Audio Games

[squirmelia]

Thursday's Perspectives on Design lecture involved discussion of accessibility of computer games, such as not relying on sound to convey information, so that games are more usable by people who have difficulty hearing, or the opposite - games for people who are blind, which do rely on sound.

Game Accessibility has various information and even an Audio Game Maker to let you make your own audio games. I tried playing a maze game linked from AudioGames.net, which reminded me a little of playing in Jeppe Hein's Invisible Maze at an art gallery in Copenhagen, but was less fun. I'm sure there are more exciting games out there though. AudioGames also has a list of interesting papers and articles, such as Wired's article on The Blind Fragging the Blind, and a paper on Designing Sound for a Pervasive Mobile Game. Second Life is being analysed and blogged about in Second life for the visually impaired, but other games and how sound relates to them are also mentioned. The RNIB lists Party Games for the Blind, which I suppose might have been useful for Saturday's triffid party.

Comments

[todfox.livejournal.com]

You can talk to my friend thewordnerd if you are interested in accessibility in videogames. It is an area of interest to him and he's done some work coding audio games.