Reading in the dark
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Kestrell" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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08:02 pm
[Link] |
Online talk on accessible chess
Kes: Anna Dresner produces some of the most knowledgeable and useful discussions on accessible media, so I highly recommend this event to anyone interested in the subject.
Anyone For A Game of Chess? | Accessible World
Date: Monday, April 21, 2008
Time: 5:00 p.m. Pacific, 6:00 p.m. Mountain, 7:00 p.m. Central, 8:00 p.m. Eastern and elsewhere in the world Tuesday 0:00 GMT.
Where: Tek Talk Conference Room at:
http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rsc9613dc89eb2
or
http://www.accessibleworld.org
The Accessible News Wire April 13, 2008, Indianapolis, Indiana USA
http://accessibleworld.org/content/anyone-game-chess
Chess has been defined many ways but most will agree that it is not merely an idle amusement but essentially in its essence it is a game, in its form an
art, and in its execution a science. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened
by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions. the current form of the game emerged in Southern Europe during the second half of the 15th century
after evolving from similar, much older games of Indian and Persian Origin dating back somewhere before 600 A.D.. Today, while chess is one of the world's
most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide in clubs, online, by correspondence, in tournaments and informally, only a limited number believe
that it can be played and enjoyed by individuals who are blind. Anna Dresner and Alan Dicey will demonstrate to the Tek Talk audience that Whether you're
new to chess or a seasoned player, blindness does not have to stop you from playing, and playing well. It really is a game that can be played effectively
and enjoyed by those who are totally blind.
IN their presentation, they will describe adaptive chess sets, discuss playing as a blind person, tell you where to get free lessons, and suggest lots of
ways to meet other players - sighted and blind, from the U.S. and elsewhere - and develop your skills via e-mail, voice chat, and computer chess programs.
So listen in, then grab a board and join the fun!
( contact info and online conference room info below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Tags: accessibility, games
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03:36 pm
[Link] |
It's good when you can laugh
One reason I listen to http://www.937mikefm.com
is that they play these really amusing little soundbites. The one which just played was
News flash! Boston Mayor Menino wants to outlaw violent video games.
...News flash: Mayor Menino knows what video games are.
It seems, according to this story
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view.bg?articleid=1080874&srvc=home&position=rated
that the mayor is blaming teenage street violence on video games. I've always been curious about this arguement: if kids are home playing video games, how can they be out shooting people? Also, is it an election year for the mayor?
Current Music: Crazy
Tags: games, politics
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12:25 pm
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Indie games trends
I wanted to follow up on my post of yesterday by linking to whatever blog posts I could find on Henry Jenkins' and Beth Coleman's presentations on virtual worlds, the event I went to last night, but I've had no luck in finding any posts (after spending all day yesterday writing, I didn't feel up to doing any more typing myself, but I could hear other people at the event typing away like mad).
Short of that, however, I can point to a blog post which Henry made yesterday regarding the indie games movement, as I think this has a lot of potential for doing creative things with games that contain accessible content. One comment Henry made at the talk last night which really resonated with me is that virtual worlds (and I would include game interfaces) do not need to conform to real-world physics or architecture, so rather than feeling restricted by meatspace limitations, one can take those limitations as a starting place and then do something impossible.
The post Henry made was an article on indie games at this year's GDC written by a game designer who, probably not so coincidentally, has developed
AudiOdyssey
http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/index.php
an accessible music game for the Wii which is intended to be played by both visually-impaired and sighted players.
{Note that if you go to the Gambit site you should also check out Wiip, which is a game that lets you use the Wii controller like a circus leader's whip--it sounded very cool when I had the chance to hear it, but it also, like Eitan's game, used the Wii controller in an innovative way}.
In his article, Eitan discusses the indie games at GDC as falling into "three non-exclusive themes: Games as art, space/time manipulation games, and user generated + independent games."
GDC 2008 Round Up
by Eitan Glinert
http://henryjenkins.org/
Current Location: aerye
Tags: games
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04:02 pm
[Link] |
Planning my corner of the virtual world: The Jorge Luis Borges Book Center and Dog Park
This evening I will be attending an event at MIT titled
" It's a Small World: How Virtual Communities Are Changing the Ways We Relate"
(6-8:30 p.m. at the MIT Campus Broad Institute NE 30, corner of Main Street and Ames Street).
