[games_access] Game control question...

[d. michelle hinn]

>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.

That I understand all too well!

>  > 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.

Unfortunately the reality is that game companies will say what we are 
doing is great...but can we guarantee numbers? I completely 
understand that we can get stuck in the numbers game forever. And in 
the end? A company probably isn't going to make huge amounts of money 
-- who can guarantee who would be gamers if they could be and what 
kind of games they would play? But GDC after GDC...there's always 
people who will smile back with this clouded over look in their eyes 
and say "this is great, yes, accessibility is what we should be 
doing...but we're fighting budget cuts and the game industry is a 
tough industry so in order to do any of this we need financial 
details." Every single time. So while I (and many of us in the SIG) 
don't want to get caught up in the financial quicksand...the social 
justice argument just doesn't hold.

And yeah, I bet KYE is not a fortune 50000000 company.

>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.

I agree with us doing the work of figuring out what will work -- 
that's what we strive to do. But to get someone to put in anything? 
It seems like a no brainer...but we haven't exactly seen a whole lot 
of change because it comes down to that damn financial question again 
and again and again. That's what we face in the industry -- there's 
always this insistence that nothing will happen until we can show 
that it's going to be cheap, not lose customers, and maybe even sell 
a few more units...and that it's going to be more important than 
adding in some other feature that has nothing to do with 
accessibility but that they want to do because they can.

>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.

That's largely because disability itself is complex. There is a huge 
range even within the most narrow set. And then how many people are 
we talking about when we tell a company "here are some guidelines?" 
And who are we shutting out when we let in one group (ie, what is 
accessible for the hearing impaired usually isn't the same thing as 
what is accessible for the visually impaired)? We've created lists 
only to replace them with other lists or guidelines or patterns -- 
the task is huge. But we still chip away at it.

>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.

Ah...I'll let Reid tell the story but the hearing impaired community 
went after Valve. Valve has also seen what Reid has done and they 
know him. And it remains the only commercial game to date with closed 
captioning (not just subtitles). And that was years ago...and yet why 
hasn't another company done that? Other companies have been 
complained to...and we've talked about it so much at conferences 
you'd think that by now half the industry would have put in closed 
captioning just to get us to shut up about it. The Doom3[cc] mod was 
even up for a mod of the year award (unfortunately it didn't win) at 
GDC a few years back. If I had to guess, it's the feature we talk 
about the most to the industry about...again...that financial 
question rears up and we need a better answer to that question.

>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.

Well, not every textbook...just the more recent ones. But the trouble 
with every textbook is that they only have so much space to talk 
about the issue -- at GDC I'll see the final contracts for the first 
time but the SIG will be producing a book (for real this time...).

But I think we could go on and on about the value of showing 
developers how their own game can or cannot be played. And I agree -- 
there's got to be someone on the inside of every company that says 
"you know what? we're going to put in this one feature to make our 
game more accessible to people with XYZ disability." But they get 
stuck somewhere in the system.

This is where I/we get stuck -- there's the financial question...and 
then there's the legal question. These surpass the "right thing to 
do" issue -- I don't like to believe it does...but after a while, we 
have to wonder what is going on. Is it really a financial question? 
Is it a legal question -- and if it is, how? and if it is...how much 
would we see the industry turn against us if we made that case? There 
are a lot of rough lessons to be learned from other media...just 
because something does fall under, say, the Americans with 
Disabilities Act doesn't mean that change will follow quickly (or 
even follow) -- there are way too many cases locked up in courts 
around the US just to take the captioning in movie theatres question 
to task.

So Mike I'm not bringing up all these things to say that you are not 
right -- there's a long history with the SIG and we've tried many 
things, many that you have brought up. But I bring them up to say 
that things haven't been as simple as they might seem with regard to 
impact in the industry. I bring them up to remind myself of the 
battle that we are about to go into again -- ie, GDC 2008. I also 
bring them up to say that we haven't had enough bandwidth to really 
have as big of an impact as we all would like. Maybe it's been timing 
for some strategies. I really don't know. I like your idea of 
targeting a company or two and sending them controllers, calling, 
emailing -- asking them what they think and if they say that they 
can't afford to implement any one thing ask them to at least be 
honest and tell us why exactly that is? I hope that those of us going 
to GDC can identify a few companies that are most likely not going to 
completely ignore us and/or let what we send them sit in the corner. 
I hope. I just keep hoping for that day when we can say "wow, they 
did this because we helped make it happen." I think one of these days 
that will happen. We need more than money -- we need the commitment 
of more people like you who aren't waiting for a financial payoff on 
a grand scale...or at all.

So anyway, I hope you'll stick with us because we need more people 
like you who feel like what we do is the right thing to do and won't 
accept "we can't afford it" as the final answer from the game 
industry. I just want us to remember what we face/have faced/will 
face so that we take it not as discouragement but as encouragement -- 
hey, regardless of whether or not we buy into the financial 
excuses/realities/whatever people want to call it, the fact that 
people are even responding tells us that they know we are out there.

There's a quote that my advisor told me years ago that keeps popping 
back in my mind recently. It seemed super obscure when he brought it 
up. It was a quote from Miguel de Unamuno -- a Spanish philosopher -- 
who said in his book "The Tragic Sense of Life" (If you are rolling 
your eyes already, don't worry -- I had the same reaction as I often 
do when I hear something obscure come out of someone's mouth):

When the disillusionment of the mind and despair of the heart come 
together then you finally have something to build on.

Maybe that's where we are now? Maybe we've finally arrived at the 
place where we have something to build on?

Michelle

PS -- Ok, ok...this may have been one of my crazier emails but, no, I 
haven't completely lost my mind! I think it's just the energy of it 
being the eve of Martin Luther King day (from wikipedia):

The national Martin Luther King Day of Service was started by former 
Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Harris Wofford and Atlanta Congressman John 
Lewis, who co-authored the King Holiday and Service Act. The federal 
legislation challenges Americans to transform the King Holiday into a 
day of citizen action through volunteer service in honor of Dr. King. 
The federal legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton 
on August 23, 1994. Since 1996, the annual Greater Philadelphia King 
Day of Service has been the largest event in the nation honoring Dr. 
King.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist7.pair.net/pipermail/games_access/attachments/20080120/fe1e03c8/attachment.htm>