Comments on: Usability and accessibility

By: Jurie

Jurie — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:42:35 +0000

@Stitched: Yeah, once you’ve bought a game you’re probably less likely to complain and more likely to just stick with the hard part. There’s probably a name for that psychological bias but I cba to look it up.

I tend to play a lot of demos and borrow games of friends.

By: Gareth R White

Gareth R White — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:54:00 +0000

Yeah, it’s usually used in the context of disability, but equally one of my colleagues is researching technology use amongst older people, and he talks about this in terms of accessibility – in the sense that everyone should have access to the benefits that tech can bring, but some minority groups are rarely thought about during design, and so access to that technology for them is limited.

So usually it’s about disability, and usually about technology, but in general it’s just about maximising access to anything (information, entertainment, physical space, etc).

By: Jurie

Jurie — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:45:41 +0000

Hey Gareth. Yeah, Second Life is incredibly unusable. By the way, in academia does accessibility always imply for the blind, for the deaf, etc.? I notice you specify it explicitly, but I was wondering if everyone does that.

By: Gareth R White

Gareth R White — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:31:38 +0000

This is great.
I’m having a paper published in a couple of months, called “Toward Accessible 3D Virtual Environments for the Blind and Visually Impaired”. It was based on a study I did with Second Life. Now that’s a usability nightmare. And accessibility for the blind is non-existent.
I also keep play-diaries about usability problems in games, so I’m looking forward to reading about Manveer’s experiences.
If you’re really interested I dump a shed-load of material onto my PhD reading list at http://gameplayerinteraction.blogspot.com/ but that’s mostly links to commercial databases.

By: Stitched

Stitched — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:10:48 +0000

Maybe it’s like Shawn Elliott (1Up/GFW) says. There are lot of “garbage eaters” out there who will rave about a game without being receptive to critical analysis of same game; to the point of hostility, in some cases. Only by weening people off the junk food and getting them to learn to spot and appreciate the gourmet taste will people shun some of the outrageous stuff you mentioned.

Thinking on it again, you don’t discover these things until after you, or someone else, has bought the game.

I’m pretty sure it’s hard to return a game for full price based on “the game mechanics suck”. ;)

If the game doesn’t have a demo, you have to hope that some unbiased reviewer finds out and calls them out on it.

This sucks but it’s part of the beast known as the industry.

By: Jurie

Jurie — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:59:47 +0000

Oi! :P

By: Andreas

Andreas — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:12:38 +0000

Maybe it’s that time in your life to turn to casual games and never look back?
Next stop: retirement… :)

By: Jurie

Jurie — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:58:25 +0000

Some people had no trouble with that first boss fight in PoP, but I gave up after 10 tries or so.

By: fluffy

fluffy — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:21:36 +0000

I didn’t have any problem with PoP:SoT, but I could never get past the introduction to The Darkness, which everyone says is one of the easiest FPSes around. Personally I felt that the controls and gameplay mechanics were horrible, and while the story sounded interesting, the voice acting didn’t make me feel like getting any further anyway.

Similarly, I’m still on Act 1 of MGS4, but I’ll probably restart it on easy mode.