The registration Web site mentioned homework, so, as one of the discussion topics will be "What Kind of World Would You Make: Second Life as Thought Experiment," I decided to do the Hermione thing and plan my corner of the virtual world.
*The Jorge Luis Borges Book Center and Dog Park*
with explanations about accessibility and how a visually-impaired user accesses a visual interface
First, a couple of facts regarding people with disabilities as a potential market.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Tags: accessibility, games
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05:19 pm
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Recommendations for improving access to virtual worlds
The March issue of AccessWorld is just out
http://www.afb.org/accessworld
and it includes an article which makes recommendations for improving accessibility to virtual worlds. The opening of the article muses on a real-life inaccessible space as one of the writers attempted to locate the elevator in a hotel with muddled acoustics. This points to one potential use of combining virtual worlds and accessibility: the possibility of using virtual worlds to help improve the access of real spaces. I have to say, sometimes I really wonder what the engineers were thinking when they designed something that was supposed to be accessible.
Case in point: have you noticed the audible cross signal in Central Square directly in fron of the Starbuck's, which gives the visually-impaired a go-ahead signal for a crosswalk where *no one ever stops*.
Exploring Methods of Accessing Virtual Worlds
http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw090207
We present some possible solutions for accessible navigation and
communication in virtual worlds such as Second Life
William S. Carter and Guido D. Corona
Other articles of potential interest:
Music Is His Life and His Livelihood: An Interview With Bill Mccann of
Dancing Dots
We interview the maestro of a company that makes composing and printing
music accessible--Deborah Kendrick
Surfing into the Future: An Introduction to Web 2.0
Having trouble using MySpace, YouTube or Basecamp? We examine the
reasons--Stephanie Bassler
+ reviews of lots of new access technologies
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: accessibility, blindness, games, universal design
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12:07 pm
[Link] |
Virtual card catalog generator + New book on game violence
I swiped this link to the
Virtual Card Catalog Generator
http://www.blyberg.net/card-generator
from
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sandramcdonald
Note that the card catalog site also has a great blogroll of library-related blogs, including
Game On: Games in Libraries
http://libgaming.blogspot.com/
Here is the most recent post from Game On
block quote start
With the release of Grand Theft Auto VI on the horizon, Terry Bosky of Game Couch
interviews Dr. Cheryl Olson, co-author of
Grand Theft Childhood? The Suprising Truth About Violent Video Games
, to determine what parents, educators and policymakers need to know about the controversial video games and how their children use them.
Read the full interview at:
http://www.gamecouch.com/2008/02/interview-dr-cheryl-olson-co-author-of-grand-theft-childhood/
block quote end
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: bookish
Tags: cross-referencing, games
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04:07 pm
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Haptics and the technology of touch
Kes: I had the chance to do some testing with a haptics interface last summer and, while it was part of an interface being developed in order to help blind travelers familiarize themselves with new locations, the possibility of using such tactile feedback in other sorts of interfaces, including games--or even maybe something like Google maps?-- sounds like an exciting mode for providing alternate feedback beyond the merely visual.
Note: Follow the link for more links and related articles
How Haptics Will Change the Way We Interact with Machines
By Daniel H. Wilson
from Popular Mechanics
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4253368.html
The term “joystick” seems a bit frivolous for the device in front of me, but there it is, an
interface
that hearkens back to the days of Pac Man and Donkey Kong. Yet this joystick is special—a highly evolved example of a technology that is changing the way
humans interact with machines. I’m in the Microdynamic Systems Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and the interface I’m looking at
is properly called a magnetic levitation haptic device. The apparatus is built into a bowl-shaped indentation in a table; its plastic joystick sits in
the midst of brightly colored red and blue magnet arrays. As I reach inside the basin to palm the handle, the device hums and shivers almost imperceptibly.
On a monitor in front of me, a small, spherical cursor hovers above a plain studded with nubby cones. It acts as a sort of fingertip for exploring the
3D landscape. When I push straight down on the joystick, the little orb drops. The grip jiggles my hand as I drag the sphere over the rocky ground. It’s
surprisingly fun. I jounce over a cluster of mini-pyramids, glide over a smooth spot and then hit a solid wall—pop! I feel the joystick jerk to a stop
in my hand. Every aspect of this virtual world is a playground of texture, and the haptic controller translates tactile data into feedback you can feel.
It’s a high-tech exploration of an often-ignored sensory faculty—the sense of touch.
