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.

Game Mechanics Examined

  No matter how good the storytelling, graphics, or level design, a video game’s legacy, replay-ability, and longevity depend almost completely on the quality and entertainment value of its core mechanics. If getting frags in Halo was awkward and difficult no-one would play it. If it was okay but not great "some" people would play it. But because its mechanics are intuitive, exciting, and very well done, Halo is an extremely popular game. (Granted, having the might of Microsoft behind you doesn't hurt either.)

  Once the core mechanics of what makes up the true essence of a game have been established, keeping it simple from that point on through the development is key. Taking a good set of mechanics and dressing them up with "code-candy-mechanics" will often only serve to homogenize an otherwise memorable set of solid core mechanics. Developers must resist the urge to over-engineer their game with superfluous mechanics that don’t further the purpose of the title.

Dice Game

Puh-Puh-Puh-Poker Dice

Objective:
- Be the first player to reach twenty points

Every player starts with the following:
- 5 six-sided dice
- 1 cup
- Pen and Paper
- 10 Points

Play as follows:
- All players roll two dice but keep them concealed from other players under the cup.
- All players roll two more dice keeping them visible to all.
- All players who decide to fold uncovers their dice and turns up their cup.
- All players roll their last die, but keeps them visible to all.
- All players reveal their dice.
- The player with the highest poker-style dice roll wins.
- All players who did not fold or win, subtract one point from their total.
- The winner adds a point to his/her total for every player (including himself/herself) that did not fold.
- If all but one player fold, that player is awarded one point.
- The first player to reach 20 points wins.

Game Review: Chalk

Chalk is a 3rd person, 2-D, side-scroller that takes place on the surface of a chalk-board. The object is to avoid and destroy damage-dealing enemy shapes by drawing chalk lines with your mouse. If your chalk line connects all the right points, the shape blows up.

It’s a challenging game because it really tests the player’s acuity. Within just a couple seconds of beginning a chalk line, the chalk line stops, no matter what. Using the mouse to connect two or more points on a moving target within just a couple seconds is very challenging. I’ve never played a game that required that type of control before and it’s certainly not as easy as it first appears to be.

While Chalk doesn’t have oodles of replay value, at least not for me, its uniqueness and novelty value alone assure that it will at least get a couple plays by most people who check it out.

Chalk is a game play driven title. It completely revolves around speed and accuracy of drawing various shaped chalk lines. While there is strategy involved in deciding what order to attempt o defeat the enemy shapes, it’s really all about being accurate with the mouse.
The game is displayed as if you were looking at an animated chalk board. There are numbers and formulas written on the board that scroll by and all objects on the board appear as if drawn in chalk, including your character. Because of this, most everything is in black and white. This is not to say the graphics aren’t cool because they are, they just aren't mind blowing. While the animation is very cartoon-look, it’s also and really cute. I could see a 8-10 year old girl really enjoying this game for a while.

The only thing you can do in the game is move around the board and draw chalk lines so the controls are both easy to use and easy to get used to. Movement is controlled by either using the W-S-A-D keys or using the right mouse button. To draw a chalk line, the user clicks and holds the left mouse button down. This is the trickiest part of the game, especially when you are trying to connect three or mouse together.

While this game is original and creative, it’s not the kind of game you look forward to playing for hours. So, in the end, I give it 3 out of 5 shiny fireflies.

Chapter Three Book Work

Review Question 2: Design a movement system for my origninal game idea and describe how I would incorporate context sensitive moves.

A few weeks ago, a game concept occured to me that's very idea is context sensitive. The concept revolves around a first person shooter/action-adventure-ish game in which the central character's dimensional reality can be switched using sepcific game objects. The reality that is switched to would vary depending on the type of game object that is used.

Because a different reality is itself a different context, every time the player switches realities the context of the controls change. So, while in one reality the player might be in a building aiming a hand gun at an attacking enemy thug, in an alternate reality he could be under water aiming a spear gun at an attacking tiger shark. Or, he could be in an alien dimension aiming a mercury filled water pistol at a charging zander-beast.

