The Stacey Serve-a-Thon is a lovely idea from her sister Kate Aherne. It starts from today and runs for a month in tribute to her memory and the kind acts she carried out whilst alive. Anyone can get involved in donating an hour of their time or an hours wage, to give to any good cause that serves others. Seems like a fitting tribute.
Global Game Jam is an annual game hack weekend, where teams around the world are given a common theme to work to (this year's was 'heart beat'), and divide into teams to produce an entire end to end functioning game by the end of the 48 hours. Read on...
Accessibility challenge
A couple of years back Tara Voelker (whilst in IGDA GASIG chair guise) kicked of an accessibility challenge at the Orlando GGJ venue, with teams volunteering to take on an extra challenge outside of the usual theme, competing to produce the most accessible game. In 2012 this was expanded further headed by Ian Hamilton to cover several venues around the UK. In 2013 the challenge grew again to cover venues in the UK, Australia and Canada.
For the 2013 event entries were initially judged at an individual venue level on some fixed accessibility criteria, and then went to a panel of judges (Mark Barlet of AbleGamers, Lynsey Graham of Blitz Games Studios, Barrie Ellis of OneSwitch, and Ian Hamilton of GameAccessibilityGuidelines.com) for the final vote on the international winner.
Global winner
The winner was a game called 'A Wise Choice', from the London venue. There were many games produced with limited vision in mind, and many produced with simple controls in mind, but A Wise Choice attempted both and many more, with features ranging from easy to read text to full self-voicing, and even a scanning switch interface for profound motor impairment.
The primary focus was blind gamers, catered for through pre-recorded full self-voicing. Creating a fully self-voiced game is no mean feat even with a decent timescale and budget, and it was very clear that not only had some good thought gone into the interaction, but also that a real effort had been made to ensure that the game was just as enjoyable regardless whether the player could see or not.
In addition to profound visual and motor impairment other less profound impairments were also well catered for, from low reading age to dyslexia, partial deafness to hyperopia.
Some quotes from the judges:
"A wonderfully accessible mix of Oliver Postgate style story telling and Gong hippy-dom" "Impressive given the combination of the timescale, the disability they catered for and the scope of the game." "Hugely impressive access. Very well thought out"
There was also a second element, added by the GGJ organisers - an official accessibility diversifier. Diversifiers are secondary themes that are not competitive, and are open to every single person from every venue. This meant that all jammers around the world gained some awareness of accessibility. Many teams deciding to tackle it themselves, with with around 200 developers deciding to take up the challenge, producing over 80 games with accessibility in mind.
Many of these were games that widened their audience by thinking about things like control complexity, text formatting, contrast, colour-blind friendly schemes and so on, and others aimed to tackle more tricky accessibility issues, opening up play to gamers with profound impairments.
The most popularly tackled of these by far were blind-friendly / audio only games:
To reach these kinds of audiences in the space of 48 hours is obviously quite a feat, yet that's exactly what both the challenge and diversifier games often achieved.. a greater level of accessibility than is found in commercial games.
Judge Mark Bartlet remarked: "I thought that all of the entries show that making games with accessibility in mind can be done! I was impressed to see what could be done in 48 hours. What this really proves is that there is no excuse for adding basic accessibility to games, regardless of the budget." - echoed by us all.
Via: Ian Hamilton post on the IGDA GASIG forum. I'm aiming to cover some of the one-switch games here in the very near future, time being kind.
The video above is of the 1989 "Micros for Special Needs Exhibition" run by the Oldham SEMERC (Special Education Micro-electronics Resource Centres). SEMERCs were set up under the aegis of the Council for Educational Technology in 1982 which shared a body of knowledge on accessible technology for children around the UK.
1982 was also the year that the BBC launched their Computer Literacy Project backed by the Acorn BBC Micro computer. Big improvements in access to computers were just around the corner.
Sad news to hear that game accessibility advocate and pioneer Kenji Eno died this week at the age of 42. Kenji produced the first ever audio game to make its way onto a games console, RealSound: Kaze No Regret (aka The Regret of the Wind). Here's a brief excerpt from a 2008 interview with 1UP.com:
1UP: After D, you surprised Warp's fans by creating an offbeat Sega Saturn adventure game, Real Sound.
KE: Oh, that's a funky game.
1UP: Yeah, not only was it funky, it was also a game without any visuals. What inspired it, and how did you get Sega to publish it?
KE: After I released D, people were always expecting more CG graphics from me, and I got tired of that. I didn't want people to think that they could predict what Warp would do next. Also, I had a chance to visit people who are visually disabled, and I learned that there are blind people who play action games. Of course, they're not able to have the full experience, and they're kind of trying to force themselves to be able to play, but they're making the effort. So I thought that if you turn off the monitor, both of you are just hearing the game. So after you finish the game, you can have an equal conversation about it with a blind person. That's an inspiration behind this game as well.
