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Older Gamers, More Accessible Game Features?
simoniker writes "Microsoft's Brannon Zahand has been addressing the key issues of accessibility, from all aspects of game development, noting: 'The demand for accessibility will continue to grow as the gaming population ages. As people grow older, mild impairments can become more severe. Also, people are likely to develop new difficulties and impairments as they age. Adding basic accessibility features to titles can help publishers and developers continue to draw revenue from these customers.' Will we have to change how games play as gamers get older?"
Dag nabbit! If only the dad-gum gol-danged articles' text were just a smidgen bigger! Hey look, a butterscotch!
Wimp difficulty (above easy difficulty).
Pause functionality (for when you unexpectedly have to leak out some half-digested prunes)
*cough*...full open source...
and so on.
From the Gamecube manual:
Then there's always the issue that playing games when younger might have caused some of these impairments. There'd be nothing worse than being the grand champion at Gradius (space shooter) or something like that, and then finally losing the coordination or eyesight to play that game as well. I'd hope there was a way to make a Gradius-like game more accessible... but heck if I know what it is. Maybe just bigger entities on-screen would help.
stuff |
He plays most of the games in a lower resolution on a 19" LCD, effectively magnifying them. Keeping 1024x768 (or lower) as an option on new games ensures that he'll be able to continue to see the games.
Volume up! When it's an option, he usually has the "bubble speak" enabled so it's not just audio. A comfortable set of lightweight headphones can't hurt either.
He saves early, and saves often. He's not as quick as he was, but being able to save games as often as he'd like means that he isn't set back hours at a time if something surprises him and he doesn't react fast.
It seems to me that keeping existing features instead of dropping them will help with at least some forms of accessability.
checkers or chess
Honestly, when we live in an era where game designers so pressed for time that they can't even make the game stable, there's no way that they'll have the time to build in accessability features. Or look at the Dead Rising problem; they're not willing to patch an issue that affects a huge group of players, so what's going to happen when people with disabilities want to game?
That being said, it *is* nice to have some of those accessability features, even if you don't really need them. Subtitles/Closed Captioning is incredibly useful when you're gaming in an environment where you can't crank the volume to hear every whisper, for fear of a sudden explosion that'll wake your parents/kids/roommates and cause general problems.
So you make some accessibility features for games. So, if your coordination ain't the best anymore, you'll get "compensation" from the game by having a mild to heavy auto-aim feature. Or if you can't see so well, you get the enemy highlighted in bright colors.
Sounds familiar? Right. We call that "cheating" today.
It's not that I want to look down on aging people. Hey, I'm myself starting to notice that I start to lose my edge. I can't compete with 16 year olds anymore, and I'm saddened by the prospect of not being able to even beat the next Burnout at all anymore. My reaction is getting slower, my eyes ain't what they used to be, but hey, that's ok. I get old, and I'll play what's there for me. No biggie. I'll be as good as I am.
Toning down the game to make it "accessible" would feel like cheating to me. Multiplayer or not. In multi, it's even more blatant because, well, what would keep a non-disabled person from using those tools as well? In single, I'd feel like I cheat myself.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Poor eyesight? Buy a 42" LCD.
Poor hearing? 7.1 Surround.
Bad reflexes and memory? Learn to talk sh!t.
Perhaps wheelchair ramps in GTA?
And maybe the cars won't go quite so fast?
It is EXTREMELY poor for readability. Perhaps it dates back from the old days of DOS when you just had one font size so webdesigners never adjusted to the fact they could adjust it. Perhaps all webdesigners got perfect vision. Perhaps webdesigners all work with very low resolutions on really big screens.
Whatever the reason as I get older I am now totally depended on Opera's excellent zoom function. Any reasonably designed page will easily adjust and use a larger character size, if you zoom in enough even going so far as actually use more then 1 pixel for the character lines. Amazing.
It is slightly harder to override the default black on white without getting weird effects but I put up with it to save my eyes from strain.
Does this relate to games? Well yes. Console gamers are sorta lucky here because they had to play their games on the crap resolution TV's that forced game companies to use HUGE fonts. Just check out console to PC ports to see the effect. Granted KOTOR got the worst of both worlds. It kept the same resolution for the menu so you had lousy readbility and a gigantic amount of wasted screenspace.
Anyway, yes I think games must change if they want to appeal to the aging gamer. But I don't think this is just a case of using big fonts or controls that fit in an adult male hands.
Save points are a pain in the ass if you got something called a life (or rather have lost something called a life by getting married and having kids). You simply don't have the time to sit down and play a level all the way through in one sitting when you get older and have other responsibilties.
