[games_access] Retro Remakes 2006 Q & A's: Closed Captioning question

[Reid Kimball]

Thanks for the heads up.

Here's what I posted on the forum:

To confirm an answer to an earlier question, I personally prefer
having the option to turn captions on for dialog separate from sound
effects. Feedback from people who downloaded Doom3[CC] also like the
freedom. Most people will only want to caption dialog, but having the
freedom to only caption the sound effects is a nice touch I think.

As for captioning only what is visible on screen or what is important.
I like to keep things simple and my own philosophy is if it can be
heard, it needs to be captioned. In other words, every line of dialog
and sound effect recorded should have a matching caption. I understand
that strictness is time consuming and expensive for an indie developer
but it's important to make sure the experiences are equal between a
hearing player and a deaf player. When thinking about the experience
you want your players to have, you don't make up two experiences based
on people's abilities or preferences, otherwise you'd get a confusing
game I think or maybe you don't know what kind of game you really want
to make? Point is, the experience should be consistent for everyone,
both hearing and deaf players. A not so known fact is that most deaf
players will not play multiplayer games with hearing players because
they lack the audio clues the hearing players have access to. The deaf
players feel they are at a disadvantage. It doesn't have to be that
way.

Now, you might be thinking, "that's too many sounds to caption, won't
it be distracting?" The solution to this is to prioritize the sounds
you caption. For Doom3[CC], we developed a list of prioritized sounds
so that only the most important, threatening sounds were captioned
first. If everything was quiet, with no real threats, then the
environmental sounds were captioned. Providing captions for all
sounds, whether or not the gamer sees them will help provide a wider
range of experiences for deaf players. If you only caption threatening
monster and weapon sounds, during the quiet moments (if there are any)
they will lack the full experience of being in an environment that
lacks threatening sounds.

As an example, imagine you are playing a game, you are in a beautiful
mountain valley, there's a waterfall nearby and lots of birds flying
over head. Enemies being to attack and all the sounds are related to
the combat. When everything is done, the only sounds left are birds
chirping and water splashing. Hearing the contrast could be quite an
experience. If one were to only provide captions for the combat, Deaf
players will not have that soothing, calm-after-the-storm kind of
experience because the environmental sounds are not captioned. Marc
Laidlaw (writer for Valve) wrote about this in an interview, "In
an intense battle, the captions create a kind of cool staccato textual
poetry to go along with the action. It's a very good simulation of the
sonic experience." I can imagine during the battle of my above
example, the captions are poping up frantically, then when the
environmental sounds kick in, they slowly appear, creating a calming
visual to compliment the calming sounds of the scene.

-Reid

On 7/24/06, Barrie Ellis <barrie.ellis at oneswitch.org.uk> wrote:
>
>
> Any thoughts on the following (especially yours, Reid):
>
> from:
> http://www.retroremakes.com/forum2/showthread.php?t=6774&page=2
>
>
>
> I assume there are no real need for Closed Captions unless the sounds are
> important to the gameplay?
>
> Eg, if a game's sounds are mainly lazers, explosions etc, I'm assuming
> they'd serve no purpose?
>
> But if, say, you could hear off screen monsters getting louder as they get
> closer, those sound effects would justify it?
>
>
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