Hi Chris.
This was an interesting discussion to read, and I agree in part, it is
trivially true that if all human sensoary input or even the approximation of
those senses were equally functional via sound as opposed to vision,
blindness would be not be a disability.
However, I disagree that attempting to represent information and game
concepts is a chimera or a less than crytical attempt, simply because there
is far more to games than just the graphics. Player interaction,
apprehention of game factors, construction of explorable environments etc.
I myself have been fully able (and still am aable), to play a number of
visual games with if not quite the same ease as a sighted person (especially
as regards text), at least with enough to success to appreciate what aspects
of those games made them unique. Other genres such as fps have been closed
to me.
When I started playing audio games with shades of doom, what convinced me
that the idea of games via sound was a worth while exercise was the fact
that shades, for all it might not be up to the same level of information or
play speed as a sighted game, had the same factors which made a game like
original doom a good example of the fps genre. Exploration, atmosphere,
compelling story, and semi tactical combat.
I would myself suggest it is these elements and how the inofrmation
processing qualities of sound can be made to enhance these elements which
should be the focus of game developers when creating an audio version of a
visual game, hence the clock and map elements in castaways, the overview and
the ned to play reactively which ultimately matter far more to the stratogy
game than whether you see everything on the map, have an obscuring fog of
war etc.
So, before developing audio mine craft, before even deciding how to
represent information the question should be "what is valuable in the
experience of mine craft and how should this be bought to an audio game"
To take your roguelike example, I've been able to myself play Angband (and
some varients there of), through a combination of big viewable tyles and
readable text with supernova. Yes, I agree that despite a huge range of
factors presenting the information inherent in angband, everything about
each level to a blind player would not produce something which was easy to
play. However then we have kerkerkruip. Though thus far a shorter roguelike,
(far shorter than kerkerkruip), Kerkerkruip replicates random monsters,
tactical combat against multiple enemies, one time character death, and many
other staples of a roguelike but in the utterly accessible medium of a text
game.
In the same way, Entombed in it's original concept was not merely turn based
combat but was planned to have as much of the environmental traps, chests,
even food as a game like angband (sadly these got lost in developement
though if jason ever makes an Entombed Ii we might see them).
This is the sort of question I'd personally ask of developers.
As regards uses of sound, welll to be honest I'd myself argue this is
already being done by games like Papasangre, where the atmosphere and
challenge is directly related to sound, indeed when i showed a sighted
friend of mine who is a huge doom series fan Shades he stated Shades was if
anything harder and more terrifying than graphical doom because! of the lack
of sound and, the need to imagine the appearence of monsters and rely on
what were to my sighted friend unfamiliar senses.
So, this is in some sense already being done.
I personally would not be as much a fan of games written expressly about
blind super heroes or blind martial artists, but that objection is more
cultural than anything else since it smacks of elitism, and also can produce
somewhat condescending sounding games. I also do confess Che martin's rail
racer, set in a day of the trifids style future where most of the world's
population is blind so cyber motor racing happens on rail tracks made me
very much rethink my view on games which show an exclusively "blind"
experience, since Rr is a really well put together and awsome game with
great mechanics which preserves everything good a racing game should! have
but utilizes the "blindness" exploration of the plot to allow the need for
sound kews for the action.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
---
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