From the New Yorker
BlSide: A Game for Players Who Can't See : The New Yorker
A Video Game That You Cant Even See
Posted by Laura Parker
Earlier this year, a minor injury to my right eye left me
temporarily blind. I could do little but sit in bed and listen
to audio books, until someone told me about the video game
BlSide, which doesn't, in fact, contain any video. It is a
meticulously designed, audio-driven thriller that is entirely
devoid of graphics.
Built to entertain blind players as well as those who can see,
the audio-only games accommodation of disabled gamers is a
pleasant anomaly in the gaming industry, even though the number
of gamers with disabilities is significant. The latest Americans
with Disabilities report, which draws on 2010 census data,
estimates that nearly fifty-seven million Americans, or roughly
nineteen per cent of the population, have a disability, with over
thirty-eight million suffering from what the report considers to
be a severe disability of a physical, mental, or communicative
nature. While nearly twenty million Americans had difficulty
with physical tasks relating to upper body function, more than
eight million over the age of fifteen have difficulty seeing and
seven and a half million reported difficulty hearing. There is
certainly overlap with the fifty-eight per cent of Americans who,
according to the Electronic Software Association, play video
games; the Able Gamers Foundation, a charity organization for
disabled gamers, estimates that there are thirty-three million
gamers with some kind of disability.
In the nineteen-eighties, gamers like John Dutton, a
quadriplegic who learned to use the Atari 2600 joystick with his
mouth and chin, drew attention to the need for hardware that
disabled gamers could use. In 1988, Nintendo released the NES
Hands Free, a video-game controller designed explicitly for
disabled gamers, which was worn like a vest. It had a chin stick
for movement and a tube that players breathed in and out of to
control the A and B buttons. In the nineties, attention shifted
to making in-game control schemes more accessible, leading to
releases like Shades of Doom, a first-person shooter for visually
impaired gamers. More recently, the Call of Duty franchise,
inspired by the quadriplegic professional gamer Randy Fitzgerald,
introduced a special button layout for disabled gamers which
makes it easier to aim, while the Able Gamers Foundation has
published a guide that shows developers how to design more
accessible products.
Its still uncertain how much better Sony's PlayStation 4 or
Microsoft's Xbox One consoles will be for disabled gamers than
their predecessors. The consensus so far is that the Xbox One
has a slight edge on accessibility over the PSBLED, given its
extensive array of voice controls, but it will ultimately be up
to individual game developers to utilize the consoles processing
power to introduce features like color-blind modes and in-game
text-size adjustment for visually impaired players. Microsofts
updated Kinect accessibility guidelines for the Xbox One, for
instance, reveal that the new system will not support sign
language, and reiterates that Kinects ability to work with seated
players is largely dependent on the actual game itself.
Though disabled gamers may still be cut off from traditional
gaming systems to some degree, a growing number of developers are
using the built-in accessibility features of mobile devices like
the iPhone and iPadvoiceover, assistive touch, and guided
accessto create games for physically disabled and visually
impaired players that don't require the specialized hardware that
living-room gaming consoles often do.
BlSide is one of those games. Its a survival horror setup,
about an assistant professor named Case who wakes up next to his
girlfriend, Dawn, in their apartment, after what initially
appears to be a power outage. But Case, Dawn, and everyone else
have actually inexplicably become blind. At the same time,
scary-sounding monsters roam the city. Because Case is new to
the feeling of being blind, one of the objectives of the game is
to teach players to navigate the environment using audio cues,
both from Case, who yells when he bumps into things-The door is
to my left, the kitchen is to my right-and subtler hints, like
the way sound travels in a particular environment. For example,
if you're facing an open window, you hear traffic noise in both
speakers, but if you turn to the right, you only hear the noises
in the left speaker. Other sounds-a dripping faucet or a noisy
TV-also help you get around.
The game can be played on a Mac or PC using the arrow keys, or
on an iPhone or iPad, where it uses the devices motion sensors to
track which direction you're facing in the real word to replicate
in the game. Playing with the iPhone made it much easier to draw
a mental map of the in-game environment, although I did bump into
real furniture every now and then, trying to find my way around
obstacles.
The game was the result of a high-school chemistry-class
accident. Aaron Rasmussen, half of the development team behind
BlSide, was blinded after an explosion involving red phosphorous
and potassium chlorate. "I woke up from the emergency-room drugs
and everything was black," Rasmussen said. His corneas, which
were damaged, eventually grew back, restoring his sight. The
whole experience made me value my sight more, in a way that makes
me treat it with more care.
In May, 2011, Rasmussen met with a former Boston University
colleague, Michael T. Astolfi, who was completing a masters
degree in the design and psychology of video games at N.Y.U.
Rasmussen told Astolfi that he was working on a script for a
video game based on his experience of being sightless. Later
that night, Astolfi realized that Rasmussens script could be
turned into an audio game with a sense of physical space.
Twenty-four hours later, I sent Aaron a prototype of BlSides
basic gameplay, Astolfi told me.
The pair raised over fourteen thousand dollars on Kickstarter
in December, 2011, and worked from their respective
cities-Rasmussen in Los Angeles, Astolfi in New York-to build the
game over the course of twelve months. Rasmussen, who has
dabbled in everything from software to robotics, wanted the game
to feel like a rough simulation of being blind while remaining
fun, and hit upon the idea of an exhilarating horror game.
First, Rasmussen and Astolfi modelled real-world locations in
3-D. They then reproduced the sounds that one might hear in each
environment; there are over a thousand sound effects in BlSide.
The biggest challenge was determining the right ratio of
authenticity and playability, Astolfi said. There is an immense
amount of subtlety in audio, especially in the difference between
an audio source playing behind you and one in front of you. We
found that most people didn't notice the difference on stereo
headphones when it was realistic, so we had to exaggerate the
effect of your head blocking high-frequency sounds behind you, so
that it was more useful to the player.
Since its release, last year, BlSide has been downloaded
thousands of times on iOS and PC. In June, it won an innovation
award at the Games for Change Festival, which recognizes
humanitarian and educational games with a social impact.
Others have sought to build on the game. Rasmussen and Astolfi
helped the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute create an
assistive app using the technology that powers the game, and a
blind woman in her twenties asked about an accessible programming
language that could allow her to create her own audio games.
(Unsurprisingly, blind players typically finish the game faster
than players who can see.)
While there are no plans for a BlSide sequel, Astolfi and
Rasmussen are hopeful that it will inspire other developers to
create similarly accessible games. The audio-only iOS horror
game Papa Sangre, for example, has already led the studio
Somethin Else to create two more audio-only titles for iPhone:
The Nightjar, featuring the voice of the British actor Benedict
Cumberbatch, and Papa Sangre II.
There are gamers out there who are anxious for more accessible
content, and very little, if any, of it is coming from
established publishers, Astolfi said.
People with disabilities are a group that has, in general, not
been targeted by major video-game releases. But as the indie
game movement continues to grow, I think well see more games
designed specifically for this audience.
Yet a large part of BlSides success seems tied to the fact that
it doesn't feel like a game that's been designed for disabled
players. A game with no visual stimulus can be just as
engrossing for players who can see as for those who cannot, it
seems. Our favorite feedback on the game was actually a negative
comment, Astolfi said. It was a three-star review from a sighted
player who said he found the game too scary.
VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
Archived on the World Wide Web at
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