The moves and controls would depend on the context of the player's current reality. In one reality, the [X] button causes the player to jump, while in another it might cause the player to swim or fly. The player would have to experiment to figure out what kind of abilities they have in each reality. They player could learn to switch realities to take advantage of a another reality's ability for a given situation.

Journal One: The Tablet

In his top-floor downtown flat, Diogenes knew what he had to do and that he had to do it fast. Soon they would stop knocking and start shooting. With that thought Diogenes Reynolds slipped in to the bedroom, quietly locking the door behind him.

The heavy knocking turned into pounding and shouting followed by the sound of splintering and cracking wood. "They're through the front door," he thought to himself knowing he only had seconds left.

Diogenes quickly grabbed the chair next to the bed and hurled it through the window over looking the street. He got his head out of the window quickly enough to see the chair smash to pieces as it hit the cold winter pavement 3 stories below. Fortunately, he was planning on going the other direction.

"In here," came a voice from outside the door.

Twisting over backward to look up, Diogenes could see the ledge he needed to reach above. He climbed up on the window's edge and then crouched down and turned around to face the inside of the apartment. Just then, bedroom door burst open. Diogenes caught a glimpse of a black suit and a gun as he sprung upwards from his crouched position towards the ledge above him.

Straining to reach as far as he could, he caught the ledge with his fingers but that was all he needed. Shots rang out below him as he pulled himself up on to the roof. Wasting no time, he sprinted across the rooftop to the fire escape. He quickly scaled down to the alley below and fled on foot in to the darkness.

Diogenes wandered the back streets giving himself time to ponder what it meant; the answer is though the door of the healing fathers. He'd come across it while reading the dead priest's blog just before the uninvited guests showed up. "...through the door of healing fathers" he repeated to himself; something about it rang a bell. Then, like a lightening bolt, it hit him. Diogenes turned to the east and sprinted down the alley and in to the night.

18 minutes later Diogenes Reynolds came to an abrupt halt in front of a large iron wrought door with names formed in large iron letters decorating it's crossbars. He caught his breath as he read to himself the names he recognized; Hippocrates, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister. These, he knew, were all fathers of medicine. "Healing fathers," he said to himself realizing whatever he needed must be behind the door in front of him.

A tug on the handle revealed the door was locked. After a quick glance around, Diogenes scaled the wall of the two-story brick building and made it to the roof. There he found an unlocked access door and slipped inside. The building appeared to him to be a long deserted medical facility of some sort.

Not knowing exactly what to look for, he began going from room to room opening cabinets and doors, looking under beds and in closets. Finding nothing on the second floor, he repeated his search on the first floor with the same results, nothing.

"It has to be here," he though as he walked to the front door and pressed his palm against it. "Through door of the healing fathers," he repeated to himself, again. He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply and then slowly exhaled as he turned around to face long main hall. He opened his eyes a scanned the room. He noticed a series of dusty picture frames hanging on the wall next to a door frame.

He walked over for a closer look. They were photographs of a Cathedral he immediately recognized. It was St. Book's Cathedral. The same Cathedral the dead priest was from. The one who left the clue that led Diogenes here in the first place. It couldn't be a coincidence. He knew where to go next. But St. Books was on the other side of town, he'd have to risk hailing a cab.

15 minutes later Diogenes exited a yellow taxi in front of St Book's Cathedral. He stepped on to the curb and took in the size of the building that stood before him, it was massive. He noted that it seemed much more menacing here at night than in the daytime photo he'd just seen hanging on the wall back in the "house of heavenly docs".

Fully expecting another climb was ahead of him, Diogenes walked over to the Cathedral entrance and pulled on the front door handle. Much to his surprise, the door began to open. "Finally, a break" he thought, as he opened the door and stepped inside. It was dark inside, so dark that he felt the cold steel of a large gun barrel press against his forehead long before he ever saw it. He heard a sound behind him followed by a searing pain at the base of his skull, an then, blackness...

Diogenes opened his eyes. The throbbing he felt in the back of his head as he tried to focus was not unlike that of a severe hangover. Which is exactly what he thought he had until the fist came into focus. It was attached to a large arm belonging to an equally large man who looked very eager to use it. Diogenes realized he was bound to a chair.

