turning off the screen

Why bother?

Gone Home's modification came out of a need to address the inaccessibility of mainstream gaming for visual impaired players. Starting out as a thesis project for NYU Music Tech's thesis requirement the mod has evolved into more than just Gone Home, but into a greater independent initiative for blind called Turning Off the Screen.

Back in early 2015 when it came time to pick a thesis topic, I knew I wanted to do something with game audio. The procedural nature of game audio makes it an extremely engaging medium to work with, from sound design to implementation to gameplay. However, game audio in of itself is such a mammoth to conquer-- there is no way to effectively become an expert in all of it in one master's thesis. While the exact inspirational moment remains a nebulous mystery, I recall encountering relatively young blind pedestrians many times and curiously wondered, 'How would they play digital games? Does this art form that I love provide them with the same amount of entertainment and storytelling as it does for me? Are games a problem for some people?'

The Problem

As it turns out, most games are. With the exception of audio-based games, many of which served as the inspiration for this project, the realm of digital games is inherently visual. The point of this project isn't to shame that implicit design model because the fact of the matter is is that a big portion of mainstream audiences are sighted. It is here that some of the most revolutionary visuals have evolved beyond our wildest imaginations. This discovery is a call to include more user-experience (UX) and user-interface (UI) elements that elevate game audio's role from being purely ornamental in purpose. Two major problems stem from this lack of inclusion:

1. Crudely put, developers lose out on potential revenue. When a percentage of players that could have enjoyed your game can not access it, there is a loss of exposure and therefore, a loss of profit.

2. When games, which are such a huge force in entertainment, ignore a huge population of a potential audience, the message is "this is not for you". While blind-only tech has made leaps and bounds over the years in terms of progress, blind tech shouldn't be restricted to just bio-medical purposes. The human experience transcends mere survival; forms of entertainment, especially games, expose us to new viewpoints, narratives, stories, and connects us to others through the form of characters or fans.

Why Gone Home?

Gone Home is a first person adventure exploratory game in which the player embodies Kaitlin Greenbriar, the protagonist who comes home after a semester abroad to an empty house. Upon this unsettling discovery, it is up the player to piece together the past in order to understand what has happened to her family in the present day.

Critically acclaimed and well-known throughout the indie gaming community, I thought that in order to tackle the crux of the issue of blind accessibility, it was best to approach a game that had a built in audience and had simplistic game mechanics; walking and basic interaction with specific environmental clues. From a technical standpoint, I could focus more on audio implementation without worrying about an onslaught of complex audio, such as bullets or even footsteps since the floor remains the same textures in this level, and I would be able to showcase this project without the hurdle of coming up with a story and the issues that come with designing game play and mechanics around it. The game was also built in Unity, a game engine that I was already familiar with.

Prototyping

After building the initial the environment, I moved onto working on the actual game mechanics. I initially stuck as close to the original character game mechanic as possible. This entailed basic first person movement, where WASD or the arrow keys corresponded with desired player directions. I quickly ran into my first issues here. Lesson number 2 was that audio became the visuals -- players couldn't see obstacles and assumptions on the developer's end (me) led to frustrations. Casual player testing also determined that the current first person game play did not provide enough aural cues. Lesson number 3: deviating from the original material can be advantageous for accessibility. This realization spawned the addition of white cane asset that was attached to the character's body in order to roughly replicate the real life experience of a blind person using a white stick to maneuver.

Conclusions? And what now?

While it'd be foolish to have one definite conclusion at the beginning stages of this journey, I came to a few big ones:

• When creating content for visually impaired players, keep pushing the boundaries of sounds. This doesn't necessarily mean cramming in sounds to the point of overwhelming the player. Play around with localization, voiceover, and using key sound effects to ground the player.

• Constant player feedback is key, especially when creating for an experience you are not familiar with. This was a challenge because unfortunately I did not have a network of visually impaired players when I first started this project and relied a lot on one friend and colleague. However, I slowly and am still building that network.

• Enough player feedback will start to contradict each other. When showcasing Gone Home mod at IndieCade LA and user testing afterwards, a lot of player suggestions started to clash, creating a bit of hesitation in which direction to go in for certain issues. There needs to be a balance between developer discretion and player opinion.

• While the theories of accessibility were simple, the execution was labor intensive. In an era where game creation tools are free and devs can create an awesome game from zero knowledge and zero dollars, it's unfair to pin the entirety of the blame on creators. I find that if game engines themselves had accessibility tools built in, a whole slew of blind-friendly games that aren't necessarily audio-only would crop up. Because free heavy duty engines such as Unity and Unreal follow the triple-A industry model of optimization, perhaps triple-A game engine engineers could invest time and money in creating those tools.

• I still do not have all the answers. While I have learned an invaluable amount from when I started, there are still so many unanswered questions, paths that could have and can be taken, technical questions, and mistakes made. There are so many factors as to why this is, me being a sighted developer being a big one, but they were all valuable lessons that have beneficially shaped this project.

Due to the closed-source nature of Gone Home, the Gone Home mod has been finished for awhile. However, I now carry the philosophies and principles learned with me. Since my focus has shifted to more web-based applications, I try to follow guidelines laid out by standard web accessibility protocol, like the ones listed on w3.org. When it comes to personal gaming projects, without the time constraint of a game jam, these are crucial components that will need to be incorporated into early development.

Video of Demo