💾 Archived View for tanelorn.city › ~bouncepaw › gemlog › game-disabilites.gemini captured on 2020-11-07 at 01:30:45. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2020-10-31)
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Posted at 2020-10-22
I have some notes about game mechanics and ideas I'm not really going to develop for games scattered all around the noosphere. Why not share them?
Today's question is interesting. I haven't done any research on it so it all comes from my experience and ideas of how disabilities work.
Consider people using wheelchairs. How does the world look to them? First of all, they are not really fast; a game where you have to run away from something wouldn't be fun. Secondly, they can't traverse difficult terrains; something like Minecraft is not an option. To sum up, any game with focus on movement is no good. Well, that was obvious. Seems like wheelchair-related games won't be exciting.
In Etrian Mystery Dungeon, a roguelike spin-off of Etrian Odyssey, enemies can make your mouth, legs or arms bound. If your legs are bound, you can't move as usual. It is temporary. I think temporary movement restrictions are better because they add an element of surprise and forces the player to come up with a creative way to defend themselves. Using teleportation orbs to get away from an horde of monsters? Cool.
Looks like binding is also present in mainline Etrian Odyssey games.
If a player can't hear, they won't be able to hear monster's footsteps, distant rumblings and other sound effects. Just a game with no SFX. Background music can still be utilised though.
However, if there are NPCs in the game that can talk, many things can be done. To begin with, you can't hear people talking with all the consequences: you can't ask or tell things. There's no point in interacting with every NPC in town just to learn what they are up to anymore.
Next, gestural languages can be brought in. Do you know how complicated they are? They are not letter-to-letter equivalent to usual languages, it's a different system! Hands are not limited in space, you have 3D phonemes to make words with. Compare with usual languages with their boring 2D phonemes.
Gestural languages are really exciting, you should learn something about them. Did you know that French and Russian gesturals are in the same language family while usual French and Russian are Romance and Slavic correspondingly?
Nevertheless, I can't think of any cool usage of them other than replace speaking NPCs with hand-moving NPCs. Sadly, it's pointless, because there is no difference for the player to read a textual representation of speech or gestures.
Most games are visual. Taking it away, even partially, is destined to be interesting.
I'm near-sighted. If I don't wear my glasses, the world becomes hard to use. I can't see the numbers on street lights. I can't see the price tags; can't read from afar in general. I can't see people's faces. But everything is smooth.
Games with near-sighted characters should have art styles without any distinct lines. Faceless people, colors fading into each other, etc. It's hard for most people with perfect sight to understand this but my world is really blurred.
But I wear glasses. All near-sighted people I know wear either them or lenses. So, why would a main character of a game not wear anything correcting their vision? I can't think of any reason.
Blind characters are a totally different thing. Of course, there are many steps of blindness, it's not binary, but gameplay would be mostly the same.
Game designers would have to focus on sound. A cat meowing from the right should sound so. However, some sounds are difficult to hear. There's a setting in Minecraft that lets you turn on subtitles for sound effects. I was really surprised to read about sounds that were so subtle that I couldn't notice them. A minecart rumbling under the ground indicates that there is a mine there; I would never hear it without subtitles.
Should blind games write all the sounds so the player can consult them? I think they should. Moreover, all the information the characters gathers should be displayed. Some blind people know how to echolocate like bats; an approximated map of the room can be shown.
Here's how a game like that could look ↓. Octothorps represent unknown tiles. A lot of information is in audial form. Like a zombie (z) growling.
ROGUELIKE GAME α © Kino corp. 2020 Approximate map: #-----------#### | z ### Press / to investigate characters | @ ###### Press e to echolocate and gather more info | ####### Press ? for game tutorial +------ ########
Hm, it feels so similar to usual roguelikes.
Dlyxecis ppleoe hvea tourlbrs rdiaeng txets. Can ti aveh teristning efeftc on gemapla?y
Color blindness would make game creators make interesting design decisions.
Schizophrenic characters can have helper characters that are always near to tell you something. Conflicts with other people related to these characters can be interesting.
Mad characters can have a distorted perception of the world.
This topic just needs a discussion. I expect it to be more fresh than the recent markdown discussion. I want to hear you criticize my ideas, propose your owns and tell us about games that have already implemented some disabilities.