Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
Well as far as metroid like music is concerned, it might be worth asking around on retro type sites. I know some of the fan made turrican levels (a rare case where the copywrite owners gave permission for all elements of a game to be used), have had astounding music. There is even the unfortunately named Metroidican, and now Metroidican mission x both of which have astoundingly good scores which are a mix of styles between Metroid and Turrican, indeed I personally think some of the remixes of super metroid themes which Cjo, the composer has done are superior to things found in the prime games. As usual though, it's the game and programming first, since something the size of even original metroid would take a great deal of work and design, especially in the 2D vertical elements. 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.
Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
Hi Charles: I think you just brought up a very important point when it comes to creating audio games and converting certain games into audio games. A lot of people like yourself have never had a chance to play certain games, and would like to know what they missed out on. Montezuma's Revenge is as good as any to use as an example here. The original game came out in 1984, and I am told was inspired by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It was a fairly popular game for its day, and was one of the first really good side-scrollers for the Atari 2600 platform. Even today the game has remarkably good game play, and was more about avoiding monsters rather than killing them. I'm not at all surprised someone like yourself would be slightly curious what the game was like. That is in fact why I decided to take over the project myself when James North got rid of it. I had grown up with that game, played it many times as a kid, and loved it. The idea of an accessible version appealed to me as much as someone like yourself. It was a decent game that could easily be converted to an audio only format, and would give me a chance to play an old classic I grew up with. I get where Christopher is heading with his reasoning, and it is fine as far as it goes. Unfortunately, one of the motivating factors why I spent time developing a game engine, why I started USA Games, etc is I grew up playing many games in the 80's and 90's and can no longer play them any more due to going blind. I still want to play them and if I want to I have to rewrite them, and make them accessible. If I could only create new games, create something original, that would be okay but would not have the same personal motivating factors as writing something I really enjoyed from my childhood and early teens. Cheers! On 12/31/13, Charles Rivard wee1s...@fidnet.com wrote: One thing that attracted me to Montezuma's Revenge, originally begun by James North, was the hope of playing what sighted gamers had played, in an audio version. It didn't work out as originally planned, but I'm still glad that Thomas Ward took over the project. Some people wouldn't want audioized, is that a word?, renditions of games for the sighted, but I would like them. The main roadblock, or at least one of them, is copyright. --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
Hi chris. Well I'm less certan on the representative qualities of sound since as you know audio and visual processing are handled diferently anyway and past experiments have usually resulted in something with stoo much information that is hard to interpret, rather than something which is of practical bennifit, indeed the best informational aides I've sseen have been those that extend existing sensory input, such as ultra sonic canes. Getting aay from cognitive science however and back to games, while I fully agree that wanting to represent something like Mortal combat or call of duty for those who've muddled through and got a partial experience with sound is not a good idea, at the same time there is validity in examining why specific genres of games and redesigning accordingly. As one example, I have for years played exploration platformers like Turrican, Metroid and mega man, yet it somewhat irritates me that the closest we have come to such things in audio are 1D only, and that many peopel expressly do not like side scrollers when in effect they have not seen a truly 2D side scrolling game. While something like metroid might be pushing it, i don't believe the barrier of showing vertical movement is quite as absolute as people seem to think, and working on ways of that sort of representation can only be helpful, just as David greenwood worked on ways to easily represent large scale 2D map information in Time of Conflict. Btw, If you haven't tried Zero site yet i'd recommend trying that. It is different to 3D velocity, though is also an audio flight sim, however features some interesting changes like randomly occurring enemies. 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.
Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
Well Charlse, copywrite is only an issue if you want a game with the same characters, as indeed occurred with the huge montizumas return mess. For example, lets say a developer wanted to make an audio beatemup like mortal combat. Well, it'd be possible to create a story and characters and have a martial arts tournament, even have demons, trans dimentional empires and the like, but just call it something different, indeed for me I'd personally prefer! a game which featured a new and different story to a game which just played like a copy of what I'd seen before. 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.
Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
Hi Dark, I too dislike 1D side scrollers and after trying a few I was put off of trying more. Because of that I may not have a good concept of which games actually stretch that boundary and become more 2D. Fortunately I finally tried bokurano daiboukenn 3 yesterday and was quite impressed. It is a fully 2D platformer. Your character is one space tall and can jump 3 spaces higher than himself. The jumps seem somewhat analog since if you want to jump onto a high ledge that has a gap underneath it you must make sure to move to the right at the middle of your jump rather than right after you jump. While I think it is still far more difficult than playing a mainstream platformer with vision it does work reasonably well. I think there are a few more improvements that could be made, but the author has done a good job and any developer wanting to experiment in this area should try BK3 first to see how the author has solved some of the problems so they don't go re-inventing the wheel. I know you're not excited about going through the setup required to play Japanese games. I was not either, which is why it took me 4 and a half months since Bladestorm360's Guide to playing Japanese games and Clement Chou's earlier guide before I finally got setup. I ran into 2 hitches during setup which were quite frustrating. The first was getting the Japanese keyboard installed because NVDA reported a treeview item as a list view item and so I did not realize I had to expand it to get down to the actual check box items. You might not hit the same issue since we are running different versions of Windows and different screen readers. The second was because BK3 did not output to the clipboard by default and I had to use control C to grab the Japanese text of the screen before using instant translate to convert it to English. Once I got BK3 copying it's output to the clipboard the process became much more smooth. I recommend finding some time to devote to getting through the Japanese game setup process. If you're not ready to do that yet then you should try a game called 2D Platformer located here: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?id=12126 2DP uses the English language and copies many of the game mechanics of BK3. It is more of a game prototype at this stage though, demonstrating the movement mechanics, where BK3 is a completed game with hazards, enemies, items, gold coins, experience, character levels, and stat growth. But for me it was a teaser to get me to finally setup to play Japanese games. Anyway, I still think platformers have lots of room for improvement, but it is nice to see games stretching the bounds. Ian Reed Try my free games at http://BlindAudioGames.com On 1/1/2014 5:52 AM, dark wrote: Hi chris. Well I'm less certan on the representative qualities of sound since as you know audio and visual processing are handled diferently anyway and past experiments have usually resulted in something with stoo much information that is hard to interpret, rather than something which is of practical bennifit, indeed the best informational aides I've sseen have been those that extend existing sensory input, such as ultra sonic canes. Getting aay from cognitive science however and back to games, while I fully agree that wanting to represent something like Mortal combat or call of duty for those who've muddled through and got a partial experience with sound is not a good idea, at the same time there is validity in examining why specific genres of games and redesigning accordingly. As one example, I have for years played exploration platformers like Turrican, Metroid and mega man, yet it somewhat irritates me that the closest we have come to such things in audio are 1D only, and that many peopel expressly do not like side scrollers when in effect they have not seen a truly 2D side scrolling game. While something like metroid might be pushing it, i don't believe the barrier of showing vertical movement is quite as absolute as people seem to think, and working on ways of that sort of representation can only be helpful, just as David greenwood worked on ways to easily represent large scale 2D map information in Time of Conflict. Btw, If you haven't tried Zero site yet i'd recommend trying that. It is different to 3D velocity, though is also an audio flight sim, however features some interesting changes like randomly occurring enemies. 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
Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
Ah, but what about for those who have never seen it before and those who would like to again, in a format that those who are now blind can play? --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! - Original Message - From: dark d...@xgam.org To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, January 01, 2014 6:54 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation,was: MindCraft for the blind. Well Charlse, copywrite is only an issue if you want a game with the same characters, as indeed occurred with the huge montizumas return mess. For example, lets say a developer wanted to make an audio beatemup like mortal combat. Well, it'd be possible to create a story and characters and have a martial arts tournament, even have demons, trans dimentional empires and the like, but just call it something different, indeed for me I'd personally prefer! a game which featured a new and different story to a game which just played like a copy of what I'd seen before. 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.
Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
Hi Charlse. That is true, and I must admit I'd love to play something like final fantasy or dark souls myself, or to show people who haven't had the chance to play them the true fun that can be had metroid hunting on Planet Zeebs, however the problem is the fat cats and their stupid laws, and yes, the way copywrite is currently treated is stupid, indeed I think John Swift, generally held to be the originator of the modern concept of copywrite since gullivers' travels was ruthlessly plagerised would be quite appauled to see where things are at this point. However there is another side to the coin. why should people be bound to characters and concepts reamed up by others rather than thinking up their own? Indeed in the world of independent games there are just as strong characters and concepts as in the world of mainstream games, since after all creative story writing isn't just the prerogative of big companies and that is one area where an ameter can do as well as a professional. That is another reason why i'd love to see some creative story telling with game concepts, since that! doesn't require anything more than good imagination and writing, and at worst some actors and a narrator. 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.
Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
For the gamer who has been blind since birth who has never played a very popular game of even the early eighties, I'm all in favor of an audio remake. I'm also in favor of new ideas. To anyone who has never played chess, although the game has been around for centuries, it is a new experience, so I disagree with anyone who refuses to play a game that they consider as old. I have heard this thought voiced on this list by some gamers, and they are only shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring games that would be new to them, even though they have been around the sighted gaming community for ages. I'm not saying that your are one of those, though. And I still refuse to beware the Grue! --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! - Original Message - From: dark d...@xgam.org To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, January 01, 2014 2:20 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation,was: MindCraft for the blind. Hi Charlse. That is true, and I must admit I'd love to play something like final fantasy or dark souls myself, or to show people who haven't had the chance to play them the true fun that can be had metroid hunting on Planet Zeebs, however the problem is the fat cats and their stupid laws, and yes, the way copywrite is currently treated is stupid, indeed I think John Swift, generally held to be the originator of the modern concept of copywrite since gullivers' travels was ruthlessly plagerised would be quite appauled to see where things are at this point. However there is another side to the coin. why should people be bound to characters and concepts reamed up by others rather than thinking up their own? Indeed in the world of independent games there are just as strong characters and concepts as in the world of mainstream games, since after all creative story writing isn't just the prerogative of big companies and that is one area where an ameter can do as well as a professional. That is another reason why i'd love to see some creative story telling with game concepts, since that! doesn't require anything more than good imagination and writing, and at worst some actors and a narrator. 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.
Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
I agree. To be honest since they have not been played I do feel that some of the retro games that were played by sighted should try to have as retro a feel as they can. a remake is good but then its a remake. Even if there was a free crappy retro that came with the remake or whatever I wouldn't mind. We started with text then we went straight to the sound card basically. I have never played that many games that used the pc speaker my self. At 04:22 PM 1/1/2014, you wrote: One thing that attracted me to Montezuma's Revenge, originally begun by James North, was the hope of playing what sighted gamers had played, in an audio version. It didn't work out as originally planned, but I'm still glad that Thomas Ward took over the project. Some people wouldn't want audioized, is that a word?, renditions of games for the sighted, but I would like them. The main roadblock, or at least one of them, is copyright. --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! - Original Message - From: Christopher Bartlett atouchofrevere...@gmail.com To: 'Gamers Discussion list' gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2013 8:44 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation,was: MindCraft for the blind. 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
Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
Hi Shaun: Well, I don't know about that. Rewriting a retro game is fine, but I don't necessarily agree with going to the extreme of trying to make everything as retro as possible. Technology has drastically improved to the point we have better graphics, better sounds, better music, and so on. Improving those elements in a retro remake of an old classic would only enhance the game not detract from it. To give you an example in the original Montezuma's Revenge when Panama Joe walked or ran it made a boop, boop, boop sound which really doesn't convey any information to the player at all as to what he is walking on. In the Alchemy/USA Games version we used realistic sounds for dirt, ladders, ledges, sand, etc to convey to the gamer exactly the type of surface being walked on. So that is one of many examples where going too retro is actually a pretty major detraction from the remake. As for the PC speaker you aren't missing much. I played a number of Dos games when I was sighted that used the PC speaker, and comparatively speaking it was nothing to write home about. Most of the sounds were beeps, boops, and bleeps. In short, not very realistic at all, and pretty inaccessible from a blindness perspective. Cheers! On 1/1/14, shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com wrote: I agree. To be honest since they have not been played I do feel that some of the retro games that were played by sighted should try to have as retro a feel as they can. a remake is good but then its a remake. Even if there was a free crappy retro that came with the remake or whatever I wouldn't mind. We started with text then we went straight to the sound card basically. I have never played that many games that used the pc speaker my self. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
