Hi Eleanor.
I will try my best as regards a review, and see what I can get done, since
as there isn't currently a demo version of the games it might be a good
thing to have especially for gamebook fans.
As to kim's game, snowflake and orchestra, I did indeed have the easy button
off (in fact I played the games through once on easy then once without),
however I believe the difficulty issue hear is a direct result of access in
games and differences in auditory vs visual memory.
In kim's game playing graphically, a person is required to memorize the
pictures of objects, and then pick out those objects from a set of pictures.
This task therefore requires a person to a, scan and identify visually the
existing pictures and memorize them, and B, then extrapolate from those
memories to seeing those pictures in another context, being that the
position and location of the original pictures would change.
In making the game accessible however, the rules of the game also change
simply by virtue of the differences betwene the processing of visual or
aural information, and it is due to that informational change that the
difficulty of the game also changes, since rather than memorizing the
position, location and features of a given set of pictures a person is
simply comparing a couple of sets of words, instantly identifyable words,
and only the presence or absense of those words in a list becomes relevant.
This task could! be a difficult one, but not given the amount of time which
a person has to reread the list for purposes of memorization in the game
(even at it's shortest it allows for multiple rereads), and not given the
number of objects required to memorize which, while probably a good few when
looked at visually, aren't quite as many when simply on a list of words,
even more especially because many visually impared people have a pretty good
aural memory anyway simply by virtue of a lack of access to quick writing
materials and the need to remember phone numbers and the like.
this was rather similar to a recent alteration I had in a music exam I took
last week. instead of being given a peace of written music and asked to
sing, I was played a four bar tune on the piano and asked to sing the
trebble part. Instead of, as would happen with the sight reading test,
having constant access to the music and time to studdy it, I got the peace
played three times and then had to sing from memory. had the test been
absolutely equal, so that just as at any time a sighted person could look at
their present music I could sing a couple of notes then ask the pianist to
play the rest, it would've not been a reasonable test, since it needed to
test not my ability to sing with infinite access to the score as a person
reading music would have, but my ability to sing from meory being as I learn
all my music by ear.
therefore, While I really like the access changes, I do think perhaps either
some extra modes need to be included to up the challenge of the games to vi
players, or some extra games with similar rules but taking into account the
fact that they do not work on pictures need to be devised.
changes could include the following:
1: replace all pictures with sounds and remove the identifying names of
objects spoken by the screen reader. Being as sounds are harder to instantly
identify and less familiar to the player than words which are instantly
matched with concepts, this preserves the identifying part of the game
needed when played visually.
2: instead of such a long studdy period, limit the number of times a player
can have the list of objects to memorize read by the game voice, say start
with five, then at level 3 go down to four, level 5 down to three, level 7
down to two.
3: have a varient of the game which actually! uses words drawn from a very
long database, rather than a finite set of objects depicted by pictures. By
having far more variation in each puzzle, a player would need to retrain
their memory each time and could no longer look for specific familiar
objects.
4: simply increase the challenge ad infinitum, with more objects and less
time, rather than finishing at round ten, or incert some harder difficulty
modes. Though a simpler solution, I'm slightly less inclined towards this
one since it does strike me as rather giving an unfair advantage to vi
players.
5: instead of listing objects, create a short parza engine to insert the
list of objects into a short paragraph with the ability to vary, eg "you are
facing a fine oak table upon which there is an x, next to an x, with an x in
the corner" or "you open the doors to the cabinet inside which is an x and
an x, and on a small table next to it there is an x"
this increases the amount of information a person needs to take in at once,
since they need to sort the relevant peaces of information from the
background musch as someone looking at the pictorial list needs to remember
only the presence of the objects not their position. This would make the
task a good bit harder.
Hope some of these crazy ideas make sense. I actually do! rather enjoy the
tyle based games, i was just a little disappointed that they were so easy,
(I ot a perfect score in all three games on my second go), but this is I
think a consequence of their accessible convertion and the slightly
different challenge they present, rather than any sort of actual problem
with the games themselves.
all the best,
Dark.
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