At Carnegie Mellon University’s Microdynamic Systems Lab, this experimental magnetic levitation haptic device is used to quantify a variety of tactile sensations,
including roughness and elasticity. The world of haptics is expansive by definition. It is the field of science and technology dedicated to tactile sensation,
and it has applications for everything from handheld electronic devices to remotely operated robots. Yet outside of the research and engineering community,
it is a virtually unknown concept. “People don’t even recognize the word ‘haptics’ yet,” says Ralph Hollis, director of the Microdynamic lab. “You have
to spell it for them.” In an age of digital devices that stimulate and amaze the eyes and ears with increasingly high fidelity, haptics has been employed
mostly in relatively unsophisticated applications—rumbling video-game controllers and buzzers that alert you to a cellphone call. But as our digital tools
have become more complex and capable, our
interfaces with these devices are beginning to run into the limitations of sight and sound. “It’s really only now that we’re seeing a migration from keyboards and
mechanical switches to touchscreens and touch-sensitive surfaces,” says Mike Levin, a vice president at Immersion, a San Jose, Calif., company that produces
haptic interfaces. “We’re losing that tactile feel that we had before, and now we’re trying to bring it back.” Plus, games and online social networks are
emerging with richly rendered 3D environments that can be hard to navigate on a two-dimensional screen.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Tags: games, haptics, technology
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02:36 pm
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A brief history of Wikipedia by Nicholson Baker
The New York Review of Books has a very witty article on
The Charms of Wikipedia
By Nicholson Baker
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131
in which Baker refers to Wikipedia as both a giant leaf pile and as a medieval wall with bits of classical buildings built into it.
Baker then goes on to describe the gaming aspects of Wikipedia.
block quote start
But the sources and the altruism don't fully explain why Wikipedia became such a boom town. The real reason it grew so fast was noticed by co-founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales in its first year of life. "The main thing about Wikipedia is that it is fun and addictive," Wales wrote. Addictive, yes. All big Internet successes—e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft—have a more or less addictive component—they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you're trying to sleep.
Brion Vibber, who was for a while Wikipedia's only full-time employee, explained the attraction of the encyclopedia at a talk he gave to Google employees in 2006. For researchers it's a place to look stuff up, Vibber said, but for editors "it's almost more like an online game, in that it's a community where you hang out a bit, and do something that's a little bit of fun: you whack some trolls, you build some material, etcetera." Whacking trolls is, for some Wikipedia editors, a big part of why they keep coming back.
block quote end
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood:  charmed
Tags: games, wikipedia
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10:53 am
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Turning Disabled Into Gamers, MIT Aims to Spread Robot Rehab
Article on the development of rehab robots at MIT’s Newman Lab for Biomechanics and Human Rehabilitation
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4252136.html
I found the following quote especially amusing--now if only I could program live humans to learn this rule.
block quote start
“Apparently, this hasn’t been easy on the physical therapists,” says Hermano Igo Krebs, principal research scientist at MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “It’s a highly aerobic activity for them.” That’s not because the robots are particularly strong—according to Krebs, they’re generally built to be capable of 28 newtons, or roughly the same strength as a “weak woman.” Since these devices aren’t working out muscles, but attempting to restore synaptic connections, there’s no need for additional force. In fact, to build successful rehabilitative robots, MIT had to develop machines whose first priority wasn’t to push back, but to get out of the way.
Krebs compares most robots to a car in low gear. When you’re heading uphill, shifting into first gear makes sense. But once you’re driving downhill, the car is actually resisting gravity, restricting your speed. Likewise, robots are generally built for performance, and even robotic toys rely on sensors to avoid either slapping their human owners around or burning out their motors against us. On assembly lines, potentially lethal industrial robots are built to freeze the instant anyone crosses nearby laser boundaries. Building robots that instantly shift between zero resistance and even a minor amount of force is an ongoing technical challenge.
block quote end
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: disability, games, mit
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09:30 am
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Accessibility in games links and resources
Someone asked about resources on this topic, so here is a short list of links and articles where one can learn more about what some people are doing about making mainstream games accessible or creating games which appeal to both disabled and abled gamers (thanks to simplychristina and vernicus for the links).
1. The International Game Developers Association Accessibility SIG
http://igda.org/accessibility
I would point you specifically to
the mailing list,
the news blog
http://gameaccessibility.blogspot.com/
--I just created a LJ feed for this named igd_access--
and the sections titled "Readings and Presentations" and "Game accessibility organizations."