Same with games that seem to want to insist on enforcing replay. Why exactly do so many console games force me to play it through on easy mode first before unlocking the higher difficulty settings? I payed for the game, I decide how I play it. Imagine if DVD makers could determine you had to sit through the movie in one go or that you first had to watch the theather release before you could see the directors cut.
What I don't think will dissappear is for instance twitch games that as you get older get harder to play, although some old people will be able to out twitch any teenager, for the same reason that teen movies still exist when most movie go'ers ain't teens.
But if you audience in theory is any age group above X then you would be a fool to make the game a pain in the ass to play by using difficult to read fonts. Or maybe not. Just look at the web. Again the same question, why does every webpage use the same tiny font on a white background against all the usability guidelines?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
quake for the blind: "there is an enemy at 11 o'clock. he is shooting at you. you're dead."
Accessibility is an issue that affects millions of Americans (and worldwide) with disability, not just disability due to aging. While the implications of aging will affect a lot of contemporary games and the current "gamer" population, there are quite a few youngsters with disability who are disenfranchised from the enjoyment of video games due to access issues. I remember hearing an article on NPR about the blind being able to play text adventures through text-to-speech. While I doubt the feasibility of statements like "Blind people should be able to play XBox 360", I think that the gaming industry, especially consoles, has matured in sophistication enough to start adding accessibility features to their games. I can think of several off-the-shelf solutions for consoles right now (using one-handed controllers or a Dance Dance Revolution pad for playing RPGs or tactical strategy games, in folks with manual dexterity problems, alternate input devices for consoles, etc.), but it would be nice to see more effort on the software side. After all, gaming is a great hobby for those who may be wheelchair-bound or have to stay indoors for one reason or another.
55 & over only. Allows limited visiting hours from characters from other servers. Can you see it? Lord of the Rings online can have "The Grey Havens". WOW can have "Ashes to Ashenvale", that kind of thing. And when you go your main character can get either a tombstone that is visitable by characters on other servers, or an actual in-game object that holds the ashes.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Of course there wouldn't be disability bonuses in multiplayer. Maybe age brackets for player matching. And of course a game design that minimizes unnecessary inaccessibility (e.g. by using large fonts and icons).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
While researching a bit on reaction times, I stumbled upon this link from Clemson's biology department:n .htm
http://biology.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/Lab/110/reactio
It's a pretty good literature review on the various studies done on Reaction Time and the various factors relating to it. Some pearls:
Many researchers have confirmed that reaction to sound is faster than reaction to light, with mean auditory reaction times being 140-160 msec and visual reaction times being 180-200 msec (Galton, 1899; Woodworth and Schlosberg, 1954; Fieandt et al., 1956; Welford, 1980; Brebner and Welford, 1980). Perhaps this is because an auditory stimulus only takes 8-10 msec to reach the brain (Kemp et al., 1973), but a visual stimulus takes 20-40 msec (Marshall et al., 1943).
Simple reaction time shortens from infancy into the late 20s, then increases slowly until the 50s and 60s, and then lengthens faster as the person gets into his 70s and beyond (Welford, 1977; Jevas and Yan, 2001; Luchies et al., 2002; Rose et al., 2002; Der and Deary, 2006). Luchies et al.(2002) also reported that this age effect was more marked for complex reaction time tasks, and Der and Deary (2006) concurred. Reaction time also becomes more variable with age (Hultsch et al., 2002). Welford (1980) speculates on the reason for slowing reaction time with age. It is not just simple mechanical factors like the speed of nervous conduction. It may be the tendency of older people to be more careful and monitor their responses more thoroughly (Botwinick, 1966). When troubled by a distraction, older people also tend to devote their exclusive attention to one stimulus, and ignore another stimulus, more completely than younger people (Redfern et al., 2002).
At the risk of being politically incorrect, in almost every age group, males have faster reaction times than females, and female disadvantage is not reduced by practice (Noble et al., 1964; Welford, 1980; Adam et al., 1999; Dane and Erzurumlugoglu, 2003; Der and Deary, 2006).
The authors concluded that left-handed people have an inherent reaction time advantage. In an experiment using a computer mouse, Peters and Ivanoff (1999) found that right-handed people were faster with their right hand (as expected), but left-handed people were equally fast with both hands. The preferred hand was generally faster. However, the reaction time advantage of the preferred over the non-preferred hands was so small that they recommended alternating hands when using a mouse. Bryden (2002), using right-handed people only, found that task difficulty did not affect the reaction time difference between the left and right hands.
