Hi Paulette,
According to our charter the purpose of the Audyssey list is the discussion of games that are made accessible either through accident or design. This may include but is not limited to braille board games, braille card games, hand held games like BopIt, and of course any computer games that a blind person can reasonably play independent of sighted help. More recently we've allowed and added the development of accessible games to our charter as there have been a number of tools like Audio Game Maker, BGT, etc created in recent years for designing accessible games for the blind. Thus it falls under our charter because its related to accessible games for the blind.
The reason why the books you are talking about are off topic is that they are essentially just books about games, but aren't actually games themselves. Nor are they related to existing accessible games. Therefore we, the moderators, consider them to be outside of our purview to discuss accessible gaming.
It would be different if the book, story, etc was a piece of fan fiction related to an existing game. In a case like that it might be allowed, but would have to be related to a specific accessible game. It couldn't be just any story about gaming in general.
For example, there is a book called Kilobite about a couple of disabled people who end up getting trapped inside a virtual reality game. While you could argue its about gaming, it deals with accessibility issues, etc in the end its still mainly just a story. It has no connection to an existing accessible game, or even an accessible game in development. We feel rather than discussing it on Audyssey, which has very specific rules of what is on and off topic, you would be better served talking about books on one of the several book sharing lists for the blind.
As far as who sent the Dream Park books I wasn't paying attention and deleted the posts in question. Your best bet would be to go to
http://www.audyssey.org and look at the list archives to see who sent what. Cheers! On 5/1/2012 2:41 PM, Paulette Vickery wrote:
Hi Thomas, The book, Ready Player One, is all about computer games in the future. The book, Heir Apparent, is about a teenaged girl who is playing a computer game in the near future and something goes wrong with the game. The book, The Manhattan Hunt Club, is about a man who is caught in a hunting game under the city of New York. That one, I grant you, is not about computer games, but the book is about how he has to get out of the game in which he has been thrown. I was quite pleased to hear about the Dream Park books from someone on the list. If I hadn't started the gaming novels thread I would never have heard about them. Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by accessible games. Why are novels having to do with playing computer games not appropriate for the list? I did not know that people in England evidently do not have access to many of the books that we can read. So, very regretfully, I will not discuss books on this list again. I wonder how many more computer game books I will miss due to a lack of the discussion? Could you please let me know who sent the post about the Dream Park books so I can thank them off list? I have deleted many posts, including that one. Thanks. Paulette
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