READ MORE: As the video game industry evolves, making ‘indie’ video games gets trickier Many of these changes have roots in the “indie” gaming space, where smaller teams of developers had the breathing room to experiment, said Adam Brennecke, a game director at Obsidian Entertainment and Frey’s colleague. “There’s plenty of people out there willing to play your game and give you feedback,” Frey said. In the last few years, however, companies have made an effort to include greater diversity in testing. “Blind people want to be in programming and want to play games and want to be included.” Why would they? That’s a visual thing.’ But that’s not true always,” Zigmont said. “People have these expectations: ‘Blind folks don’t want video games. People often overlook such communities or assume they don’t want to participate in certain entertainment genres, said Kat Zigmont, senior director of operations and deputy director at the World Institute on Disability. When testing these games, he explained, older projects didn’t have the budget or inclination to invite people outside of the target demographic – teenage boys who do not have disabilities. How we got hereįrey credits disability advocates who have pushed for these options for years – and whose voices are starting to be heard in the broader industry – with helping make this change happen. “If there are barriers to play because a game’s not accessible or inclusive, people won’t play it,” Mortaloni said. That makes integration much easier compared to previous decades, when features and accommodations were often slapped on at the end of a game’s creation, she added. She said it’s Xbox policy that creators consider accessibility from the very start of the development cycle. “And so by adding accessibility options in, it means that I can play how I need to in that moment.” If I broke my wrist snowboarding, the standard controller mapping doesn’t work for me anymore,” Mortaloni said. If I’ve been staring at the computer all day, maybe I need night mode. “How you play changes over the course of your life or during the day. All of this happens before reaching the main menu where you actually start the game.Īnita Mortaloni, accessibility director at Xbox, said such features not only help players who have disabilities, but allow most people to enjoy the game no matter the circumstance. Lastly, you are directed to a menu where you can turn on presets for vision, hearing and motor accessibility. After that, you are asked to adjust the brightness and contrast of the screen, before you get several options to change the size and color of subtitles. The first thing you see is a question about what language you want to use, and whether you need a screen reader to read the menu text. Let’s say you open the recently remade Sony game “The Last of Us Part I” (now adapted into a popular HBO show). READ MORE: 8 things you didn’t know about Super Mario Bros. “That gets executives to just look at this as more of an option because there’s a much bigger pool of people,” he said. The $184 billion game industry’s massive growth over the last couple decades includes an expanding number of people with disabilities interested in playing, according to Alec Frey, a senior producer at Obsidian Entertainment. But now mainstream developers are leveling up – increasingly considering accessibility when designing their games, whether to accommodate a visual impairment, a motor control issue or an anxiety disorder. Options for subtitles, the ability to completely remap the controller or change the game’s brightness were scarce. It used to be rare to have settings to adjust anything beyond volume control. ![]() Yet while more people pick up and play, limitations of the games still leave some behind. With more than 3 billion estimated players around the world today, the video game industry has grown far beyond its kid-focused, arcade origins.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |