“INTERVIEW WITH UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS GAME DESIGN STUDENTS” in “Ability Machines”
INTERVIEW WITH UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS GAME DESIGN STUDENTS
BETTER PORTRAYALS OF DISABILITY IN VIDEO GAMES REQUIRE that we think of imaginative solutions that capitalize on games’ interactivity. For this reason, I wanted to look for ideas from unexpected sources. Instead of interviewing industry veterans, I wanted fresh thoughts from fresh minds: game design students. I teach my game design students that design is simply creative problem-solving. A recurring theme in the chapter to follow is how games struggle to portray disabilities in interactive and interesting ways. A common practice in game design classes is to ask students to brainstorm how they would approach a particular design challenge. And I did just that: in December 2021 I asked Logan Bahr, Casey Eakins, and Alex Lorah, all students who had taken my game design course, how they would depict disability in video games. The following are some of their responses.
QUESTION: If given the opportunity to depict wheelchair use in a video game, how would you design it?
LOGAN: I would focus on how manual wheelchair movement depends on the use of one or more hands. Therefore, I would design a game to emphasize this. I could see either a 2D platformer or a 3D game where you need to collect and use certain objects in certain locations, some in combination with each other. The main mechanic would be juggling your mobility with your ability to hold things and interact with the world (like pushing buttons or opening doors).
CASEY: For wheelchair use, something that immediately comes to mind is rotation: tanklike vehicle movement with a concern for ground height adjustments and limited off-roading. Unique controller movement with rotation could be interesting as well: rotating button clicks, rotating the mouse, or motion controls.
QUESTION: How would you design a game that depicted low vision or blindness?
CASEY: I think for blindness you could do something interesting with the audio to describe what’s happening on screen to simulate blindness (with only captions appearing on screen for the audio). Playing the whole game without visuals, as an audio-only experience, with a controller could be super interesting.
ALEX: I think limiting visuals in a game to simulate blindness could add to a game in meaningful ways! Games create interesting puzzles and situations by depriving the player of information all the time. Any game that brands itself a “mystery” or even a puzzler would be of no interest at all if the player had all the information necessary to complete every challenge immediately. Limiting clear visuals and forcing players to instead rely on other senses like hearing or simply their intuition to make sense of a situation or puzzle could go a long way in making a boring or easy task more interesting. For an example, one game I feel is a master of strategically depriving the player of information is Lucas Pope’s high-seas mystery game Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope, 2018), wherein players are tasked with determining the fate of all sixty people aboard an ill-fated ship by examining the memories of its crew with the help of a magic pocket watch. The game is constructed entirely of two solid colors (no gradients except those via solid-color dithering), meaning relying on precise visuals is a no-go from the start. In addition, excellent audio design means keen players can forgo their visual sense in its entirety when figuring out the fate of many of the crew, simply by paying close attention to the accents and verbal mannerisms of the voice actors and connecting them to the crew manifest, which states the nationality and shipboard duty of all crew aboard. Instead of letting the player run amok and make easy deductions based on clear visual information, the game uses limitations in the sense of sight to add interesting solutions to complicated problems without feeling disruptive. In summary, force the player to make use of auditory information (limiting the game’s accessibility to the hearing impaired, but that’s a topic for another day) in an interesting way to counteract the losses in visual information. I’d be happy to try out a game that has extremely limited or even nonexistent visuals if the audio design was top-notch and did a good enough job conveying information that I wasn’t constantly craving better sight.
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