In an effort to increase the face value of my game accessibility posts for the MMOG community, I've asked for some additional assistance from the game accessibility community and was reminded of AbleGamers, a fairly new site run by Mark Barlet, a Disabled Veteran and avid gamer, primarily as a host for reviews of the accessibility of MMOGs.
Mark includes accessibility reviews of several MMOGs -- more are coming. I'm trying to get him access to a few for review purposes. But for now, we have these:
There's also an interesting editorial on some recent efforts by Blizzard that incidentally closed off accessibility for many gamers with mobility disabilities called Wanted Adventurers: Disabled Need Not Apply and talks about a decision from Blizzard to disable the ability for gamers to use "add on features" that many mobility impaired gamers needed to play. And the disturbance to a community of gamers who now find them locked out of the game that had originally provided them with the ability -- through community created add ons -- to access the game. I have no news as to whether this feature has been added back but I've been told that it hasn't (please correct me if I'm wrong!)
A few of us took a TN commenters suggestion of going to the WoW forums to see if we can find people interested in joining us in an accessible mod. The trouble is...none of us have accounts because we don't play WoW so we couldn't even post the request on the forum. Sure, I understand that they want to have a community for, well, the community of players. But what about the community of would be gamers that are a little leery of spending money for the game and then then monthly fees only to find out that they can't do anything? Perhaps we've missed something and there is a forum for people who would play but can't to post -- anyone around here know about a back door somewhere?
Wow, thanks for the post!!!
Posted by: Mark | May 20, 2007 at 22:29
At the Serious Games reception at the GDC earlier this year, a developer told me about this website called OneSwitch (http://www.oneswitch.org.uk/). The owner of the site has written a lot about accessibility in games. The site also has a large library of 'one switch' computer games available for download. It's not exactly MMO-related, but it does concern assistive gaming tech.
Posted by: Rory | May 20, 2007 at 23:54
Hi Rory -- that's the website of Barrie Ellis, who is a SIG member, and I am going to be posting information about his site as well. He's also been giving some thought to MMOs, as we've all been putting our heads together about how to apply our work so that it's o more interest to the TN audience.
Posted by: Michelle Hinn | May 21, 2007 at 17:45