When Mark Barlet called his lifelong friend Stephanie Walker, she was in tears.
“I can’t feel my right hand, and I can’t play,” she said. “I want to play, but I can’t.”
Stephanie had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and now had little to no feeling in her right side. She’d quickly gone from working a full-time job to not being able to walk or feed herself. She just wanted to spend a night on EverQuest with her friends like before, but now even that was cut off to her.
Four years later, Stephanie is the associate editor of Ablegamers.com, and Mark is the editor-in-chief. They’re part of a community that sees that disabled gamers don’t have to lose an important part of their life, even when developers have lagged behind on accessibility.
Stephanie plays EverQuest 2 these days using a mouse-driven playstyle, though she’ll be switching over to Age of Conan soon. She got a new Wii game from her six-year-old daughter for Mother’s Day, and will be giving that a try.
For disabled people especially, games can be an important part of life. For Stephanie, the online realm became a vital part of her social life. “For me, that WAS my community for over a year,” she said.
Ablegamers.com serves as a place for disabled gamers to just hang out and be themselves, Mark said. Many don’t want to tell their guilds about their conditions. Online, they don’t have to be “the disabled guy” if they don’t want to be.
The site also serves as a place for gamers to get advice about hardware setups that will accommidate them, though every case is a little bit different. Programmable keyboards like the G15 from Logitech or the Ergodex DX1 can help, or foot pedals can help someone who has lost the use of a hand.
On the more extreme end, someone might need customized hardware, something like a “quad controller” for quadriplegics, which work from mouth and tongue inputs.
The site also serves as a place to share information on games from an accessibility standpoint. Where a regular review might talk about the graphics, Ablegamers reviews focus on things like how hard a game is on the left or right hands, or how easy it is to map functions to other devices.
But so far, the community hasn’t gotten much help from developers, even when the fixes would be simple.
Big-name developers don’t really make games with an eye to universal accessibility, though some have made progress, Mark said. For instance, Sony Online Entertainment modified EverQuest 2′s color-based conning system to accommodate players with red-green colorblindness.
Valve made a similar leap with Half-Life 2, said Michelle Hinn, the chair of the Game Accessibility Special Interest Group, a part of the International Game Developers Association.
Lots of members of the deaf community liked first-person shooters, but had a lot of trouble with the original Half-Life because ambient sounds were so critical to survival. Valve heard the feedback, and Half-Life 2 was the first mass-market game to be fully closed-captioned out of the box, having not just subtitles, but text for sound effects.
This is the sort of feature the Game Accessibility SIG works with game developers to implement. As developers look to expand their player bases, more of them have shown interest.
The nonprofit group is planning a textbook for developers on how to make their games accessible. “Our basic belief is that everyone has the right to have fun,” Hinn said.
However, the members of the group are driven by more than fun.
“What keeps me interested in it is all those phone calls,” Hinn said. On some days, it’s parents whose children were in an accident, are devastated that their son or daughter can’t play with their friends the way they used to. Video games might be the only way they can have fun with their friends anymore.
On other days, it’s calls from VA hospitals, where young veterans are coming back from overseas with severe injuries. For disabled veterans or anyone who has gone through severe injury, the rates of suicide and depression are high. Many of the patients are gamers, and getting that part of their life back can help tremendously. In addition, games can be a gateway for them to want to use other types of assistive technology.
With all the negative attention that games get in the public, people need to know about these uses, Hinn said.
“That’s when you start to realize, perhaps games are a little more important than we might think.”
Popularity: 23% [?]
You know I think this is something that is just going to get more and more important. Films and TV have subtitles to enable hard of hearing viewers, and building are increasingly obliged to have disabled access. Even websites are increasingly trying to pander to disabled people with standards like Aural style sheets (the audible equiavalent of css), and with games increasingly becoming accepeted as a lifestyle choice rather than just geek-niche, I really dont see this going away.
Good comments on how gaming communities become important to gamers with disabilities btw. Ive found gamers a useful enough support group as it is. Noone give your an honest oppinion like someone trying to headshot you at the same time
Matthew, great story, thank you very much for sheding more light on the issues that fellow gamers are having. Disabled gamers just want to play great games with their friends, and nothing else.
Again, thanks Matthew and thanks Kwanzoo
Great article Matt and Kwanzoo staff. It is great to see companies and individuals making their love of gaming more accessible to others who have some form of handicap that could impede their enjoyment of gaming.A man named Ben Heckendorn (Benheck.com) has been working on making gaming more accessible to everyone for years, but also has come up with a few one handed versions of the Xbox 360 controller.His work is more than worth a glance. Thank you again for your article. I look forward to more.
Amazing story! Good to know the gaming industry is starting worry more about those fellow gamers.
A friend of mine from WoW returned from Iraq with his ear drums were blown off but he still kicks ass in CSS and Team Fortress 2!
>:D
Gamer for life!
We actually hit up Mr. Heck earlier this week.
http://www.kwanzoo.com/social-trivia/video-games-a-short-talk-with-ben-heck.shtml
I use to work for them, but have since moved on. Anywho if you are interested in accessible gaming there is a company called NaturalPoint based in Corvallis, Oregon that makes something called a SmartNAV http://headtracking.com
There are also other headtrackers out there, but they are more expensive.
Hope this helps…
-K
Reading this, I’m reminded of an old friend who used to come over to my house to play video games with me. His left arm had been rendered almost completely unusable from birth, so all he really did was watch. It’s great to see that now there are ways he can play too. I’ll be keeping an eye out for new advancements in the field, and thanks so much for bringing it to my attention.
I digress. Great article, Matt. I hope to see more like this in the future.
[...] if Matt Boyd keeps cranking out articles like this one, I’ll have to reconsider my current No, I’m not going to visit a pop-culture trivia [...]
Unique input devices ftw. Can’t wait for mouse and keyboard to finally segue into something different, such as:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/475/1/
This is an excellent article Mr. Boyd. I am joyous to know that someone cares about disabled players. So many games are loosing touch with people who require special needs, or are otherwise disabled. I’m glad to hear something from you anyway.
[...] Boyd has written a great article over at Kwanzoo discussing an issue that’s going to be becoming very important to gamers and [...]
Another organization doing outstanding work getting wounded soldiers back in touch with their communities, both online and in gaming, is Soldiers’ Angels, with Project Valour-IT. Laptops are equipped with voice recognition, and other technologies to help wounded soldiers use them effectively to get back in touch with their families and friends. And many of them kick ass at CSS, CoD and other games, too.
Nice article! It’s a start in the right direction!
It’s good to see support is growing for disabled gamers!
I hope companies also start tackling controllers so those like me with a physical disability can more easily play.
Hey, thanks for posting the link to this site, Matt. And thanks for posting an interesting article, too. Having poked around a bit, this is actually an enticing place, and you have articles about things that actually mean something rather then being pop culture clap. Have fun here, and give us some more intriguing reads, if you would be so kind.
Great article – I hadn’t even thought of about disabled gaming until now!