[games_access] Game control question...

[Michael Ellison]

On Jan 20, 2008 5:59 PM, d. michelle hinn <hinn at uiuc.edu> wrote:
> Heh -- that's interesting to know. And kind of not surprising, sadly.
> Oh, I think we could spend some major cash on hiring people to do all
> kinds of work. What were those investor's names? ;)

I'll let one know we're working on something and see if he has
suggestions.  Once we've got something together to present, we'll see
if/when he has time for introductions.  Trying not to bug him too much
without giving him something solid with an action plan - he gets
people asking for money for the craziest things all the time, and I
want to stay above his noise level.

> Well, awareness has been our purpose and what we've been trying to do
> for most of this decade. But without slick packages (back to that
> whole "ask for millions and you have a better chance" thing) and
> demonstrating how a company can financially benefit from including
> accessibility, that's where we get stuck.

Don't get stuck on the financial benefit part.  If I thought there was
a way to make game accessibility profitable enough to make serious
business sense, I'd raise venture capital to start a company for it
and make millions instead of spending my spare time writing free code
for it and working at a good but not exactly stimulating or life
enhancing day job.  But it's really not a huge-growth market from my
analysis (snide comments about political trends in the US bringing us
more customers aside) - if you do make a company in the accessibility
area you have to charge high prices to make up for low volumes and
you're keeping your fingers crossed hoping the insurance companies
will pay them.  I'd put money on it that KYE operates at a loss or at
best break-even, and only exists because he's a nice guy with noble
values.

I think we'd do better trying to make it stupid simple and cheap for
companies to make their products more accessible and show them how
rather than trying to convince them to do the research, development,
and testing themselves.  Then it's more a question of what the right
thing to do is than whether they have the time, expertise, and money
to spend on figuring out what they need to do and how to do it.

Accessibility is a really broad field, and from what I've seen there's
no clear list of how to make a game accessible that's useful when
implementation time comes - even for a narrow set of disabilities.
Closed captioning is one exception, and I think Valve did a pretty
nice job on Half Life 2 supporting it - because someone there thought
it was important and the right thing to do.  I'd fully expect that if
they've seen what Reid and his group did with Doom 3, we might even
get an audio radar in HL3.

But while every textbook says "Configurable input is the key for
physically disabled gamers", Valve and Id developers would say "Well,
our games are completely configurable for inputs!".  Problem is,
they'd be right and they've obviously put some serious time and effort
into making their games that way, but their games still don't work
worth squat with a QuadController without external software - and the
QuadController, from what I've seen, has more inputs available than
just about any other solution.

> Actually Child's Play is already on board to help us out as a grant
> partner. :) But yes...convincing resource centers is another slice of

Awesome, good job there. And on researching proving that games are
important.  Kinda funny we have to prove that, since even animals play
games to enhance their lives and humans have pretty complex games that
we play today that have been played for centuries.

-Mike