"I'll ask you only once," said a British man's voice from behind him "where is the tablet?".

"What the hell is he talking about," Diogenes thought. "I don't know. Why don't you tell me." he said giving Mr.Fist a wry smile.

An explosion of pain rippled outwards from the left side of his upper lip like wildfire. "Ouch, that looks like it hurt." said the voice from behind. He continued, "If you haven't noticed, my friend Badger rather likes to hit things. Honestly" he paused pensively, " I rather enjoy watching."

"Oh. Well in that case. Could you describe the tablet? I mean, was it Kindle-like or more IPad-ish?" Diogenes wasn't going to break, but his nose did as Badger's fist connected with it at blistering speed. Though writhing in agony, he didn't weep. He'd broken his nose before. Soon the searing pain would be replaced by a dull throbbing ache which he recalled would be much more tolerable.

The British man stepped in front of Diogenes and leaned in close until the two were nearly nose to nose. "Here is your choice Mr. Reynolds." He spoke slowly and precisely, "You can tell me where it is and I promise to end you quickly, with a bullet. Or, you can refuse to cooperate cooperate. in which case I shall instruct Badger to end you using only his teeth. Quite painful, as you can image, and also quite slow." He glanced over his shoulder at a grinning Badger. Then looked back and whispered calmly, "Now Mr Reynolds, tell me where the tablet is."

"I told you, I don't even know what you are talk-" Diogenes tried to respond.

"YES YOU DO!" The British man's thundering voice interrupted. He frantically thrust his hand in to his inner breast pocket and fished out a small black and white photo. Still yelling, "TELL ME MR REYNOLDS! TELL ME WHERE IT IS!" He held the photo up in front of Diogenes an shook it violently ... "THE TABLET OF FROZEN SOULS, TELL ME WHERE IT IS!!"

Diogenes felt the blood freeze in his veins. He didn't look at the photo. He didn't need to. At that moment Diogenes learned all he needed to know. He was about to die.

Player Walkthrough: Tactical Advantage

By Adrian Palmer, Jon Daley, Bobby Lee, Mike Gossett

  The Green Army’s forces are on the move and my Army, which consists of 10 soldiers, two tanks, and two missile batteries, is running dangerously low on resources. Currently, we are located in the grasslands about four clicks south of the nearest city. To the East are nearly impassable mountains. To the West are barely navigable forests. However, about 8 clicks to the Northwest, there is a resource facility that, according to reports, is unoccupied. I decide to send a small squad of soldiers to capture it quickly and, in case there’s trouble, a Tank along behind for support.

  After dispatching my troops, I receive word that the Green Army has soldiers advancing on the same resource facility. Although my troops will reach it first, I decide to dispatch a missile battery so that once secured, I can take out the Green Army’s advance forces from a distance. If I can hold it, then I’ll use it as a jumping off point to launch attacks on other facilities.

  As planned, my troops reach the facility first. Unfortunately, the Green Army will be within attack range before my missile battery is close enough to defend. Meanwhile the Red Army has captured its second resource facility and is marching West towards my base. I order two tanks and my remaining Missile Battery to the East to set up a defense perimeter, so I can fend off the Red Army’s approach.

  I soon receive word that we have secured the Northwestern Resource Facility without incident. However, the joy of that operation’s success is short lived when a subsequent report indicates that the Green Army’s tanks are now within attack range of our newly captured facility. They attack and immediately capture one of our soldiers.

  
My support tank returns fire, disables, and captures one of their two tanks. Their remaining tank fires and takes out my troop holding the facility, blast! Our tanks exchange a few javascript:void(0)more rounds of fire before my tank lands a critical hit and capture theirs.

  Happy to have won that battle, I now have a tough decision to make: With the Red Army quickly advancing on our position from the East, can I afford to dispatch more forces to reoccupy the Resource Facility?

  Ultimately, I determine that keeping troops back to defend the Eastern boarder against the Red Army makes more tactical sense than immediately going after the Resource Facility again. My hopes are that my single tank can defend the facility until more troops can be sent to re-occupy it.

... I’ll just have to wait and see …