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Purpose: Participation and accessibility issues faced by gamers with multi-sensory disabilities are themes yet to be fully understood by accessible technology researchers. In this work, we examine the personal experiences and perceptions of individuals with deafblindness who play games despite their disability, as well as the reasons that lead some of them to stop playing games.
Materials and methods: We conducted 60 semi-structured interviews with individuals living with deafblindness in five European countries: United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, Greece and Sweden.
Results: Participants stated that reasons for playing games included them being a fun and entertaining hobby, for socialization and meeting others, or for occupying the mind. Reasons for stop playing games included essentially accessibility issues, followed by high cognitive demand, changes in gaming experience due their disability, financial reasons, or because the accessible version of a specific game was not considered as fun as the original one.
Conclusions: We identified that a considerable number of individuals with deafblindness enjoy playing casual mobile games such as Wordfeud and Sudoku as a pastime activity. Despite challenging accessibility issues, games provide meaningful social interactions to players with deafblindness. Finally, we introduce a set of user-driven recommendations for making digital games more accessible to players with a diverse combination of sensory abilities.
IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATION
- Digital games were considered a fun and entertaining hobby by participants with deafblindness. Furthermore, participants play games for socialization and meeting others, or for occupying the mind.
- Digital games provide meaningful social interactions and past time to persons with deafblindness.
- On top of accessibility implications, our findings draw attention to the importance of the social element of gaming for persons with deafblindness.
- Based on interviews, we introduce a set of user-driven recommendations for making digital games more accessible to players with a diverse combination of sensory abilities.
This work demonstrates the potentials of procedural content generation (PCG) for games, focusing on the generation of specific graphic props (reefs) in an explorer game. We briefly portray the state-of-the-art of PCG and compare various methods to create random patterns at runtime. Taking a step towards the game industry, we describe an actual game production and provide a detailed pseudocode implementation showing how Perlin or Simplex noise can be used efficiently. In a comparative study, we investigate two alternative implementations of a decisive game prop: once created traditionally by artists and once generated by procedural algorithms. 41 test subjects played both implementations. The analysis shows that PCG can create a user experience that is significantly more realistic and at the same time perceived as more aesthetically pleasing. In addition, the ever-changing nature of the procedurally generated environments is preferred with high significance, especially by players aged 45 and above.