Hi charlse. As you imagine I do agree just because a game is old doesn't mean it can't be fun, and accessible computer games have introduced me to several games I'd not played before which have been around for a long time such as backgammon, eucre or spades toname a few. The issue for me however is that many computer games aren't as elemental as say backgammon, and don't require their names and concepts to work, or even the level design. For example, lets say I made an audio game about someone hunting aliens on a mazelike alien planet, collecting different weapons which gave them access to different parts of the game. I wouldn't have! to call it metroid, or use Samus, ridly or other metroid characters. yes, I freely agree that having audio gamers introduced to the world of metroid would be awsome and I'd support any project, but given that nintendo would stamp on such a remake (they have with even indi games in the past), I don't really see the need at this point, particularly since it would be possible to take the gameplay elements that made metroid special and do them with different characters. In one sense this could also be to audio games advantage, since if not using traditional weapons for metroid, it would be possible to use weaponry and concepts that took advantage of audio medium. For instance, lets say you could find an item which would create a different stepping sound when you encountered a section of floor which you could jump up and shoot through to get to new areas below you. metroid never had such a device, indeed the closest thing it had, the x ray scope was pretty useless, but an audio game set in a similar space environment could use the audio information there to create some different puzzles and require the player to do things like make sure she/he steps on every ledge in the room and walks across to check there isn't a secret passage there. that would be absolutely true to the style of metroid, where hunting carefully for secrets made a huage part of the game, but would employ sound to do so in a unique way. As I said I'm certainly not against audio remakes, but I would love to see an audio game developer use game concepts and think up their own setting, similarly to the way Draconis created dynaman by having packman in a slightly different setting with different shaped grids and an electricity theme, and also use the audio for things like scanning for electrons. Indeed, Packman is a great example since we have both an audio remake in the form of packman talks which is pretty faithful to the original (though imho more fun in first person), and an enhanced game with similar concepts but different gameplay and basic characters. 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.
Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
Exactly Dark. We'd be unlikely to get away with making a straight Metroid title in audio, which was why a few years back I was and amd still am toying with the idea of a game in the style of Metroid but with an original story and character. The trouble might be in finding someone familiar enoug with the atmospheric music of the Metroid series who could compose a score with a similar feel. They're coming to take me away, ha-haaa! -Original Message- From: dark Sent: Wednesday, January 01, 2014 6:27 PM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation,was: MindCraft for the blind. Hi charlse. As you imagine I do agree just because a game is old doesn't mean it can't be fun, and accessible computer games have introduced me to several games I'd not played before which have been around for a long time such as backgammon, eucre or spades toname a few. The issue for me however is that many computer games aren't as elemental as say backgammon, and don't require their names and concepts to work, or even the level design. For example, lets say I made an audio game about someone hunting aliens on a mazelike alien planet, collecting different weapons which gave them access to different parts of the game. I wouldn't have! to call it metroid, or use Samus, ridly or other metroid characters. yes, I freely agree that having audio gamers introduced to the world of metroid would be awsome and I'd support any project, but given that nintendo would stamp on such a remake (they have with even indi games in the past), I don't really see the need at this point, particularly since it would be possible to take the gameplay elements that made metroid special and do them with different characters. In one sense this could also be to audio games advantage, since if not using traditional weapons for metroid, it would be possible to use weaponry and concepts that took advantage of audio medium. For instance, lets say you could find an item which would create a different stepping sound when you encountered a section of floor which you could jump up and shoot through to get to new areas below you. metroid never had such a device, indeed the closest thing it had, the x ray scope was pretty useless, but an audio game set in a similar space environment could use the audio information there to create some different puzzles and require the player to do things like make sure she/he steps on every ledge in the room and walks across to check there isn't a secret passage there. that would be absolutely true to the style of metroid, where hunting carefully for secrets made a huage part of the game, but would employ sound to do so in a unique way. As I said I'm certainly not against audio remakes, but I would love to see an audio game developer use game concepts and think up their own setting, similarly to the way Draconis created dynaman by having packman in a slightly different setting with different shaped grids and an electricity theme, and also use the audio for things like scanning for electrons. Indeed, Packman is a great example since we have both an audio remake in the form of packman talks which is pretty faithful to the original (though imho more fun in first person), and an enhanced game with similar concepts but different gameplay and basic characters. 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.
[Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
It's actually more complicated even than that. The notion of recreating in an audio medium games that are primarily visual is a tempting chimera that has, I feel, been one force behind the relative stagnation of the audio games world. The reasons for this make a lot of sense; people who grew up playing conventional video games are often more passionate than folk who never had that experience, which being so, makes the idea of recreating those games from the past seem more compelling than our actual experience shows that it is. In the following discussion, I'm intentionally ignoring the problems of expense and size of development shops we've typically seen, as well as markets. These factors are relevant to the general problem of game development, but not to the discussion I'm having below. Yes, I know about them and understand their effects on what we've seen, but they obscure what is for me a more basic problem. Before I wander off on what is to me a more interesting tangent, let me just suggest that Castaways is probably a better or at least more comparable game than Revelation for Mine Craft. Revelation is more like the mobile game Alchemy. So why do I call the recreation of visual games in an audio form a chimera? Because we haven't yet cracked the problem of how to convey visual information in an audio context. Consider the following: When a sighted person processes visual information, they are processing shape, relative size, lighting, color, motion, perspective, relative position and many other data over a time scale that is on the order of tenths to hundreds of a second. All this processing is parallel, through many different information channels if you will. Any of these data may be relevant to figuring out a situation, route planning, tactics choice or strategic considerations. Now compare this with sound. First of all, sound processing is slower physiologically, allowing for less parallelism in how our brains deal with sound sources. Localization is less precise than a visual person gets from locating an object with her eyes. The problem of determining distance to objects is more complex; there are more visual cues to distinguish large objects far away vs. small objects close at hand. There is no audio equivalent of horizon, perspective or shading that provide the visual clues to perform this simple but necessary task. There are some analogs, pitch could be used to convey color fairly directly as, at least for simple primary hues, frequency could correlate directly and one could use volume to correlate with either saturation or brightness. (Saturation refers to the color's intensity, brightness measures how much light is reflected or produced for an energy input.) But how do you convey the color teal, which is a very particular hue, a mixture of blue and green? I suppose you could mix wave lengths from the green and blue part of the spectra, but the result would be a pitchless (though not white) noise that might be very difficult to distinguish from say the burnt orange hue that would be mixing a lot of yellow with a bit of red and darkening the brightness and lowering the saturation value. And all this assumes you have a meaningful concept of color to work with. I have had sufficient vision in the past to be able to visualize these colors. Does this discussion hold any meaning for someone who never saw them? (an honest question; I do not have that experience, so can't comment from my own life.) As a very simple example; I have spent the last year trying to wrap my brain around the idea of how best to convey in an audio format the information available to a sighted player of Angband, Moria, Nethack or any other roguelike in a meaningful way. I worked for a short while with one of the actual variant developers for these games, trying to design a system that would convey the information about position, relative positions of enemies, walls and floor features such as traps. Note that this doesn't even begin to touch the complexity available to a sighted game developer for a Call of Duty sort of game. I still haven't found a way to convey even this much reduced information load to a player in a way that doesn't take impractical amounts of time to play a game of any meaningful length. This doesn't mean it can't be done. It doesn't even mean that I won't solve this problem at some point. What it does mean is that I, a pretty smart cookie and good at algorithm development, as well as a pen-and-paper game designer who has created quite playable original designs and hacks of pre-existing work, have not yet solved this problem, indicating that it's not a trivial problem to solve. The solution probably involves information compression; first of all figuring out what information is actually necessary to the experience of playing a rogue-like; whether the physical exploration aspect that we saw in Entombed is actually important enough to justify its cost in information complexity,
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.
Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
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
Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation, was: MindCraft for the blind.
One thing that attracted me to Montezuma's Revenge, originally begun by James North, was the hope of playing what sighted gamers had played, in an audio version. It didn't work out as originally planned, but I'm still glad that Thomas Ward took over the project. Some people wouldn't want audioized, is that a word?, renditions of games for the sighted, but I would like them. The main roadblock, or at least one of them, is copyright. --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! - Original Message - From: Christopher Bartlett atouchofrevere...@gmail.com To: 'Gamers Discussion list' gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2013 8:44 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] The red herring of visual game recreation,was: MindCraft for the blind. 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
