Re: GoldGun: Play for free Episode 1 from 31st January
Hy My True Sound team,
I want to adress the blindness as a story device issue here. Because I highly disagree that you should avoid the topic at all costs. There are however some problems with the approach on this.
Firstly the audio game market is full with games that give you an arbitrary reason why your character can't see and thus the game is audio only. So this plot device feels really stale to experienced players. Seen thousands of times, can't they come up with something new? That might be a problem that puts some people off.
Secondly this aspect is often just used as a justification, not as a narrative device. There is a very important difference hidden, let me explain:
A justification tries to establish the reason for a certain gameplay mechanic and is stacked ontop of a complete construct. Thus it often feels ill fitting and forced. Blindness as a narrative device however would use the special condition blind to build a story and some game mechanics ontop of it. This way you actually can work with the topic and develop it into something artistically fulfilling.
Blindness puts us in a disadvantage to normally sighted people in most situations. But games tend to tell a story about some superhuman being conquering all obstacles and enemies in their way. That doesn't fit very well together. Try to solve this dichotomy with your story or don't use blindness ass a plot device.
Just think of the movie don't breathe or the super hero daredevil for some interessting implementations of blindness in a real story environment.
Lastly coping with their own blindness is a highly delicate topic for some blind people for obvious reasons. Getting confronted with this aspect of life in a highly escapistic medium as video games can be a real bummer. By any means blindness as with all disabilities is a delicate issue and should be handled carefully. But also it has to be handled somehow because denying doesn't help either.
So if you feel comfortable to adress this issue with enough care and thought I am pretty sure someone could build an amazing audio game with a compelling story out of it.
If you however just want to make a game accessible to blind and visually impaired people please don't just use the "well, our main character turned blind, let's move on" trope. I don't need that at least.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
