The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

http://gamescc.rbkdesign.com/
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[Lackey]

I'm actually taking a class on assistive technology right now, I wonder if I should bring this up.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Swimmy]

Interesting!

I've always thought that games should include subtitles for game dialogue, as a simple courtesy. I never even thought about such a thing for game sounds. Thinking about it, now, many stealth games would be completely unplayable by a deaf person. And I always thought of MGS as one of the friendlier games. Guess I hadn't thought it out at all.

[dhex]

it's extremely interesting. a bit over the top in some parts, perhaps - i.e. doom 3 even with captioning cues is sort of unplayable, because of the ooga booga! nature of the gameplay - but still very cool.
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[SuperWes]

From that image, it doesn't seem to take the nature of gameplay into account with these cues. Isn't it more important to know where the sound is coming from than what the sounds are? Halo solves this admirably by indicating where sounds are coming from using on-screen arrows that appear in the direction of the shot whenever guns are fired.

Taking that as inspiration, the Doom closed captioning might be more effective if it took the form of visual clues that indicate the nature of the sound instead of actual words. So if you heard footsteps, the location of the footsteps could appear as vibration rings that come in from the corner of the screen where the footsteps were located. The vibration rings could get bigger to show how close the sound is.

That would probably work well for anyone actually.

-Wes
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[dessgeega]

all of myst 3's puzzles that required sound clues were subtitled. it was quite a step up from the original myst's insurmountable piano puzzle. (too bad the rest of the game was a huge step down from riven.)
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[Reid]

Hey all,

I'm the designer of the Doom3[CC] mod and currently working on Quake4[CC]. Just wanted to pop in here and say thanks for your kind words and comments about this.

Lackey wondered if he/she should mention this mod in their assistive technology class. I think it would be a good idea. One of my goals with these projects is to get the word out, let people know about these issues because I've learned that many do not. The more that know about the need for CC in games the more pressure will be put in developers to add them to their games. Support is really lacking these days, I need all the help I can get, Slowly but surely, things will turn around eventually. I'm assuming that your class covers the broad topic of assistive technology in all fields necessary. One thing that could be discussed is that through this mod I have realized that captioning in games has the benefit allowing me to position the captions where I need them to be on the screen. Using closed captioning on TV is horribly limiting. During sports games most captions cover up much of the action of a football game depending on the camera shot. There's nothing I can do when someone on TV has their eyes covered by the text, I can't make the captions translucent I can't move them, only turn them on or off. I hope eventually TVs will allow much more customization in CC or other areas.

Also, SuperWes made a valid point and version 2.0 of the mod does incorporate a visual sound based radar, as I call it. It's my fault that I don't have screenshots of it on my website showing it, so I need to update that section. I also have one video of version 2.0 which should show the radar on screen, but that's no excuse for not having screenshots.

Anyway, thanks again for bringing up this mod and talking about it on this forum,

-Reid

[RaBeeWilliams]

Wow.

Thank you for taking the time to post here.
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