Video Games for the disabled

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Michelle Hinn campaigns for more accessibility for disabled gamers





(CP) - Game developers take Michelle Hinn's phone calls these days. But they may not always like what she has to say.



Hinn is chair of a special interest group in game accessibility that's part of the International Game Developers Association. The adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is passionate about her cause, opening up video gaming to the disabled.
"This is a social justice issue, this is not just a gaming issue," Hinn told a seminar at the recent Montreal International Game Summit.
So Hinn campaigns for developers to think about captioning games, allowing controllers to be remapped, offering easier modes of play, better manuals - and to rethink the kind of titles they make.
The payoff can be rewarding.
"We have one member who also has mobility impairment and said he was able to dance for the first time in an online role-playing game and that was amazing to him," Hinn said in an interview.
Access to gaming can also promote a sense of inclusion, said Hinn, citing the case of a blind gamer who just wanted to be able to say to a friend "'Yeah, I got such and such score on that, what did you get?"
"So we're no longer talking about 'oh, this is my friend who has a disability.' It's 'this is my friend that just kicked my butt in this game,"' said Hinn. "It's a very interesting and very powerful social tool, I think."
Part of her group's job is also to share information and tips - and to correct false assumptions.
Hinn's group has been active as a fully fledged special interest group for about four years now. She speaks to major gaming conferences and works behind the scenes with console manufacturers and game developers.
While there is much more work to be done, the developers now know who she is.
"Yes, I'm getting e-mails back from people, like Will Wright who created The Sims," Hinn said, with a slight sense of disbelief.
And there have been success stories. Hinn points to such enlightened developers as Namco and Valve, which after getting complaints offered full captioning on the hit game Half-Life 2.
In some cases, it's a matter of convincing developers that thinking of the disabled does not have to mean not including game features but rather new ways to access these features. And to have them think out of the box.
Hinn cites the game DEMOR for the vision-impaired - imagine a sophisticated pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game that uses GPS. She also notes that games that only call for one button, currently popular in cellphone games, have been used by quadriplegic gamers "forever."
Hinn's group is also trying new ways to get developers involved. One of the current projects is dubbed Accessibility Idol and involves inviting some big-name developers to show up at the Game Developers Conference with an idea for a game for the mobility-impaired.
"We're thinking of an avid gamer who was in an accident and is now quadriplegic and loves to play games and loves to play games with his friends who don't have disabilities," Hinn explained.
Many developers are astounded at the lengths that people will go to play their game. At GDC, they showed developer David Perry footage of a quadriplegic gamer playing The Matrix: Path of Neo using a quad controller that uses "sip and puff" tubes to control the action.
"The look on his face was astounding," Hinn said of Perry. "Because it's touching when you see something that you've created and see what someone does in order to access your game because they think that it's so important to their lives."
"I think it really puts some things into perspective of what kind of impact the gaming industry has on people's psychological well-being."
Hinn's unpaid game accessibility work is piggybacked on top of an already busy schedule. She teaches courses on video game design at the University of Illinois and runs a "living-learning community," which she explains is like a small college within the university for women majoring in math, science and engineering.
Hinn, who has a BA in music performance, a B.Sc. in psychology and MA in multimedia in design, was recently named one of the "Game Industry's 100 Most Influential Women" by the online magazine Next Generation.
"I'm always looking for injustice and trying to do research that in some ways helps," Hinn explained. "OK, maybe this is not the most important issue in the universe but for some people it is."
Hinn has dealt with problems of her own. She is dyslexic, although she wasn't diagnosed until she was about to graduate from undergraduate school.
"I guess I felt a kind of personal tug in my heart, knowing I had somehow gotten through school with good grades despite having this reading disability."
"Then later I started developing a condition that gives me chronic pain. It just happens here and there and so I've become more aware in recent years of my own body kind of shutting down on itself and the importance of having things to do when that happens, I mean who wants to just sit there with nothing to do?"
The term disabled run the gamut - from vision-, hearing-and mobility-impaired issues to those caused by aging, genetics or accidents.
Hinn says she gets e-mails all the times from parents or doctors asking about how to get hold of a certain controller.
"Those are the heartbreaker e-mails," she said. "You hate that's what brought a parent into the field but if we can help, just keep a child from being depressed, helping them feel more included in the world and in touch with friend groups, if more online multiplayer games were more accessible, that would open up a huge range of social possibilities."
"We're always talking about bad things that happen on the web and online games but that's one of the positives, no one knows you're disabled online."
But the sands are ever shifting. Progress is made on one console, only to have a new one come out with new challenges for disabled gamers.
Hinn, who once worked as an intern at Microsoft, sees progress among independent developers but says the larger console manufacturers have lagged behind.
"Microsoft had not done very much which is disappointing ... because they have done a lot with accessibility with regards to their operating systems and other programs but when it comes to gaming not so much. And the same with Sony and Nintendo, although I think Nintendo has more of an understanding, especially games for the elderly with games like Brain Age, etc."
Each small victory is savoured by Hinn, whose passion shines through.
"I've always been an advocate of social justice and that's why I'm involved in a lot of programs that help foster women in the game industry and women in technology," she explained.
"So yeah. the pay's not so great but it feels worthy, for me it's the right choice.
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For more information, visit:
-www.igda.org/accessibility
-www.gameaccessibility.com
-www.deafgamers.com
-www.audiogames.net