Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 64, 1996) is commonly held to be one of the best games of all time, but it has more than its then-innovative 3D worlds to recommend it – it can also be played by the blind.
“There were all these musical cues and cues in the sound design,” says Kevin Satizabal, a keen gamer who’s been blind since birth. “You could tell when you’d picked up a star, or when the player was jumping, or when you picked up coins.” When you can’t rely on visual cues, having a different audio cue for each event in the game is more than just a bonus.
“Fighting games are a perfect example,” says accessibility specialist Ian Hamilton. Through learning the audio cues for each move, vision-impaired players have been able to master them. One, Brice Mellen, even beat the creator of
Mortal Kombat at his own game.
One genre takes this principle of great sound design to another level, reducing or removing the visual elements to create games playable only by ear. Audio games have been around for a while – Satizabal mentions
GMA Tank Commander and
Shades of Doom, both of which came out more than a decade ago – but they are gaining recognition thanks to the vision-impaired community’s latest console of choice.
“The idea of a blind person using a touchscreen may be a strange one at first,” says Hamilton, “but smartphone uptake was actually faster among people with impaired vision.” Thanks to Apple’s decision to include a screen reader called VoiceOver on every device since the iPhone 3GS, catering to vision-impaired players on iOS is easy. “So easy,” Hamilton adds, “that Zynga made
Hanging with Friends blind- accessible entirely by accident, just by naming their buttons correctly.”
More intentionally blind-accessible games include audio games, such as the Papa Sangre series (iOS) and The Nightjar (iOS), both from developer Somethin’ Else, which are played using simple touch controls – or, as Satizabal prefers, the gyroscope – to navigate towards sounds that represent goals and away from those made by monsters. Many exploit our fear of being blind, which makes for an intense experience but could be problematic if overplayed.
“Horror has its place,” Satizabal says, “but it can be a little bit cliched. And also, visual impairment already has enough negative associations without it being brought out in the gaming world.”
Richard Harlow, who lost most of his sight to an optic nerve disease five years ago, agrees, saying these games can give the impression that blindness is “incredibly scary, and that you can’t be left by yourself”.
One studio taking a different tack is Incus Games, which is developing an audio-only adventure for PC and Mac. In
Three Monkeys, players control a protagonist called Tobar who becomes a hero precisely because he was born blind and is thus best equipped when the world is cursed into darkness. “We wanted to create a world in which not being able to see was your biggest strength,” says
Stephen Willey, producer and composer on the game.
“It’s more about empowering your sense of hearing,” says Satizabal, who met Willey while both attended Birmingham Conservatoire and is now a consultant on the game. He brings expertise from his experience both with audio games and “just getting around on a daily basis as a blind person using sound” to make suggestions such as adding more background noise to the forest in which the demo takes place, to make the game feel more real.
In that demo, a sprite called Yoska teaches the player how to use their hearing to hunt a bird and shoot it down with a bow and arrow and fight bandits and goblins with a sword. It sounds like something you’d expect to do in a modern big-budget RPG, which Willey says is intentional: “What we’re really aiming for is an audio game that has a kind of AAA [those with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion] feel about it.”
That should appeal to vision-impaired players such as Harlow, whose experience of “real video games” before he lost his sight has led him to consider many audio games “kind of bad, and just not entertaining”. But Willey and Satizabal both hope sighted players will enjoy the game too, so that they can have a shared experience with those who are vision-impaired.
“When there’s something that everyone has in common, that’s something that bridges people together,” Harlow says, “And that’s the awesome thing about video games.”
Listen in: audio games
Somethin’ Else iOS
Voiced by Sean Bean, a game in which you use simple touch controls to walk and turn until you’ve escaped the world of the dead.
Somethin’ Else iOS
Voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, who leads you through a spaceship which has been plunged into darkness and occupied by mysterious – and unfriendly – life forms.
An adventure inspired by Romany lore featuring “puzzles, open-world exploration, fighting, and hunting”. Later this month, they will launch a Kickstarter page to generate extra support.
Epicycle iOS/PC/Mac
A horror game in which you play an assistant professor who finds himself blind and in the midst of an apocalypse
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