On Thu, 2008-04-24 at 11:15 -0700, Zachary Kline wrote: > It does help a great deal. I must say, after a lot of practice I've > been having fun with this game. It was initially frustrating, and to a > certain extent it still is, but I'm enjoying it. I just wish there were > more live people to play with, but sadly I'm pretty sure I can't run a > server myself. I doubt anybody else at my university would be interested, > no matter how much Halo they play. Heh.
I'm glad my email explanation helped. You raise an important point: at the time when we started AQ, the huge but slowly declining popularity of Quake was something we had to balance with the fact that the engine was one of the most advanced to have been open-sourced, which allowed us to make it accessible. Since then, it has obviously got older, but there are still projects that have created much-improved (in terms of graphics and other snazzy modern features) Quake engines, which, with help, we could maybe move to in the medium-term. The main goal of the AGRIP project was to provide access to a mainstream game, surrounding online community, development tools and, finally, mapping tools (which we're at a very early stage with, but will hopefully soon start getting feedback that will help us improve its direction, when we've posted the questions on it, hehe). Anyway, the fact that Quake is now very old means that at some point we may have to move to a new engine if we want to keep the ``cool'' factor. Many of us in the AG research and development arena have been trying to prove the market potential is worthwhile exploiting by mainstream game developers, thus negating our need to exist (the ideal, after all). Unfortunately they don't see it as improving the experience for everyone through wider adoption of ``accessibility'' techniques and technologies. It's widely held in the accessible gaming and access technology communities (and by an increasing number in the wider world) that making things accessible is a side effect of good, flexible design and that it can benefit everyone to some degree if done right. AQ was, to our knowledge, the first ``to-market'' conversion of a mainstream FPS game for the sighted that blind people can play. That means that it proved the goal was reachable but for a lot of reasons is unlikely to be the one that gets the wider world's attention. We and the others in the community have exhibited at Sight Village, taught workshops at ICC [1], had numerous media interviews and even presented at academic and industry conferences including ``Game Developers Conference'' (the big one in the commercial game development area), but in my experience it's never been about anything but accessibility to everyone else. That's why we have to carry on, learn from AQ and the other great research and development that so many people are doing in this area and move on to overcoming yet bigger accessibility hurdles -- though I don't see this happening soon without the entire AG/AT communities really regrouping and joining forces. My own personal research plans include more work on proving the general link between more adaptive user interfaces and hopefully more time spent in the AG arena, though this has all been delayed by a very serious road accident a couple of years ago that has had a profound impact that will continue for many years to come. I think what I'm trying to say is that it seems we are still very early on in this area of work and research, which makes it both very exciting and very frustrating. It is hard to prove that a major shift in technology and social attitudes is required :-). Personally I think that the fact that many people compartmentalise off ``accessibility'' as ``that other cross-section of humanity that is the disabled'' is a huge stigma we have to get over. IMHO as a discipline, we're doing usability, just more successfully than everyone else, because they never managed to make people with serious cognitive and motor difficulties learn stuff whilst having fun before -- hats off to people like Barry Ellis of OneSwitch and the many others like him on the AGDev list, in IGDA, DIGRA, the Bartimeus Foundation and many other places. It seems that what we really need to push things forward is a killer app -- a way to prove a lot of what we've been banging on about regarding making systems easier for everyone by making them more adaptive. I'm not yet sure exactly what it is but I think we should really push towards it in our own ways and hopefully get to a place where we can collaborate together to actually construct it. (Actually maybe we researchers should really be concentrating on giving blind, motor or cognitive-impaired people the tools *they* need to do it *themselves*. That's certainly what a number of other projects are now looking at (e.g. Audio Game Editor) and what we're trying to do with our Level Description Language, albeit at a very early stage now.) Well, rant over. I hope that this has been interesting at least. I have copied it to both AGRIP-discus and AGDev-discuss in the hopes that we may be able to spark some discussion on the subject :-). bye just now, take care, Matthew [1] http://www.icc-camp.info/ -- Matthew Tylee Atkinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ AGRIP-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.agrip.org.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/agrip-discuss
