Slashdot Mirror
Disabled Fans Shut Out of Galaxies
Ant writes "Wired News' Game|Life reports on Nick Dupree, a disability rights activist and writer who is confined to a wheelchair with severely limited mobility. He used to use one thumb and an index finger to play MMORPG Star Wars: Galaxies. This limited mobility was more than adequate to play the game when it was a sandbox-style adventure, and he was a devotee of the game. With the New Game Enhancements, he is no longer able to play because of the reliance on keyboard/mouse combinations and the action-style combat." There really is nothing good to report on this game update.
Personally, I love the new game enhancements. The interface is better, the combat is more exciting and less stand-there-and-click-the-next-attack, and the first 30 levels are more intuitive. Plus, you have to look at it from SOE and Lucas Art's point-of-view. This is supposed to be a Star Wars MMO. MMO's are obviously popular (WoW) and there are millions upon millions of Star Wars fans. How many people played SWG before? Not enough, maybe a few hundred thousand, and of those, I'd say maybe 50 thousand actually active players. Out of millions, that's not much. How many copies of Nattlefront have sold? How many copies of KOTOR? A ton. people want to play MMOs, people want to play Star Wars games, but the old game simply was not drawing a large enough crowd. Hopefully the new one will.
Flesh Time(tm) still limits our cyber(r) existence.
I think that one of the great things about technology is that it is the great equalizer. As technology advances, fewer and fewer people will have to live with a "disabled" status since we can build machines to help them.
If I were disabled, I would spend all day's in the MMORPGs. I can only imagine how liberating it would be to be equal with everybody else, and not have people immediately take pity on you upon sight. This man, who now has lost his access to this world that had once been a major part of his life, has my sympathies, and I urge the galaxies people to find out a way to accommodate him.
I really think you're missing the point here. The old setup of SWG was not a "sandbox-style adventure" for reasons of political correctness, but instead to favor strategy and precise action over frenetic action.
I don't see how he's missing the point. As you say, the original game wasn't designed that way specifically for disabled access and, as you presumably realise, the changes weren't made specifically to remove that access. Criticising the game changes is valid. Using some disabled rights angle as an excuse to bash the game providers is really offensive.
If you don't believe that they are allowed to change their game then say so. If you believe that they are then sometimes those changes are going to affect players that they don't even know about.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Many years ago in my first software engineering course we went over similar type stuff. One of the problems inherrent in our systems is the assumption of two hands - say, for example, ctrl-alt-del to reboot. Nowadays we are much more sensitive to this, but in the early days of DOS and such there was no real alternative, it was pointed out by the teacher (who had worked at a VA hospital for a few years) that many veterans had some issues - they could type well enough one handed but many key combinations were difficult, if not impossible, to do. One of those being ctrl-alt-del. In the 8086 days that was hard on a computer user. Even something small like "press the green button" can be impossible for someone red-green color blind (and that's really bad considering that in many MMO's green usually means "easy to kill" and red means "nearly impossible").
:) Personally I thought it was very funny, kinda a type of slapstick humor.
.5% of your population can't play your game, nor is there any reason to screw that .5% for no reason other than you don't care. It's a really hard balancing act, and not playing this game I can't say one way or another as to this change. The post and article are too biased, I need more information to fully know what to think.
Of course, me being an insensitive I ass pointed out (by demonstrating - not above a little self deprecation) that they could press ctrl-alt with one hand and smash thier face into the "del" key and do it. About half the students thought I was funny, the other half hated me
Personally, I'm a moderate dyslexic and there is a lot of things out there that are very difficult for me to do. I can memorise each side of a list but can't link them or put them in the correct order - nothing I do will solve this. Nor can I spell worth a flip - in a written media it can really hamper me (to get the grammar and spelling correct for this post would take me several hours of work going from a browser to a word processor). People give all sorts of great advice "Write it down over and over", "Here is a mnemonic", etc. I'm in my thirties, been using computers since my teens, I've been a physics and math junkie since long before them. I still can not do my multiplication tables - I know a few of them and work out from there (for example, I do not know 9x7 but I dod know 7x7 so I add enough 7's to 49 to get the answer). It's like telling an armless person if the *just try hard enough* that they will catch the ball with thier hands - except mine isn't obvious visually. I think I had maybe 4 or 5 teachers that knew what I meant and all had a dyslexic kid or sibling, the rest thought I was trying to cheat.
