There are academics like me who just take existing games for their research. My students and I modify games so they become accessible to players with disabilities. See our one button version of halflife2 http://www.helpyouplay.com/gtf.html or our guitar hero for the blind http://www.helpyouplay.com/blind_hero.html
The problem with guidelines (and this has also been recognized with usability guidelines) that designers have a hard time interpreting them since guidelines assume that they have absolute validity yet they are often only applicable in a particular context. Skippable cutscenes, good idea but also a good idea for the first cutscene shown before you start playing the game? There are so many factors involved that determine whether this guideline works or not. A better format (in my opinion) is to use the format of an interaction design pattern which clearly connects a solution to a particular design problem that is valid in a particular context only. I did this for a number of usability and accessibility problems in games two years ago: see my website at: http://www.helpyouplay.com/
Since its so hard to interpret guidelines since they don't provide a context in which the solution is applied and they don't actually tell you what usability problem they solve I tried to capture the best elements of interface design using the concept of an interaction design pattern. Two years ago I created this site: http://www.helpyouplay.com/
that's a wrong comparison. Those 30 people that died today would still be alive if there weren't any guns at all. You can never justify the use of any gun. what's next? give guns to 3-6 year olds in pre school so they can defend themselves? its insane. We can live in a society without guns. We have to get rid of this state of paranoia that we live in first.
yeah and IF the gunman would live in a country without any guns no one would have been killed. We are so much better off without guns and its time people start realizing that.
American children are more at risk from firearms than the children of any other industrialized nation. In one year, firearms killed no children in Japan, 19 in Great Britain, 57 in Germany, 109 in France, 153 in Canada, and 5,285 in the United States. (Centers for Disease Control)
NO GUNS - NO DEATHS
its as simple as that, how many people can you kill with just sticks and stones?, in the same amount of time you can take out 30 people with a semi automatic? US society is based on fear and buying a gun only adds to it, until someone flips and kills 30 innocent.
England is not the only country with strict gun laws, but happens to be the exception with more homicides. England used to allow handguns up to 1997 so there are more guns than for example in germany or the netherlands that never allowed guns. The homicide rates (with guns) are an order of magnitude lower than in the US/UK.
Dear Mr Harrison, I liked your presentation on home for the PS3. But when you showed the slides that came with Games 3.0 the slide with all the keywords, why was the word Accessibility not there? Nintendo has obviously shown that there is market beyond the hard core gamer. I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that many people with disabilities (and that is 15% of the total US population) are excluded from playing games because features such as closed captions (when you are deaf) or in game support for specific input devices such as one hand controllers or sip and puff devices are missing in the majority of the games. Even something simple as manually being able to engage bullettime in a FPS would allow someone with severe physical disabilities to enjoy playing games. Many accessibility features are very simple to implement. Someone in your position can make a change and if games can be played by more people then more games can be sold which is a win-win situation for everyone.
Sincerely, Eelke Folmer
Assistant professor University of Nevada.
he's forgetting the most important thing: skippable cutscenes, remember how annoying gears of war was where you have to wait for the cutscene to finish?
If gamecompanies would spend less time on pushing the graphical boundaries but instead would focus more on providing innovative gameplay or interesting storylines we can keep the jobs here. I mean we don't outsource our hollywood scriptwriters to china do we?
In this article Mark Rein puts the development costs of Gears of War at less than 10M. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid= 20176
I doubt whether Cars has been made for that amount of money, especially since they could possibly reuse animations & models from the movie. I guess you should include those costs too right?
Are they having some internal problems at microsoft? I'm still waiting for the XNA / XBLA game competition to start, it was supposed to start in january. http://www.dreambuildplay.com/index.html
I want my game on XBLA!
Hmmmmm those games all look pretty professional, at least concerning graphics. What is defined as indie currently because these games are certainly not the work of a few individuals working in their basement on a game in my opinion. For me indie development are games like geometry wars or armadillorun. E.g. one person developed games with less than 10 months development time. Are small scale game developers just branding themselves as "indie" just to take advantage of the current indie hype?
Does anyone know how many copies of this game have been sold?
I mean the business model behind this game should be a motivation for any indie game developer out there!
e.g. 1 million copies times $4 dollars (assuming microsoft gets $1 on a $5 sale) is 4 million dollars thats not bad for a couple of month work I guess.
Hey that would at least make it accessible to the majority of the gamers suffering from physical disabilities who have a hard time now playing around with 16+ buttons. (why 16 buttons on a playstation 3 controller we only have 10 fingers?)
25 gb of game data, assuming we can compress graphics/textures/audio with a factor 10 to 1 and leaving 500mb for the uncompressed game engine we can ship 245 gb of art/audio with each game. This seems to be very high to me. Are we talking about uncompressed data here? The real problem is not the bandwidth etc as most games are very sequential and you know exactly what to load when but the problem is in the content creation, how do you create this 245gb of art?
Well I can understand it from his perspective but I can also understand it from the pc vendors perspective. Not everybody wants lots of heat generating and power consuming GPU especially when you are using a laptop, and prefer battery life over top notch graphics.
I can definately recommend ArmadilloRun. A physics based game created by only 1 person in 9 months. They should have different categories based on team size I guess because some of these games are almost semi commercial.
