Hi everyone, As you know there has been a lot of discussion recently about mainstream games vs accessible audio games. That got me thinking in a new direction, and a topic I'd like to discuss as an audio game developer. Basically, the direction I want to stear discussion towards is converting strictly visual content into audio, spoken feedback, or some other accessible content.
For example, I think all of you know by now I'm a pretty major history buff, and I have read quite a bit on ancient mythology as well. As a result many of the games I'd like to write will have gods, goddesses, and ancient creatures from mythology. However, many of these things look very strange visually. Let's take a few of the Egyptian gods and goddesses as a quick example. As is pretty common in ancient mythology and religion they are half-man half-animal creatures. Anubis, one of the Egyptian death gods, has the body of a man but the head of a jackle. Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and medicine, had the body of a man and the head of an ibis. The all important god, Horus, had the body of a man but the head of a falcon. All of this is fine and dandy if you can see it, but descriptions mean little if you can't. What I mean is if you happen to be playing some sort of mainstream game where Egyptian creatures are in it, perhaps a game based on Stargate SG1, a sighted person could instantly see what Anubis, Thoth, Hathor, Horus, etc looks like and it looks pretty cool. Unfortunately, someone who is blind may not have any idea or clue what these creatures look like. If they are not really up on Egyptian mythology and religion they might not even know as much as I described above. The problem is you can't just add some sounds to a game and say this is Horus, Thoth, Hathor, Ra, whatever and accurately give someone an instant idea what that creature looks like. A practical example of what I mean in Mysteries of the Ancients beta 17 I added a new creature, the Lamia, to level 1. I got quite a number of questions asking me straight out, "what the heck is a Lamia?" Which brings me to the point. I'd like to gather some suggestions, ideas really, how you guys think I can improve my games to more accurately describe or assist you with the more visual aspects of the creatures and enemies you might encounter in the games. Yeah, i certainly can add a section to the manuals giving a verbal description of each of the enemies in the game, which I'm doing now, but I think there is more that can be done. What do you guys think? Another related issue is accurately describing the backgroun seenary. For example, Michael and I were discussing on list how great the panaramic seenary was in Tomb Raider. That's something that just doesn't quite get transfered well to an audio format. Oh, if you want to do a text adventure you can describe everything down to the last detail if you want to, but in audio based action games developers just stick in a bunch of sounds and forget it. That leaves me personally feeling like something essential is left out. For example, in a mainstream vidio game there is all kinds of non-essential stuff to look at. Pictures on the walls, different colored rooms, stone statues, maybe a window, and things like that. All of this is purely for the player's visual enjoyment but very lacking in audio games. To give you a practical example let's take a level from Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness. On level 3 Lara Croft has to visit Von Croy's friend who happens to have a copy of his diary explaining how to find the missing paintings. One way to get it is to try and speak to her, and ask for it outright. Another is to sneek into the apartment and steel it. Which is the setting I'd like to present to you hear. Now, naturally there are various things in the apartment you would normally fined in anyone's apartment. Desk, chairs, drawers, a telephone, silverware, etc. All of this is something you can see, but there is no exact sound you can slap on some of these houshold items. Some of the items you can be a little inventive with such as record the sound of silverware clinking together to indicate there is silverware nearby. However, for furnature items such as a desk, chairs, table, etc that's quite a bit more abstract. There really isn't any sound that works for those items. Of course, some developers have made do with having a voice speaking the name of the item like "chair, chair, chair" over and over again, but not only is that distracting it is a bit weird. Another way to handle this is to have no sound associated with that item, and use the view command to find it. That makes it difficult to find the desk, for example, if you have to constantly have to keep using the look command to locate it. Very problematic as you can see. Finally, something else lacking is a way to look at or examine things you can hear. For example, in Troopenum I can hear all the various ships. Yeah, i can hear them, but somebody tell me what they look like. What shape are they? What color are they? How big is this or that ship? I hope nobody takes offense, none is intended hear, but it just seams to me that most VI game developers often overlook the power of description. They often just have a sound descriptions menu saying this ship x and it sounds like this. That's great for learning the game sounds, but it doesn't give me a mental picture of the alien, spaceship, monster, weapon, etc the sound is supposed to b associated with. I don't know if this is because I once had sight and lost it, but I find detailed descriptions in games highly important to me personally. In fact, over the past few months I have been playing lots of text adventures on my laptop. One big reason is that is the most common accessible games for the Linux operating system. The other reason is I really enjoy the degree of detail you get from using a look command. Now, that I've gotten use to that kind of feedback It just started to dawn on me that audio games totally lack this basic feature, and there really isn't a really good reason why we don't have something like that. It seams to me the only way to sort of resolve this problem is to have some kind of look command that describes everything in the game. As I mentioned earlier if you are playing a text adventure written in Adrift, Inform, etc the look command will give you a great deal of informationat once. However, this also would add a substantial amount of work to any audio game, because essentially the developer is trying to describe everything in the game that a sighted gamer could just see. So my question to you is how important is a more descriptive look/view command to you personally? Would you like to have more descriptive messages? Since this is an open topic I'd like to hear your views, suggestions, and opinions how we as a community can begin conveying completely visual content in an accessible format. I'd like to draft some general guidelines or standards perhaps to really give games a little more depth. I'd also like to know if this is something that concerns several blind gamers, or just a few like myself who lost his/her sight later in life and just want something more like the visual eye candy etc. Thanks. --- 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.