Careful Tech 110: Disembarking from the gaming train


Blaming violent video games










Artwork adapted from vector imagery by Alvara Cabrera and Freepik.


N64 Classic ‘Zelda: Ocarina of Time’ beaten by blind gamer

This is incredible. Terry Garrett, a blind gamer, has beaten the Nintendo 64 classic “Ocarina of Time”. The man’s a gaming god.

How did he do it? First, Garrett relied heavily on the game’s soundscape to orient himself around its 3D space. He even used the venerable Zelda hookshot “as a form of echolocation,” listening for the difference between the weapon striking walls and whiffing through open air. He also relied heavily on software emulation—Garrett saves his game state every few seconds, then restores that state when experiments go awry.

Garrett’s achievement testifies to his perseverance and ingenuity; it took five years of occasional gameplay to finish the task. Few gamers have the patience to do that sort of repetitive, time-consuming work.

Nintendo also deserves credit—for putting such care into Ocarina’s soundscape. The game’s sound engine places each noise in its proper stereo location. Plus, key occurrences on-screen have discernible audio equivalents. For example, when Link chaperones Zelda through Ganondorf’s castle, Zelda’s feet make tiny, just-perceptible noises.[1]

What if every game developer took low-vision accessibility more seriously? What if game studios put the same care into their sound engines that they put into graphics and physics? What if every game’s sound design made it possible for blind gamers to play—withoutresorting to trial and error?

Imagine, for example, if your avatar’s footsteps reverberated more like real life. The sound would echo differently depending on your distance from the nearest wall, the texture of the floor, or the proximity of a deadly chasm. Just this one feature would allow a blind gamer to navigate virtual realms much like Daniel Kish explores the real world.

Games might even implement a “low-vision mode.” With this setting enabled, on-screen events would create constant, audible cues.

Take the recent Arkham Batman series as a theoretical example. How might these games sound if they were programmed with the sight-impaired gamer in mind? Each mob thug would grumble and yell incessantly; that way, the player could tell exactly where each foe stood, relative to Batman’s current position. Or, as the Batmobile motored through Gotham City, audio cues could distinguish open street intersections from adjacent buildings. That way, a gamer could hear exactly when to hit that e-brake. Finally, for less action-heavy sequences, Batman might speak his inner monologue out loud—describing the environment or the puzzle at hand in exhaustive detail.

If more game developers attended to such details, a standard “low-vision vocabulary” would solidify over time. These conventions would guide devs’ work and allow blind gamers to quickly grok new games. Game engines (e.g. Unreal, Unity) would incorporate these features, giving developers a head-start on building blind-accessible titles. Design studios might even hire blind game developers to ensure that their games met the needs of the sight-impaired.

UPDATE: Reader Ian Hamilton responded via Twitter with a series of helpful thoughts. In particular, he notes that many fighting games (e.g. ‘Mortal Kombat X’) already include audio cues that make it easier for sight-impaired gamers to compete. Ian also linked to an interesting Game Developers Conference panel on “Reaching the Visually Impaired Gamer”.

  1. ‘Ocarina of Time’ isn’t the only Nintendo 64 game whose sound effects empower the blind to play.  ↩
games technology Uncategorized

‘The rise and fall of Kinect’

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, writing for Eurogamer:

[Kinect] had become central to Microsoft’s efforts to transform Xbox into an all-singing, all-dancing delivery vector for every kind of media, backed by a futuristic UI, with video games merely part of the package… But when the dream of an all-in-One tomorrow fell over — demolished by Sony’s focus on specs and gaming applications with the substantially cheaper PlayStation 4 — Kinect went down with it.

Fascinating oral history of the Xbox Kinect, which set a Guinness world record as the “fastest-selling consumer electronics device” back in 2011.

I’ve skipped the last two console generations, but Microsoft’s motion-detecting peripheral nearly sold me on the Xbox—in a way that first-person shooters never could. Even my wife, who generally ignores video games, was impressed by Dance Central.

Since those promising early days, the Kinect has lost all momentum. Lackluster console sales forced Microsoft to drop the peripheral from its hardware bundles. That move may have saved the Xbox One, but it also dried up the market for Kinect-targeted games.

That limited selection makes it unlikely that I’ll purchase a game console anytime soon.[1]

  1. It doesn’t help that we haven’t yet upgraded to an HDTV. The latest-gen consoles require a high-res display, which would add hundreds to our purchase price.  ↩
games Uncategorized

Falling out of love with video games












games Uncategorized

Underwhelming “next-gen” graphics (and why they may be a good thing)

I’ve been underwhelmed by “next-generation” gameplay videos for the XBOX One and PlayStation 4.

Though I haven’t been an active gamer for nearly a decade, I pay attention when new consoles get released. I’m eager to see just how photo-realistic the new games can get. But this time around, I’m hard-pressed to tell the difference between the first crop of next-gen games and the previous generation’s latest and greatest.[1] Maybe I’ve been out of the gaming scene too long?

Or… maybe we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns when it comes to game graphics—the point where even substantial increases in processing power return less and less dramatic improvements.

This wouldn’t necessarily be bad news! I’d love to see gamemakers focus less on whiz-bang visuals and more on “under the hood” features. The games already look real. Now, make them feel real; dedicate that extra horsepower to better artificial intelligence, more responsive surroundings, more open-ended gameplay, and dynamically-generated storylines.