So Sega was asking for exclusive rights to the game, and I said, "OK, if you'll donate a thousand Saturns to blind people, then I'll donate a thousand games along with the Saturns." And my condition was that if Sega would go for this idea, I would make that game Sega exclusive. So, that's how this happened. It's been several years now, and of course the contract probably isn't valid anymore, but the reason that I haven't done anything with this game is that I made this promise with Sega back in the day, and it's exclusive because of those conditions.
This is a really great turn based strategy game, that reminds me a little of the mindlessly-psychotic robots in Berzerk. There's a fantastic range of accessibility options, including pure-mouse and two one-switch modes. Tam has also been the first person to use the Game Accessibility Information symbol. Great stuff, and well worth down-loading and playing if you have a PC.
Whilst doing research for "One Switch 100", and having just finished reading the excellent Atari Inc. Business is Fun, I was reminded what an early trail-blazer Atari was for accessibility in computer games. Here's a short list from the 20th century in no particular order.
1. Touch Me was one of the earliest audio-games (1974), playable by blind players following the "Simon Says" sounds or deaf players following the light patterns.
2. Special Feature labelling was used on main-stream games to mark out some extra accessibility. Used on Atari VCS games at the height of Atari's success (1981-82), such as Missile Command with its specially slowed down version.
3. Colour and B/W TV Type options were more a product of the times than anything else, but this alone ensured colour-blind players had a good chance of being able to play.
4. Difficulty level switch and game variations enabled players to find fairer or easier ways to play. This started from day one with the Atari VCS and the pack-in game Combat (1977). Fat slow plane vs. three quick small planes with three times the fire power springs to mind.
5. Atari Controllers employed an interface method that Commodore and others followed. This lead to a huge range of compatible controllers across multiple gaming platforms. The standard is even compatible with some ranges of wheelchair joysticks (such as MERU's Moozi). Additionally, Atari also promoted the adaptation of their controllers for disabled gamers (see left-handed gamers, Ken Yankelevitz and John Dutton), although this wasn't a service they provided themselves. They even prototyped mind-control and voice-control for the VCS.
6. Vidcom was a portable communication aid first developed and sold in 1978 for people without clear speech, enabling face to face and telephone communication with words and sentences. Namco would follow this path of a games company creating AAC communication devices to this date.
7. Steeplechase would be the first one-switch video game playable by six players in 1975. This would later be pirated and played in Communist Russia.
8. The Atari Kid's Controller was probably the first alternative game controller built by a main-stream developer, built for additional accessibility. Aimed at very young children struggling with the standard joystick controllers, and supported by a small range of specialised games. Atari also brought on board a child psychologist and Sesame Street to galvanise their efforts.
9. Cheats and gaming aids - VCS Space Invaders had a well-known cheat giving double-bullets. Third party hard-ware developers created auto-fire in-line adapters to make shoot-em-ups easier. This stuff made a difference.
10. San Francisco Rush 2049, featured a mode whereby people with no use of their feet could still race. It was also Atari's swan song in amusement arcades.
Reading "Minority Report" in the March 2013 issue of the Official Xbox Magazine (see above), made me think three things. 1. Left handed gamers are still frequently ignored. 2. Things were probably better in 1981 (see below). 3. Farmer's Left Hand Fighter with a Xbox 360/PS3 adapter is still a pretty good solution for those ignored by a lack of in-game reconfiguration options.
Page 30 of the same magazine has an excellent "Let Us Play: Disabled gamers ask for access to the games we love" featuring Mark Barlet and Steve Spohn from AbleGamers and Ian Hamilton of GameAccessibilityGuidelines.com and Lynsey Graham of Blitz Game Studios. Well worth a read.
The scan above is taken from the September 1981 Atari (UK) Owners Club Bulletin: "Are you Left-handed? Good news for left-handed owners". This details how to convert an Atari joystick from right handed use to left-handed use by re-connecting four of the directional push on connector blades.
Atari repeated this find in the Jan/Feb 1983 (USA) Atari Age magazine, entitled "Make Your Own Left-Handed Joystick. Life was simpler then for sure.
De Game-It is a wireless games console controller, and using Google Translate and my eye-balls, I have gleaned/cribbed that: It allows for an ultra-light joystick to be positioned separately from the interface box. It has a sip/puff interface built in. It uses the same lovely "Pro Signal" black and gold sockets I first saw on Excitim switch accessible devices.
I was recently contacted by the Mum of a young lad with Cerebral Palsy both keen to get him kitted out with a switch adapted train-set. He'd used a Lego train-set at Kent's excellent CAT service and loved it.
Through SpecialEffect, I was set the task of replicating Kent CAT's brilliant adapted train-set (which I had previously seen at their Techno Talk event), but using a switch adapted Doro infra-red learning remote, which they had said they couldn't get to work. I was pleased to learn that although fiddly to teach the infra-red codes (you have to spin the orange speed control fast for a fairly short-burst of time), once it is working, it seems to stay working. Even when you remove the batteries for a short-time.
And as a nod to the adapted train-sets spanning back decades, here's a link to many more. Just great to find a relatively simple way to get modern day train-sets working. Find more D.I.Y. details at the YouTube page.