Slashdot Mirror
We recently implemented a zork interface on top of Second Life so Visually impaired can access it using a screenreader. See http://textsl.org/
There are academics like me who just take existing games for their research. My students and I modify games so they become accessible to players with disabilities. See our one button version of halflife2 http://www.helpyouplay.com/gtf.html or our guitar hero for the blind http://www.helpyouplay.com/blind_hero.html
The problem with guidelines (and this has also been recognized with usability guidelines) that designers have a hard time interpreting them since guidelines assume that they have absolute validity yet they are often only applicable in a particular context. Skippable cutscenes, good idea but also a good idea for the first cutscene shown before you start playing the game? There are so many factors involved that determine whether this guideline works or not. A better format (in my opinion) is to use the format of an interaction design pattern which clearly connects a solution to a particular design problem that is valid in a particular context only. I did this for a number of usability and accessibility problems in games two years ago: see my website at: http://www.helpyouplay.com/
Since its so hard to interpret guidelines since they don't provide a context in which the solution is applied and they don't actually tell you what usability problem they solve I tried to capture the best elements of interface design using the concept of an interaction design pattern. Two years ago I created this site: http://www.helpyouplay.com/
I was thinking about that the other day. But a large part of those guns are registered so you can just have those people hand them in.
that's a wrong comparison. Those 30 people that died today would still be alive if there weren't any guns at all. You can never justify the use of any gun. what's next? give guns to 3-6 year olds in pre school so they can defend themselves? its insane. We can live in a society without guns. We have to get rid of this state of paranoia that we live in first.
yeah and IF the gunman would live in a country without any guns no one would have been killed. We are so much better off without guns and its time people start realizing that. American children are more at risk from firearms than the children of any other industrialized nation. In one year, firearms killed no children in Japan, 19 in Great Britain, 57 in Germany, 109 in France, 153 in Canada, and 5,285 in the United States. (Centers for Disease Control)
NO GUNS - NO DEATHS its as simple as that, how many people can you kill with just sticks and stones?, in the same amount of time you can take out 30 people with a semi automatic? US society is based on fear and buying a gun only adds to it, until someone flips and kills 30 innocent.
England is not the only country with strict gun laws, but happens to be the exception with more homicides. England used to allow handguns up to 1997 so there are more guns than for example in germany or the netherlands that never allowed guns. The homicide rates (with guns) are an order of magnitude lower than in the US/UK.
what is wrong with it? it works splendid here. The only thing that could be improved is being able to right click on files found.
Dear Mr Harrison, I liked your presentation on home for the PS3. But when you showed the slides that came with Games 3.0 the slide with all the keywords, why was the word Accessibility not there? Nintendo has obviously shown that there is market beyond the hard core gamer. I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that many people with disabilities (and that is 15% of the total US population) are excluded from playing games because features such as closed captions (when you are deaf) or in game support for specific input devices such as one hand controllers or sip and puff devices are missing in the majority of the games. Even something simple as manually being able to engage bullettime in a FPS would allow someone with severe physical disabilities to enjoy playing games. Many accessibility features are very simple to implement. Someone in your position can make a change and if games can be played by more people then more games can be sold which is a win-win situation for everyone. Sincerely, Eelke Folmer Assistant professor University of Nevada.
he's forgetting the most important thing: skippable cutscenes, remember how annoying gears of war was where you have to wait for the cutscene to finish?
If gamecompanies would spend less time on pushing the graphical boundaries but instead would focus more on providing innovative gameplay or interesting storylines we can keep the jobs here. I mean we don't outsource our hollywood scriptwriters to china do we?
In this article Mark Rein puts the development costs of Gears of War at less than 10M. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid= 20176
I doubt whether Cars has been made for that amount of money, especially since they could possibly reuse animations & models from the movie. I guess you should include those costs too right?
fire it into the sun?? what if the rocket explodes like the challenger and we get showered by highly nuclear waste?
Are they having some internal problems at microsoft? I'm still waiting for the XNA / XBLA game competition to start, it was supposed to start in january. http://www.dreambuildplay.com/index.html I want my game on XBLA!
Just make NYC downtown vehicle free, like most european big cities.... you can still get hit by a bike but that's less lethal than a bus
Well not professionally but i've seen good games being developed in less than 10 months.
I know it was just developed to test out/ setup the controller but my point is, it was only developed by one guy in a short time ;-)
Hmmmmm those games all look pretty professional, at least concerning graphics. What is defined as indie currently because these games are certainly not the work of a few individuals working in their basement on a game in my opinion. For me indie development are games like geometry wars or armadillorun. E.g. one person developed games with less than 10 months development time. Are small scale game developers just branding themselves as "indie" just to take advantage of the current indie hype?
Does anyone know how many copies of this game have been sold? I mean the business model behind this game should be a motivation for any indie game developer out there! e.g. 1 million copies times $4 dollars (assuming microsoft gets $1 on a $5 sale) is 4 million dollars thats not bad for a couple of month work I guess.
Hey that would at least make it accessible to the majority of the gamers suffering from physical disabilities who have a hard time now playing around with 16+ buttons. (why 16 buttons on a playstation 3 controller we only have 10 fingers?)
25 gb of game data, assuming we can compress graphics/textures/audio with a factor 10 to 1 and leaving 500mb for the uncompressed game engine we can ship 245 gb of art/audio with each game. This seems to be very high to me. Are we talking about uncompressed data here? The real problem is not the bandwidth etc as most games are very sequential and you know exactly what to load when but the problem is in the content creation, how do you create this 245gb of art?
Well I can understand it from his perspective but I can also understand it from the pc vendors perspective. Not everybody wants lots of heat generating and power consuming GPU especially when you are using a laptop, and prefer battery life over top notch graphics.
I can definately recommend ArmadilloRun. A physics based game created by only 1 person in 9 months. They should have different categories based on team size I guess because some of these games are almost semi commercial.