the idea of trying that first to keep the cost to a minimum. It might work, and then everyone's a winner. However, what I suspect you'll find is that unless you've got a personal connection with someone at each organization or someone there who already digs audio games, it's fairly likely that the electronic copy will get filed away somewhere and not distributed to the people they have contact with beyond an initial run. Before audio paid the bills here, I worked for a few charities, and saw this happen many times. It might not turn out to be practical for the community to produce hard copy, but if there's any way to make it so, I think that hard copy would stand a higher chance of reaching relevant people, because reclaiming cupboard space is often a higher priority than keeping the network drives tidy in many offices nowadays. A cynical view perhaps, but like I said, I've seen it happen enough to believe it. Two thoughts spring to mind about a synth narration. Firstly, we're coming at this as people who use a computer for hours each day. Most of us probably have a favourite synth that we're comfortable with, and most of us have probably reached a point where we naturally tune out the robot voice and just process the words it's churning out. That's not the mindset of people when they're less familiar with computers. Having crunched the numbers in previous jobs that had audio versions of newsletters that were narrated by synths, I can tell you that the response was pretty low and the dissatisfaction was pretty high. I used to work next to a chap who had plenty of people on his books that would prefer to call him every month to find out what was happening rather than listen to the newsletter, because the synth did nothing for them. Synths haven't gotten markedly better since, and our target audience seems likely to be of a similar mindset, so I suspect that even though it'd be easier, it'd be something of a waste of time to produce an audio version that wasn't narrated by an actual human. Secondly, can you imagine the debate surrounding choosing which synth? *shudders* Regarding trailers or at least some content specific to audio not being necessary, that seems akin to saying "well ok, we'll put out a print version, but we're not doing any formatting specific to that version, nothing to draw peoples attention to the takeaway points if they're skim reading". It just doesn't make sense for people not to hear some actual audio gaming taking place given that they're absorbing information in the perfect context when they're listening to a CD. It's like the sound version of that old saying about a picture being worth a thousand words isn't it. I like your writing style a lot and am looking forward to seeing what you cook up, but think this is a situation where hearing some well thought out snippets of game play with explanations would do more to get newbies excited than reading about it, no matter how well the content is written. Scott --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. 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/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