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: accessibility, games
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01:28 pm
[Link] |
Article on designing accessibility into games
Via the OneSwitch.org.uk blog
http://switchgaming.blogspot.com/
this link to an Gamasutra article by
Eitan Glinert, who developed the AudiOdyssey audible rhythm game I helped test last summer,
Designing Games That Are Accessible To Everyone
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3538/designing_games_that_are_.php
Kes: One of the things I always find interesting about the varied comments one gets on anything relating to accessibility is that comments always seem to fall into three camps, the latter two of which often overlap:
1) It works for me and therefore I think it works for the majority/mainstream, so don't change it
and
2) This article made me think about how to do something I hadn't thought about before, cool!
and
3) I know someone with a disability and knowing them has gotten me thinking...
Current Location: aerye
Tags: accessibility, games
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09:55 am
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As Ray Kurzweil discusses the future of games at GDC, PWD remain excluded
As Ray Kurzweil, one of the most significant innovators in regard to adaptive technologies, is set to deliver the major keynote speech at GDC, it is interesting to note that people with disabilities, including vision, hearing, and mobility impairments, are still being significantly left out of the mainstream games that reporters are discussing in regard to the banner year of 2007. Game culture, like the rest of culture at large, is one of the ways in which people share experiences, not just entertainment, and as virtual worlds expand to include employment, education, and social opportunities, the disregard of equal access for everyone is becoming one more way for people with disabilities to be left out of the future being discussed--and designed-- now.
A couple of tidbits on the GDC:
1. Future of video game industry taking shape at GDC
Posted by Daniel Terdiman
block quote start
One thing that strikes me about how video games are intersecting with people's lives in 2008, and it was made abundantly clear over the Christmas holidays, when it was
simply impossible to find a Nintendo Wii
for sale anywhere, is that finally, the medium is truly mainstream.
And while there will always be a significant segment of the industry that caters to and is serviced by hard-core gamers, what's becoming evident is that there's almost no one who is left out of what video gaming is today. And for those who are left out, that may not be true as the years progress. I suspect that that is something Kurzweil will touch on, at least briefly.
"It's a very exciting time in the game industry, in that we have this growing recognition of the important of casual and family-oriented content," said Jamil Moledina, the director of GDC. "You're seeing it in the $60 packaged (games) and in the $10 downloads. It's a perfect storm of factors poised to really expand the game industry."
block quote end
2. Game creators look to the future
By Darren Waters Technology editor, BBC News website
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: disgruntled
Tags: accessibility, games
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09:39 am
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Accessible games list, BBC dramatizations, more
From the Top Tech Tidbits newsletter
http://www.flying-blind.com/tttenews/02142008/index.html
1) Thanks to
http://www.blindbargains.com,
we learn about We Can Play, a web site with an associated mailing list devoted to the principle that many mainstream video games can be played by people
with little or no vision.
http://www.wecanplay.info/index.php?title=Main_Page
2) The creator of The Ranger Station is an enthusiast of Big Finish, a British site which is licensed to create high quality audio dramatized versions
of several popular science fiction TV series, including Dr. Who, Dark Shadows, and Stargate.
http://www.bigfinish.com/
3) Google Hacks is an open-source collection of search enhancements for Google, enabling you to conduct a variety of searches and do some lesser-known
things with the Google service.
http://code.google.com/p/googlehacks
( more below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.wumb.org
Tags: accessibility, blindness, games, google, media
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07:15 pm
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GamersRead.com
It needs to happen. If I had the money, I would grab the domain name myself.
Does the phrase "transmedia storytelling" not mean anything to someone who chooses to go into radio?
Prompted by
this NPR segment
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17938562
where the interviewer asks the question
"Do gamers read?"
It's really too bad, because she was doing a nice job up until then discussing storytelling in games.
Disclaimer: Please do not be fooled into thinking that the number of posts I have made today referencing NPR indicate that I am any sort of responsible newshound or anything. I was just spring cleaning and doing my usual station surfing.
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: irked
Current Music: www.wumb.org Art of the Song
Tags: books, games, media studies
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03:46 pm
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"Hellooo, friend! Would you come over here?"
So my favorite fanboy alexx_kay made me a CD a few weeks back full of Portal soundbites (because obviously not enough of his brain cells had colonized my brain yet), and I've been going around quoting
Turret
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8foSL_G-oi0
pretty much continuously, until alexx_kay turned the soundbite into his ringtone for me. On the one hand, kind of embarassing; on the other, I will now be able to track him at Arisia.
