Hi. It's very odd, but this debate about games actually plays directly upon one of the key issues of my phd.
One of the things i am postulating, is that disability should be catagorized not merely as belonging to a particular group, eg, deaf, blind, physically imapred etc, but that disability should be defigned more fluidly as any state of a person's body or brain which actually precludes them from carrying out desires, or, which causes the fulfillment of those desires to require significantly more effort than the normal (I also have a deffinition of normal, but that is a bit much to go in to). For any sited person with a desire to play a mainstream game, there is litle effort involved beyond his/her desire to play the game and that effort which the game's developers deemed as being necessary by a normal individual to complete an in game task. For a disabled gamer though, that amount of effort increases exponentially. My brother for instance, can load a new guitar hero game in seconds, and immediately begin on the first song, no memorization required. he knows the instant he is wrong, and exactly what is required with the guitar. On average it takes him roughly ten minutes of practice with a song to get a reasonable score. Contrast this to the effort required by a blind gamer. learning the menue, loading the song, reviewing before hand what is required. How long, ---- from initial start would it take him/her to get a reasonable score? This is to my mind one of the key features of adding access in games. Take time of conflict for example, it uses a contextual menue to allow instant map review, so that even the effort of reviewing a map in audio is reduced, ---- perhaps not to the at one glance minimal effort in a mainstream stratogy game like command and conquer, but certainly far more than reviewing each square one at a time, then building up a mental picture of the map piece by piece and altering it accordingly. This is also why a game like Mota needs to have it's difficulty tweaked somewhat. I can't speak for tomb hunter, but certain I've had mega man levels which I've spent hours! on at a time. Finishing nes mega man 2 took me many hours. now admittedly part of this was because not having a wide enouygh field of view for the game I needed to learn certain aspects and look at specific parts of the screen not being able to see all of it, ---- but partly this is because the developers specifically! designed the game to be the sort of game which you'd need to struggle to finish, but where each life you got a litle further and thus wanted to get on. 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.