That being said - I find most dyslexic jokes funny even though some are kinda not accurate (much as my "smash your face into the keyboard"). I don't really mind jokes as long as they are jokes, and I will make many myself.
Personally I always try and think of disabled people when I deseign something, I can't say I always succede, or my bosses approve of my deseign, but I try. I know something of what they go through. Though once I got into the real world no one really cared if I could quote the ISO OSI hierarchy in order from memeory as long as I knew what I was doing and other were talking about. My other talents were good enough no one cared about the dyslexia. If I was armless, blind, or a parapeligic that wouldn't be so true.
Anyway, in the end one must balance what you hurt the majority of your base for the minority. It sucks to be in the minority (and I understand that, I'm also nearly deathly allergic to fish even to the point of not being able to be around them cooking it - something most resturaunts really push on fridays - I just severely limit where I go on fridays and bring my own food the large get-togethers where they have a fish fry). It doesn't do any good to go bankrupt because
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
"Content" publishers want control over everything.
That's not the case in this situation. Here, what they want is a recurring monthly income. Trust me, it's much preferable to get a steady flow of money than the occasional big bang (which then peters out as time progresses) when you release a new game. Not only is it really better (as you have a much better idea of how well you're doing both now and in the near future, financially), but it looks better on paper (so investors get the warm fuzzies).
Most people are the same - they'd rather get a regular salary, than a lump sum (maybe a year's worth, maybe more, but maybe less) once a year, on a date that they can't quite predict.
(Incidentally, why the quotes?)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I was a major weaponsmith on Chilastra, but my quick command of my trackball made my human character Namav Forsirn formidable in combat too. I mastered three combat professions, two pilot professions and I loved to frag people and get fragged around the Imperial Star Destroyer in Deep Space. I did a Skywalker and soloed that Imperial Star Destroyer countless times to rack up enough faction points to get factional armor for my friends. I flew the B-Wing, a slow, hulking behemoth only certified at Master Alliance Ace that very few have the dedication to fly. I did all this because controls were customizable. Now they're not.
So Quake should be outlawed, too?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Well, what you say is true, in a sense. For one thing, there are of course visual art programs that blind people are unlikely to be interested in. There's little or no point in making those accessible to THOSE disabled users.
If it happens that other disabled users WANT to use it however, and have some difficulties due to design, then that should obviously be fixed. The article is about dexterity issues, which can easily be solved by allowing different input methods, as an older version did.
The big issue though, is that people simply being dismissive of disabled users' needs. There is absolutely no reason why, if a user (disabled or not) wants to be able to control a piece of software, that input methods cannot be devised to allow this. So, when I say all programs, I mean all programs that disabled users might want to use, but that IS much closer to ALL programs than a handful, and I really think we need to think of accessibility as a default, rather than an exception.
On high-contrast, high-feedback, low-skill, etc... Again, if a user wants to play such a game, they are likely to believe that they could do it, if the input and feedback only suited them. This could easily be catered for with different UI modes, tilesets, etc. Most user interfaces, even in games, are becoming much more dynamic, using scalable graphics and high-level input APIs rather than bitmaps and raw joystick access. So it's definitely doable. And, yes, I think any cost involved in that extra mode should be part of the overall cost for all members of society who play the game. We're all in this social thing together.
1. Company does something geeks perceive as evil.
2. Geeks write a story which boils down to "Hey, this is evil!"
3. Geeks find a way in which this hurts some disadvantaged group.
4. Geeks write a story pointing this out.
5. ???
6. Profit!
Not to defend Lucasarts or anything, but...yeesh. Are the disabled nothing more than pawns to be used to attack companies with? I seem to recall similar articles blasting Windows (and other things) for not being disabled-friendly. I don't recall many (if any) articles blasting how eeeeeeeeeevil NetBSD is for not catering to the blind or disabled...
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Both SWG and EQ have had some serious screwups, and about the only way to make the games fun again involves using a time machine.