Some examples:

  • What if the bad guys learned your battle strategies? They “notice” that you tend to hide in A/C ducts, so they start tossing grenades into every vent.
  • Or what if you could destroy any in-game building, wall by wall, and watch the rubble crumble?
  • Or what if you could infiltrate the enemy’s headquarters any way you wished: parachute onto the roof, skulk in through the sewers, zip-line in from an adjacent skyscraper, or don a disguise and saunter through the front door?
  • Finally, what if the storyline was truly unscripted, and the game could spontaneously generate new character dialogue, responding to your decisions?

Up ’til now, games have felt static and rote; they pull the user along preset (if pretty) paths by invisible strings. But imagine if developers focused on features like these (instead of pixel-painting). Gamers would become creative agents instead of puppets. And that, more than piled-on polygons, would make games feel “next-gen”.

  1. I’ve heard that it takes a few years for developers to really unlock a console’s potential. Thus, you might not see the best graphics the PS4 or XBOX One can produce for a while. But previous console releases (e.g. going from the PS2 to the PS3) boasted dramatic visual improvements over their predecessors; I just don’t see it this time.  ↩

games Uncategorized

Why Nintendo shouldn’t make iOS games









games sports Uncategorized

Replacing live sports with video games.


Sports video games have come a long way, baby. Back in the day, you needed a Ph.D. in modern art just to identify what sport you were actually playing. This red block here blips its way to that green block, and… touchdown! Er, or is it… home run? Oh, sorry, no… uh, birdie? Not exactly lifelike. But fast-forward thirty years or so, and you get this:


I don’t own a console from the current generation, so screenshots like this one flabbergast me. Pop in a disc, and this is what your XBOX or Playstation will pump out right now. And this from game systems that are already growing long in the tooth. In just a few decades, we’ve graduated from abstract bricks to cartoonish sprites to grotesque polygons to this.

Now, I’ll admit; we’re not at photorealism yet. The bodies lack grit. The collision detection wonks out. The player models wear their faces like death masks, devoid of expression. Sideline characters lurch and jerk like animatronic puppets. But we’re getting closer to true simulation; digital Lebron may seem unhuman–but you can tell it’s him. Virtual Tiger stares back with creepy, soulless eyes—but how’s that any different than the real thing? (Ha! J/K, Mr. Woods.)

So… Here’s my question: what happens when the final hurdles to realism are overcome? When video games can pump out enough pixels to render video indistinguishable from a TV broadcast? When programmers can compose algorithms that bestow faux personality to the players? When developers perfect the stadium details—the crowd’s chaotic swell, a jersey rippling in full sprint, spittle flying from coach’s mouths? When 3D games can project Bill Cowher’s chin straight out into your living room?

Will fans eventually forsake real-world sports for virtual versions? Watching in HD already trumps sitting in the nosebleed section… wouldn’t playing the game be better still? Why settle for mere spectating when you could command life-like athletes to and fro across the pitch? Could video games eventually pose a competitive threat to the major leagues?

It sounds ridiculous. After all, how can “fake” simulations replicate the “real” human drama that sports offer? We fans relish the human-to-human storylines that make sports so fascinating. But aren’t those storylines already manufactured by the sports industrial complex? Twenty-four/seven ESPN coverage and sound bite journalism overhype and artificially inflate the drama. If it’s not real conflict in the first place, why couldn’t it be replicated by my game console?

So… what if simulated sports trumped their live counterparts? What would we lose? “Tradition!” some immediately reply. After all, yanks_slugger_158 hardly belongs in Coopertown alongside Ruth and Mays. Others would fret about our children’s ballooning waistlines. Without toned sports heroes to adore and emulate, our kids would never go outside again. Instead, they’d park their ample posteriors before the idiot box, ’til their fingers grew too pudgy to push the buttons.

Fair enough, but virtual sports might gain us some things, too. We could assuage the national guilt about the lavish wastefulness that surrounds our professional leagues. No more disposable billion-dollar stadiums. No more ridiculous multi-million-dollar contracts for muscle-bound shlubs. We might even (what a concept!) pay our teachers and nurses a fair and proportionate wage instead!


Top: a healthy brain, with no brown “protein tangles.” Bottom: a brain with traumatic damage caused by football. Read more here.

There’s another guilt-inducing plague that virtual sports could alleviate. For decades now, our culture has condoned–even celebrated–a perverse sort of prostitution. For entertainment, we pay athletes to destroy themselves. Contact sports cripple their bodies and rot out their brains. See, as an example, several recent studies, which suggest that playing football slurries brains to mush. The hockey rink, the soccer pitch, the football field: these are our Coliseums, the players our gladiators. Shouldn’t we demand that these brutal exhibitions stop?

And how better to stop them than to make virtual avatars suffer, rather than flesh-and-blood-and-brain humans. Let digital athletes brave the brain-shocking blows. Let simulated players pump up with poisonous performance enhancers! Problem solved.

At least until the artificial jocks become self-aware. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Photo credits: Atari’s Home Run Baseball, via AtariAge; EA’s Madden 2010, via GameDaily. Brain images from the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, via CNN.