[games_access] "Shaking Things Up: Can full-body games become more.accessible"

[Barrie Ellis]

Hi Lynsey. Yes, that's my understanding too, although I get the feeling that stance with Microsoft may have relaxed a bit. It was a mistake though from an access point of view. Frustrating to hear that they had additional access in a lot of games then stripped it out.

Earlier days, I know that Konami allowed most/all of their dance mat games to be playable with a standard controller. I doubt that hurt their business model, but did allow for a number of alternative methods to be implemented (http://switchgaming.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=dance+mat).  Maybe all the 3rd party dance mats caused them to loose a bit of money, but maybe not. All those cheaper units allowed more people to access their games from a price side of things for sure.

It was so disappointing to find that Rock Band and Guitar Hero games didn't give you that flexibility. Eye Toy and Wii the same. Tying up controls so tightly is just not the right way to go forward.

Barrie



From: Lynsey Graham 
Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2012 9:35 AM
To: Barrie Ellis ; IGDA Games Accessibility SIG Mailing List 
Subject: Re: [games_access] "Shaking Things Up: Can full-body games become more.accessible"


I agree 100%, but from my understanding, in the case of Kinect games there's quite often a lot of pressure from the publisher NOT to have alternate controls, because of trying to promote the Kinect hardware and it's capabilities. In the early days of Kinect development, we were explicitly told that the first run of Kinect games shouldn't be playable sitting down, because of a) wanting to promote it as a 'more active' method of controlling games and B) wanting to show off the full body detection.


The silliest thing is that quite often many Kinect games DO have alternate pad/keyboard controls, used by the dev staff - quite often it's impractical for everyone to use Kinect due to the space requirements, so a lot of the time it's only the designers (who need to ensure the feel of the game is correct) and the coders working on Kinect detection (who need to make test it's working as planned) who use the cameras. The debug alternate controls get removed for final release.

Sent from my iPad

On 20 Oct 2012, at 09:15, "Barrie Ellis" <oneswitch at gmail.com> wrote:


  Some inspiring weekend reading I feel:

  http://switchgaming.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/shaking-things-up-can-full-body-games.html

  Dimitris Grammenos has given me the okay to host his brilliant article on making Kinect type games much more accessible, with some imaginative solutions. Great stuff.

  Barrie

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