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And if your conscience doesn’t bother you, think of it this way: 5% of the population amounts to an awful lot of dollars that you’re not going to get. Before long, it may not even be legal. A growing body of legislation requires that publicly-available services provide equal access to people with disabilities. If somebody sues and a court decides that an MMOG is a service – and it pretty obviously is – we’ll have to start providing facilities that enable disabled players to play on equal terms with able-bodied ones. At the Game Developers’ Conference this year, I took part in Accessibility Idol – a game design competition sponsored by the IGDA’s Accessibility SIG. The goal was to create a multiplayer game that a quadriplegic player could play head-to-head against able-bodied players. I’m pleased to say that out of five contestants I came in second – my friend Sheri Graner Ray beat me by one vote. (She created a really cool design that involved training dragons with a pitch pipe, so her victory was well-deserved.) My game was a combat flight simulator for zeppelins. Because airships are large and slow-moving, the game more closely resembles naval warfare during the battleship era than modern aerial combat, and I called it Dreadnoughts of the Skies.
Doing the research for the competition, I learned a lot about accessibility issues. One of the basic principles of design for the mobility-impaired is there’s no such thing as “too slow.” I specified that Dreadnoughts could be slowed down to any degree desired. Another is, keep the user interface as simple as possible. That’s good advice for any game anyway. I specified a mouse-based game that could be played via a head-mounted pointing device. I wanted to support all the traditional flight simulator modes, though, so I included a voice command system to take over the keys that flight sims normally use – throttle up and down, weapons control, and so forth. Voice commands are a little problematic for quadriplegics who are dependent on a ventilator, because they have to wait for a breath to speak, but again, I thought the game would be slow enough to allow them to compete on equal terms. Finally, I specified AI-driven gunners at the other positions on the airship, who would automatically fire when an enemy vessel came within range. The player could put the game on autopilot and switch to those positions if he wanted to. None of this was hard to design – it was simply a question of taking the trouble to think about it in the first place. I was especially motivated because I wanted to win the competition, but you can bet I would have been even more motivated if I thought I was going to earn some money from it. |
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