Oh, and is it truly the case that no one has made a Turret t-shirt yet? Better yet, a Turret hoodie?
But just in case that wasn't enough robot love for you, LJ user jesse_the_kay sent me
this link to an audio mashup of a choir of old talking Mac voices
http://www.archive.org/details/org.resource.public.twas
reciting "The Night Before Christmas," though maybe you have to be a synthetic voice geek to be quite as amused as we were by this.
Current Location: library
Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Still Alive
Tags: games, homicidal robots, media, talking computers
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09:50 am
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Fantasy games, fantasy literary, and fiary tale come together in Miyuki Miyabe's Brave Story
Kes: I will be adding this title to my Amazon wishlist, and thought others might find it interesting as well. I would be interested in hearing form anime fans on whether this story has some similarities to that medium as well.
Brave Story
by Miyuki Miyabe
Playing Games: A review by William Alexander
Miyuki Miyabe has written dozens of books in all sorts of genres,
but only a few of her novels have as yet been translated from
Japanese into English; Brave Story, a sprawling young adult fantasy,
is the fourth. Brave Story chronicles the adventures of Wataru,
an ordinary boy who leaves urban Japan for the fantastical world
of Vision. This particular magical kingdom, filled with swords,
circuses, monsters and helpful animal-folk, is similar to Fantastica
of Michael Ende's The Neverending Story in that it never pretends
to be anything other than imaginary, even within the world of
the novel; both Vision and Fantastica take their shape and substance
from the imagination of ordinary people. But unlike Bastian, The
Neverending Story's book-loving protagonist, Wataru's imaginings
are fueled by intense 3-D graphics. He loves video games, especially
fantasy role-playing, and such games are his primary reference
point for fantastical things.
This could also be true of Brave Story's target audience, who
might have learned fairy tale tropes primarily from games like
The Legend of Zelda. I'm not going to wring my hands about this,
or panic that kids are abandoning traditional entertainments for
new, scary, and immersive forms -- D&D games do not really inspire
teenagers to summon demons with the blood of their toddler siblings,
few readers since Quixote have lost their sanity in heroic novels,
and Plato's Republic has yet to be overthrown by either poets
or playwrights. The interesting question is not whether the influence
of video games is pernicious, but whether game-logic and story-logic
are even compatible. Game play involves active choices with unpredictable
outcomes, but it isn't possible to nudge the characters of a book
into doing things differently.
In Brave Story, at least, the ludic and the literary do compliment
each other. One reason for this compatibility might be the fact
that fantasy literature and fantasy games share a certain amount
of folkloric source material, including the "plot coupon" story
structure.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: bookish
Current Music: www.wbos.com
Tags: books, fairy tales, fantasy, games, wishlist
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12:32 pm
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Virtual worlds open up to blind users +Disability tattoos
Via Ouch! The BBC Disability Magazine
1. Disability illustrated: the tales behind the tattoos
By Holly Lane
"I believe tattoos are an artistic journal that mark out important milestones in the wearer's life - in blood and ink."
Holly Lane has numerous tattoos. They're very important to her, and each has a purpose or meaning. In this article she tells us about her body art, her
latest design, and meets other disabled people with personal stories behind their tattoos.
Go to
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/lifefiles/tattoo/
to view the tattoo photo slideshow
and read the stories of four disabled people with tattoos:
2. Virtual worlds open up to blind
BBC News, Tuesday 18 September
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6993739.stm
Online virtual worlds could soon be accessible to blind people thanks to research by students at IBM in Ireland.
By Geoff Adams-Spink
Age & disability correspondent, BBC News website
Screenshot of IBM building in virtual world, IBM
IBM is establishing a presence in virtual worlds
Online virtual worlds could soon be accessible to blind people thanks to research by students at IBM in Ireland.
Some estimates predict that 80% of active internet users will be using a virtual world in four years' time.
The company said that it is keen to ensure that blind people are not excluded from an environment that sighted people will take for granted.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: accessibility, blindness, disability, games, tattoos
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11:08 am
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Accessibility: Links to info on PDF, eBooks, games, Linux, more
Kes: Note that there is an additional free accessible game listed after the Top Tech tidbits listings--going back to school means you need more things to distract you from doing homework, right?
From Top Tech Tidbits
http://topdotenterprises.com/lists/ .
1) Stephen Baum from Kurzweil will present A Technical View of Optical Character Recognition as the Tek Talk presentation for GMT Tuesday, 11 September starting at 00:00.
http://www.accessibleworld.org.
2) Here is a Fred's Head Companion post to help you decide if joining
an audio book club is a good idea for you.
http://fredsheadcompanion.blogspot.com/2007/09/audio-book-clubs-are-they-right-choice.html
3) Fred's Head also tells us that Bob Rankin, co-author of the informative and venerable Internet Tourbus newsletter,
http://www.TOURBUS.com
wrote a plain-language book called the No Bs Guide to Linux. the book is out of print, so he has put it on the web, calling it Low Fat Linux, for free use.
http://www.LowFatLinux.com
4) the Gw Micro blog has recently discussed a way to read protected
pdf documents which you can use if you have Microsoft Office 2003 or
later,
( more below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: accessibility, blindness, editors, games, pdf
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02:57 pm
[Link] |
MIT Gambit lab develops accessible deejay game for blind gamers
Kes: This is the game I spent some time testing this past summer--you can find out more about it on Eitan's Web site
http://www.eitanglinert.com
and note that Eitan is looking for more blind testers as development continues.
Video games' new frontier: The visually impaired
By Steve Mollman
For CNN
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS/09/02/video.blind/
Forget shoot-em-up addicts -- video games are reaching out to the rest of us.
The greatest symbol of this is the Wii console from Nintendo. Its innovative wireless control -- the Wiimote -- has even non-gamers excited as they swing
it through the air to control, say, a tennis racket on the screen.
Wii's Wiimote may play a pivotal role in bringing the visually impaired into the electronic gaming fold.
But not quite everyone has been reached. One group is still largely ignored by video game makers: the blind.
With that in mind, a team of researchers at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in Massachusetts set out this summer to make a music-based video game that's
designed for mainstream players and also accessible to the blind.
Appropriately, perhaps, they incorporated the Wiimote into the game-play, though it's optional.
The resulting DJ game, designed for the PC, is called AudiOdyssey. In it, players try to lay down different tracks in a song by swinging and waving the
Wiimote in time with the beats. Or they can just use keyboard controls.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: pleased
Tags: accessibility, blindness, games, mit
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04:53 pm
[Link] |
Wired article commends BioShock as example of quality horror
Kes: I'm not just posting this because alexx_kay worked on BioShock, but because it makes some great points about what quality horror can offer, and I also like the fact that the writer points out how effective audio can be in creating anxiety and tension.
Gore Is Less: Videogames Make Better Horror Than Hollywood
By Clive Thompson
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2007/08/gamesfrontiers_0827
block quote start
I'd only been playing BioShock for 15 minutes, and already I was trembling like a little girl.
It's hard to disentangle what precisely was scaring the crap out of me. Maybe it was hearing the rumbling moans of a nearby Big Daddy, and realizing it
was hunting for me. Maybe it was the way those filthy, genetically modified humans would pop out of nowhere, dressed, improbably, in Victorian clothes
and creepy Eyes Wide Shut clown masks. Or maybe it was their weirdly garbled dialogue -- how they'd shriek, "Get away from me!" while slashing at me with
lead pipes.
The fact is, I like to be scared out of my wits. I'm one of those wimps who is easily spooked yet generally enjoys the sensation. So ever since I was a
kid, I've loved good horror movies -- I'd turn out the lights freak myself out with classics like Halloween, Friday the 13th or The Exorcist.
Yet here's the thing: For several years now, I've found that my favorite horror experiences aren't coming from movies any more. They're coming from games.
Why? Partly it's because films have become much less artistically interesting. With a choice few exceptions -- like the superb The Ring -- I've found that
modern horror movies have been offering less and less suspense, and more and more gore. Maybe it's due to the rampaging success of Saw, which gave birth
to the current trend toward torture-chic and metric tonnage of blood in scary movies.
In contrast, the best scary-game designers have quietly perfected the interplay of tension and release that makes for a truly cardiac horror experience.
They have, in a sense, become even more faithful interpreters of the horror tradition movies than Hollywood directors.
In BioShock, for example, the audio editors are masterful at generating free-floating anxiety. As you wander through the game's ruined city, whispering
voices pan in and out of your skull. Often it's the semilucid/semicrazy patter of the gibbering "splicer" humans, but either way, it makes you feel as
nuts as they are.
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Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: excited
Tags: games, horror
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