I used to work on games at Microsoft and they put their money where their mouth is when it comes to accessibility. I had spent multiple days in the accessibility lab interviewing and understanding how to make games easier for people with various disabilities. One of my managers encouraged me to test my features using the controller with one hand and farther away from the screen where bad font decisions were more obvious.
Two things I remember in particular from that time at Microsoft:
* The claim that making games better for people with disabilities makes them better for everyone
* The claim that most people will have a disability (not necessarily permanent) at some point in their life
I feel that those two lessons have permanently impacted my design lens.
I think it was Microsoft that came up with a great infographic illustrating that disabilities aren't a black/white thing. It broke things down by permanent vs temporary vs situational.
Something like:
- Touch / tactile - arm/hand amputation (permanent), arm in a sling (temporary), new parent cradling a baby (situational)
- Vision - blindness (permanent), cataracts (temporary), distracted driver (situational)
- Hearing - deafness (permanent), ear infection (temporary), bartender in a noisy bar (situational)
- Speaking - non-verbal (permanent), laryngitis (temporary), interacting with a heavy accent (situational)
When framed like this, it seems much easier to make the case for accessible products, versus as an afterthought.
Vision: Color blindness
And the list goes on.
I've got an eye infection when I was a teenager. It has strongly tinted my vision white, so for a couple of days I could only see outlines of big objects highlighted by skylight. From this experience I found I could still walk my usual routes without wandering off the road, as I could recognize familiar telephone poles, trees, I even remembered all the ruts in the road.
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/controllers/xbox-adap...
That’s not a token effort or a cash-in. The team behind it really gave a damn.
This co-pilot mode sort of reminds me of Starcraft: Brood War where there is a cooperative mode where two people can control the same set of buildings and units. The amount that each player contributes to the game can be as variable as you need it to be, as far as one player not doing anything at all. Or if you were both skilled, it could simply augment what you could do. One person could be making sure you're spending resources and building the base while the other focused on controlling the units fighting the enemy, for example.
Overall I think the video games industry is very very behind in accessibility, though. Even some relatively simple accessibility options are absent from some of the biggest games. I believe Ubisoft has made great strides to make their video games more accessible to everyone and there are some notable ones such as The Last of Us 2 [1] and Celeste [2] that go above and beyond to ensure that anyone that wants to play the game can.
Accessibility can be expensive to implement and gaming isn't really considered an essential, even in terms of entertainment, but I think it's worthwhile to try and encourage even smaller developers to try to make their games more accessible.
[1] https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/the-last-of-us-part-... [2] https://celeste.ink/wiki/Assist_Mode
If you wanted to get more into gaming, a Switch would be a good choice. There are lots of games which are mechanically accessible (still not trying to be rude here) to six-year-olds, while still being a ton of fun.
Subsequently, if you race full-pull the other person will be in a permanent #12 spot. They will receive a lot of star and bullet power ups though ;-)
as part of my journey, trying find answer and heal. i stumbled across the fact that Microsoft's current CEO Satya Nadella son Zain is a legally blind quadriplegic with cerebral palsy. his book refers to the first few years of his sons life as "a dark place". Satya is fairly older than me, I admire him very much.
I have no doubt that it bring great joy and comfort to Satya that he's been able to drive Microsoft to be a leader in accessibility. Most great efforts have great stories. This is one of them.
We used to do that sharing the same keyboard. My friend and I played though most of The Catacomb of Abyss like that. Good times.
Just out of curiosity I checked, and co-pilot seems to be available on Windows too (within the Xbox sphere at least). I will try that out, looks like it could have potential for us.
Is there anything that i can buy to improve his quality of life with? Even something small could be useful.
Otherwise, one suggestion would be controllers for quadriplegics. There are a few options out there, afaik most are controlled with your mouth but there are also gaze-tracking options. I believe the XBox accessibility controller is compatible with some of them.
It also shows why controller compatibility between consoles might be more important than one would think: the "native" controllers might just be inaccessible. If you want to play on a Switch, you can use an adapter [0] to use the Adaptive Controller. Similar products exist for the PS4, I believe. Hopefully someone reverses the protocol DualSense speaks with PS5 sooner rather than later and can make an adapter for that as well.
[0] https://www.mayflash.com/Products/NINTENDOWiiU/MAGIC-NS.html
Sony recently[1] mainlined its DualSense 5 driver to the Linux kernel, so reversing the protocol shouldn't be difficult. There previously were a couple of open-source 3rd party drivers for older DualShock controllers - I use a DS 4 controller for all Steam on Linux games and it works very well: most games recognize it as a PlayStation controller, display the correct button symbols on help screens and QTEs
1. Dec 2020 - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Sony-HID...
When games do coop well, it's usually an inherent part of the game. If you can make the assumption that there is at least two players playing together, you can create unique and interesting ways for the two players to interact on screen. "It Takes Two" is a recent game that was designed explicitly for two players and you can immediately tell the difference from it to a game that cooperative modes were an afterthought to the solo mode.
Games requiring more than one player immediately alienates a lot of players and limits your audience a lot, so that's probably why pure coop titles are extremely rare.
As for asymmetric titles like Mario Galaxy where the second player is not essential, it's pretty hard to make the gameplay satisfying for the secondary player while not impeding the first player or making it feel essential to the gameplay. The "little brother" mode costs a lot with little perceived benefit for the developers.
Him and his wife don't have it easy ( they used to go walking in the mountains a lot, so the declining mobility in recent months are ... Depressing for them, although they don't really complain. I just notice it in the conversations when it comes up)
I think their first game with this feature was Bayonetta (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6nkc6GQ-B8) but at this point a bunch of other games have it. I think every action game should have this where possible, and you can find testimonials out there from people who love these features despite not having major accessibility concerns, like https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgx8nz/auto-battle-is-the-be...
Increasingly I think we're discovering that there's a class of temporary accessibility issues that can get in the way of using a website or video game - you have trouble focusing because your kids are distracting you, you can't remember what your current objective is because the last time you played was a week ago, etc. It's great for games to provide assistance in those cases too.
I mean I won't claim they're fun, just that they're easy to play.
I think anything that can be co-piloted so smooth that other player is not annoyed, can be also simulated by an AI.
It is not really overthinking it. It is taking the learning and bringing it to a wider audience.
But there are a lot of affordances devs can make in individual games. Someone else mentioned Celeste and Last of Us, but Microsoft's Forza series has a bunch of options, like brake assist or turning assist, that can take a lot off your plate.
Usually, when these modes are enabled, there is some indication that they are used, and you can't enter ladders with them, to prevent cheating.
I probably would've played more video games if I had known about these co-op modes.
The console actually authenticates the controller using some secret [0]. I find it very doubtful that Sony has implemented this authentication in their Linux driver and released the necessary secrets.
Unless this procedure is a part of a standard that I'm unfamiliar with that it may still need to be reversed for PS5/DualSense. We also need the secrets or use the workaround with a legitimate controller I referenced in a different comment [1, 2].
[0] https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2018/ps4-ds4/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378663
[2] https://www.cronusmax.com/manual/wired_controllers_connectin...
I'm not sure how frequent this is, but when I was little we (me and my brothers) had limited time to play, so we would play our time and watch each others, sometimes completing long missions in Ground Control by playing one after the other. When you look at it this way, having something to do instead of just looking at the screen (which was already plenty of fun) is huge.
Unless Sony is now signing every message I see no reason why this approach couldn't be used on the PS5/DualSense. That said, my cursory search didn't reveal a working PoC.
1. https://github.com/chrippa/ds4drv
2. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Sony-HID...