[games_access] Feedback needed on poster for GDC 2008

[Reid Kimball]

Of the games that use closed captioning they usually don't communicate
gameplay or other info such as distance and loudness. That is more a
style choice in my opinion, whether to change the alpha of the caption
based on how loud the sound is. My personal opinion is to err on the
side of readability and not use alpha to communicate loudness or
distance, etc. The distance can be represented in the visual sound
radar if the game/player wants to use that feature. Usually, how loud
a sound is doesn't matter, because one sound is loud or soft doesn't
usually communicate important gameplay information.

I can see developers wanting to get creative with the captions, making
them shake and look distorted to represent an earthquake, that's fine,
but I think players should have the option to turn these text
animations off and fall back to plain non-stylized captions. They may
have poor vision or a low quality TV that makes them prefer the plain
text.

I'm curious if you or anyone has other opinions? Not many people are
using captions in this way and no standards have been established.

-Reid

On Jan 4, 2008 9:53 AM, Matthias Troup <foreversublime at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>  Reid,
>
>  A little off topic - Does [dcc] have any features relating to gameplay and
> difficulty?  Hard-to-hear sounds could be missed by anyone regardless of
> their hearing ability.  If the text were harder to see that would reflect
> the chance you might miss what the text identified.  For instance, if the
> text were displayed with an alpha channel correlating to how far away/loud
> the sound was and/or if the text were visible on-screen for a time that
> correlated to the distance/volume of the sound.
>
>  -Matt
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2008 22:10:25 -0800
> > From: reid at rbkdesign.com
> > To: games_access at igda.org
>
> > Subject: [games_access] Feedback needed on poster for GDC 2008
> >
>
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I'm working on a poster for my Dynamic Closed Captioning poster
> > session at GDC this coming Feb 2008. I'd like feedback on the poster
> > regarding the actual content I have on it. I wanted to keep the
> > content minimal, I want people talking with me rather than reading
> > posters. I also want the poster to prompt them to ask questions, so
> > not everything is explained clearly on purpose.
> >
> > NOTE: I know that one screenshot is labeled as Half-Life 2 but instead
> > shows Doom3[CC], this is temp and I'll change it to HL2 later.
> >
> > Take a look at the word 2007 version or the pdf version linked below:
> >
> > http://gamescc.rbkdesign.com/GDC2008_poster02.docx
> > http://gamescc.rbkdesign.com/GDC2008_poster02.pdf
> >
> > Thanks everyone,
> >
> > -Reid
> > _______________________________________________
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> > games_access at igda.org
> > http://seven.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/games_access
>
>
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