There are a lot more good summaries in that article. I also remember being in a Science Museum and one of the exhibits claimed that the best reaction times on their particular exhibit in traditional studies were seasoned Aircraft Pilots.
yeah... old people should stick to games that aren't so difficult on them. like checkers and shuffleboard. maybe dominos or croquet.
Ira
But I don't even think this is necessary. I don't own a Nintendo DS (yet, at least) but I understand that a feature of the Nintendo online gaming system is to match players against others of similar ranking and skill. I don't know if Xbox Live has a similar system, but I don't play PC games online much because I find a server, join a game and get my ass kicked in about two minutes. I love FPS games and used to love playing Unreal Tournament against my flatmates, so this sounds ideal to me - a system where I automatically get matched against other grandads who are as numptie at games as I am.
Stroller.
I enjoyed this article because it relates to me. There's a reason why I don't own a gaming console. I haven't owned one since Atari 2600. Due to my four fingers on my hands, lack of thumbs, and inablility to hold game controllers in mid air, I cannot use those console controllers very well. I have to use them on tables to hold them. This is why I do better on computer games because of keyboards, mice (small light ones like those old two/three button ones), and simple small joysticks (think of those old one/two buttons one like those old school Atari 2600 joysticks). I currently have a Microsoft Sidewinder joystick, but they have too many buttons and too big for my hands, so I don't do well when flying (I avoid flying in Battlefield games ;)). :(
I also have speech and hearing impediments, so I don't use Teamspeak or any voice communications. I tried it once in Day of Defeat (original version) and obviously, no one knew I was saying (even my friends whom I talked to!). Hearing is another problem since I don't hear well with my analog bone conduction hearing aid (mono -- one microphone and can't determine audio directions). I love games that use closed caption/CC and suititles like in Half-Life 2 games (only use the dialog ones) and F.E.A.R..
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yet another reason I love Firefox. The minimum font size setting (advanced font options) overrides stupid web "designers" who think that itty-bitty fonts are a good idea. I *can* read really small text, but I don't WANT to. It's too much strain on the eyes to be looking at microscopic fonts all day.
This wouldn't be such a problem if I had neural interfaces that could transmit input and output without having to use my cumbersome body. Early methods would probably only use thought-controlled input, but I want to be truly immersed in games some day buy having it all take place in my mind. If I could have the graphics superimposed over part of my vision, I could play a game or do some other activity on my computer instead of having to day dream while I'm stuck doing tasks that don't require much attention. I'd just have to keep the computer offline; I don't want my mind hacked.
Ith's Ear Candy: Netaudio wants to be heard
This was much less of a problem before the early-mid Internet Boom,
CSS has helped a bit - it moved much of the display out of the object-markup body, so it's easier for the reader to override the author's visual preferences, and it's easier for the author to let go of some control. But Javascript has made things worse. And part of the problem is that you're probably using Firefox, not IE, so IE-specific mismarkup may be defaulting to tiny fonts because it's not the same way Firefox would render it. So switch to Lynx, and you'll be able to read it just fine :-) Cellphones/PDAs/Treos help, because they're forcing many web authors to use markup that can be rendered on wimpy screens that are no longer walled-garden WAP but still won't ever have the resolution that the author's PC has.
Me? Not only am I old and cynical, but I'm reading this on a relatively new work laptop that *still* doesn't have as many pixels as the *Sun-3* I was using two decades ago, and it's possible that the *next* laptop we get at home will only do WXGA, which is *still* slightly fewer pixels than 1152x900 (I'd rather pay less money for a faster machine with more pixels, but the one we're looking at is very small and has a very bright clear screen.) Moore's Law means that instead of that screen costing $3000, a CRT costs $29 or LCD costs under $300, but it's still lame. And that means those web-designing art directors with their 23-inch Apple displays or game designers with gimongous-memory 4-D graphics-accelerator cards will continue to design stuff that looks ugly on my machine, in spite of how beautiful it looks to them. And they continue to use pixel-based design tools - back then, when my boss had trouble reading things on his screen, we told Sun NeWS Postscript-based windowing to use bigger fonts, and it rendered them beautifully. 15-20 years later, when I had trouble reading my computer screens all day, Windows wasn't much help, so I had to get reading glasses :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I've finally had to start wearing reading glasses, and most of my gaming is still Nethack and Solitaire, so I'm allowed to make old-geezer gaming jokes...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has a Special Interest Group (SIG) about accessibility. There are some really interesting links and documents to be found. Search it yourself at http://www.igda.org/accessibility/.
Also [shameless plug] this year's Retro Remakes Competition (scroll down till Competition to see the rules, or search the news to find the games entered) was held with disabled gamers in mind. At least in that community, accessibility is kept in mind.
One CS student VS 893 DOS games: Let's play oldies