An Interview w/ The AbleGamers Foundation

Saturday at PAX East I was able to sit down with an amazing group of gamers who are out there to help improve gaming for gamers with disabilities.  Check out the interview here.

I'm talking about AbleGamers, who held a panel at PAX East on Friday.  They were a part of the "Gamers Doing Good - How We Use Video Games to Make Life Better for Others" panel.  The AbleGamers Foundation & Gamers Outreach Foundation teamed up to discuss how video games are being used to help others, from the disabled to vets.

More than 33 million gamers in the United States has a disability.  Three of those gamers, Mark Bartlet, Steven Spohn and Ben Herz, took time to sit down with me and talk about what AbleGamers is and what they are doing to improve gaming for disabled gamers.

Kayhynn:  What made you create Able Gamers?

Mark:  Well I could just send you the narrative text, I've written it out enough.  However, my best friend in the world that I’ve known since 6th grade was diagnosed with MS in 2002.  as she got married and started having her own family, we used video games to stay in touch.  Every Friday night was game night.  We'd get on and we'd play an MMO and get on Ventrillo to talk.  Her and her husband and me and mine and we'd BS and really have a good time and stay connected as a family through gaming..

One Friday night she didn't get on like she was supposed to and I was worried and concerned.  I gave her a call.  Her husband answered the phone and I could hear crying in the background.  I asked what was wrong and was just about panicking because  I've known her longer than I've not known her in my  life

What ended up happening, is that MS, being what it is and is just a crazy disease, just picks on you because it's like a big bully.  That day it made her right hand not work very well.  When she put her right hand on her mouse it just didn't feel right.  It felt dead and it made her feel very uncomfortable being there because it didn't' feel right.  So she wasn’t going to play that night.

I was like wait, what? A diseases is going to ruin gaming for us? No no no, that’s not gonna happen.  I'm a technologist myself, so I decided to use this skill that I had to help.  Because obviously if we're looking for something to help her out, other people had to be looking for something as well, which is where we started up this organization.

Kayhynn:  What is one of your biggest goals and how do you plan to achieve it?

Steven:  Our biggest goal is to be put out of business.  We want to, in the next ten years, have accessibility to be so included in video games that we won’t be needed.  We hope to achieve that by raising awareness of what all we do, about how easy it is to add accessibility to games through options which can be added cheaply through the early part of the development cycle or through patches.

Kayhynn:  What game companies have you worked with that have actually changed some of the  the games to make them more accessible?

Mark:  Game companies are hard to say.  We’ve worked more on a title-to-title basis because that is how game companies are split up - by title.  Blizzard/Activision consulted with us to put a color-blind patch in WoW.  One of the first patches for Warhammer Online contained support for the on-screen keyboard.  To their credit, Mythic actually brought me in because their offices are in D.C.  They invited me to their office and invited me to their super-secret testing lab and said “Okay Mark this is what we think we got.”

They had three testers -  I was really impressed that they had three people playing the game with an on-screen keyboard -  sitting at the computer playing the game with an onscreen keyboard.  One of them turned to me and said “I have a question, maybe you can explain this to me.  How do we go about doing this?”

We kinda explained they have to move the UI around to accommodate for the on-screen keyboard.  They were like “Oh, Okay,” and that turned into a great success.  So the first patch that came out for Warhammer had the on-screen keyboard support on it. 

This happened, specifically, because Steve was interested in playing the game.  They sent us some beta copies.  Steve tried it out and ended up saying, “The game doesn’t work, it’s dead to me, move on.”  They were like “Whoa, no, we want you to play this game.” So they fixed it because they really wanted us to play this game.

Steven:  Onne of the most impressive things though was working with World of Warcraft.  We worked with Blizzard when they included their colorblind accessibility patch.  they added to where you can tell what currency was what with letters, more things identified with text, etc.   These were our two biggest achievements so far.

Kayhynn: Wow, that’s pretty awesome.  So what do you talk to game developers about when talking about accessibility?

Mark:  The Able Gamers Foundation asks several key questions of game developers when speaking to them.  We give them a flyer that asks several questions, those being:

• Does your game include remappable keys?
  The ability to change the configuration on any button is critical to the ability to play for the largest segment of disabled gamers.  And who doesn’t want the ability to reconfigure keys, regardless of disability?
• Does your game have colorblind options?
  The ability to tell the difference between item levels, health pools and who’s your friend or enemy is impossible for many gamers who can’t see the difference between red and green, blue and yellow and more.
• Is your game captioned for the hearing impaired?
  The ability to immerse yourself in a game without sound is important to the hearing-impaired.  Simply by adding captioning to every aspect of your game includes millions of disabled gamers.

From there, we talk about how the games can be improved if they cannot answer yes to all three of the questions.  The flyer contains a link to the Able Gamers Website to help educate companies.  http://www.ablegamers.org/33million

Kayhynn:  Thanks for the time for the interview today.  I look forward to seeing more of what the AbleGamers are involved in in the future.

The AbleGamers Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity that runes AbleGamers.com which provides news, reviews and advice on disabled technology and the accessibility of mainstream video game titles.

As an alternative to Serious Gaming, mainstream video games supply many disabled individuals and veterans with rehabilitation as well as social stimulation in situations where they may be otherwise shut out of society’s idea of normal everyday life.

If you would like to support the AbleGamers Foundation in its mission, please visit http://www.ablegamers.org