Hi Damien, Smile. Oh, I never suggested you were loony, stupid, or any of those things. However, your point of thinking of a route as a list of instructions rather than a mental map is a great point I was trying to illistrate to Yohandy. Not all of us have the same skills and/or abilities which makes playing certain genres of games more difficult than others.
I, for example, have excellent sspacial orientation. I've been told by a number of o&m instructers that I have a very sharp mind when it comes to remembering routes etc in my head. The reason for that is I can picture a mental map of the route, remember everything in proper context, and can use that information to pretty much plot my course. I can even use that skill for quickly assessing where I am in a strange place I've never been in before. It is like I have a mental mapping feature in my head that draws and redraws the route in my head as I go. Understandably not everyone, such as yourself, is able to do this. Obviously, this skill is a huge advantage for me in accessible games. Any game like Sarah, Shades of Doom, Pacman Talks, Monkey Business, etc that requires figuring things out in a realistic spacial context is fairly easy for me. I simply form a map in my head of the level, as best that I can, and then begin moving around in that mental map until I figure it out. Once I played the game a couple of times I never get lost again. That gives me a huge advantage. Coming back to my point though there are games like Tomb Raider with far less accessibility than Shades of Doom or Sarah. Unlike Shades of Doom there is a third axis of movement up/down that makes the levels far more complex to navigate. There are ropes, ladders, staircases that have to be navigated to reach certain rooms above the one you are in. You really have to have extremely good spacial orientation to figure this out if you are blind because you will have to use your ears and memory to get around the levels. If you reduce it to a simple list of left, right, up, down, foward, and backward type things it just won't cut it. You litterally have to keep a memory of the map, the level's exact layout, in your head at all times. Cheers! On 2/7/11, Damien Pendleton <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Thomas, > In my experience I know some other blind people, who have been blind since > birth, who struggle with spacial awareness. I, for example, can learn a > route somewhere but find it hard to reverse the rules when finding my way > back. I can't conceptualise it as a map in my head, but rather have to > construct it as a list of instructions that I have to remember. > If I find that concept hard in real life, goodness knows how hard it will be > in a game where you don't physically have the landmarks there instead of as > sounds. Granted, I have some small mental difficulties that make it harder > for me than maybe other blind people, but I don't like to get into that any > more since I used to be ridiculed a lot for it. I'm not a loony though, > trust me. *Grin* > Regards, > Damien. > --- 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].
