Accessibility in Video Games

  The assignment this week was about accessibility for the physically impaired. Play a game we are proficient at while physically handicapped in various ways: no hands, no sight, one arm, and, for control purposes, one game without an impairment. I chose the game I've been playing the most lately, Halo Reach. As an XBOX 360 title, it uses the standard wireless XBOX 360 controller. I decided to play four games of Team Swat Deathmatch on XBOX Live.

Game One - No Impairments
  The controls in Halo rely HEAVILY on visual senses and many input commands at once. At any given time you may be moving forward (left stick), looking to the side (right stick), while jumping (left bumper) and shooting (right trigger) at an enemy. That's four different inputs at once. While once the technique is learned and committed to "muscle memory" it becomes automatic, controlling the game is still a relatively complex human behavior to undertake.

Game Two - No Arms
  I played with my feet. My two big toes, really. The left toe was on the left stick which controls for movement forward and backward, strafe left and strafe right. The right toe was on the right stick controlling where I was looking. After a few minutes I was able to cooridnate my feet to the point where I could walk forward and carefully turn and go around corners. However, because the mouse is so sensitive and the human foot is not conditioned for such small movements, even attempting to aim at an enemy was futile. By the time you got the recticule anywhere near where you wanted to shoot, the enemy gone or, more likely, had already killed you. Add to that the fact that in all of the controller configurations, the attack is controlled by the right trigger, which, in order to get to, I have to take my right foot off the aiming stick and turn the controller sideways to reach.

All that being said, I do feel like if the cotrols had been set up differenltly I may have been able to get more than the one kill I managed to muster by walking up behind someone who wasn't playing and assassinate them.

Game Three - No Sight
  Playing Halo3 blind-folded felt ridiculously futile. Watching the replay afterwards showed just how ridiculously futile it was. While I had all the tools I needed to control my player, I had not intelligence behind my movement. I would up just running in random directions and firing my Battle Rife in circles or in to the wall. Amazingly, I did get a single kill when a player happened to spawn right in front of me while I was firing randomly. Unfortunately, he was from our team and my one kill was a betrayal.

Game Four - One Arm
  So for the one armed attempt things went a little better. Being right-handed I chose to not use my left and actually got three legit kills. Its still extremely hard to get in position and aim. Two of my kills came from camping in a spot where I knew opponents would come by and correctly a head shot when they did. In order to make the game even remotely playable the controls would have to be split between the one hand and the feet. One such a device was devised however, I'm certain that those who chose to use it would soon excel at it.

Conclusion:
  In the end, this exercise really showed me how inaccessible video games must be to people with these type of impairments. Game designers would do well to try experiments like this when designing control system for games to be used by both non-impaired and impared players presents a serious challenge.