Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary

"You are equipped with a medical kit

, a few grenades, a gun, a knife, your fists, and a computer to analyze your surroundings, and you must make your way through the many levels of the top secret military research base, and shut down the ill-fated experiment." This is how the Shades of Doom website describes the gamer's task. Oh, and there's one more thing: You are blind.

Shades of Doom is one of many computer games for the blind and visually impaired. These are not "video" games, as that word implies a visual element. Instead, a genre of audio games based not on graphics but on sound has popped up. Perhaps as many as 2000 blind people play computer games, estimates Thomas Ward, a blind gamer and game developer, and many of them converse on thriving game forums, such as Audyssey.org and AudioGames.net, whose members provided much input for this story. When asked what is the most interesting factoid about computer games for the blind, one gamer on the Audyssey email list responded: "To be honest, that we can play games at all." How is it done?

The key is to replace visual cues with auditory ones. David Greenwood, who created Shades of Doom, says that his game is similar to its prototype for sighted players, Doom, the classic shooter by id Software: "In Shades of Doom, it's more or less the same thing, except it's all done with sound." Sounds come in many forms and have different purposes, providing spatial orientation, text descriptions, and "ear candy."

Orientation

In audio games, players orient themselves with help from stereo sound. Wearing headphones that pipe different sounds into the left and right ears, a player can hear where sounds are coming from and develop a sense of the environment. In Shades of Doom, Greenwood says, "You'd be walking down a hallway and a passage would open off to the left, and so to give this info to the blind gamer, I would make the echo so that it sounds like the echoes of your boots are coming off from the left side. If there's something attacking you, you just turn your character until the sound is directly ahead of you." A beeping sound rises in pitch until you are right in front of the target. Then, you shoot.

Sound Effects

"If something can be represented graphically," Ward says, "usually there is some sound queue that can be added to identify it." Wind sounds, he says, can identify the opening to a cave or passageway. Different kinds of footstep sounds can indicate different terrain. A player might hear a quack in the child's animal game "Here Comes The Duck!" or the moan of a zombie in the shoot-'em-up game Swamp. Each zombie has its own moan or growl, which you can listen to in this audio review.

Text Descriptions

A growl could easily represent a barking dog or a zombie. But so can words.

"A zombie dog snarls and tries to bark at you!" That snippet comes from the role-playing game, Alter Aeon. Though not specifically designed for blind people, Alter Aeon is accessible to them because it relies on text to tell the player what is happening. Screen reader programs, which automatically read the text on the computer screen, can just read the text aloud to a blind player. People have developed new versions of the game that condense the text or replace some of it with iconic sounds, says Dennis Towne, the lead coder for Alter Aeon.

What kinds of descriptions should you use in a game for the blind? You might think that visual descriptions are out. In fact, that's far from the truth, says John Bannick, Chief Technology Officer of 7-128 Software, a company that makes family games that are accessible to both blind and sighted players. "People who are blind, in our experience, want to hear visual descriptions. They may not know what blue is but they want to know that something is blue. They don't want to be treated any differently."

"Ear Candy"

Not all the sounds in a game have to be functional. As Bannick says, "Another important thing that's often overlooked in games for the blind is what one of our blind colleagues calls 'ear candy.' [She] says, 'Hey—you guys got eye candy. I want ear candy.' Give me sounds that are interesting." Bannick describes the sound effects in one of 7-128 Software's games, called Inspector Cyndy in Newport. "We have a lot of background sounds—you have sounds of seagulls, sounds of cats, clocks ticking, doors opening and closing, people walking around."

Function Follows Fun?

Audio games can be more than entertainment. Researchers at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and elsewhere have created an audio game with a practical purpose: to help people learn to navigate unfamiliar environments. Lotfi Merabet and colleagues created their game based on a map of a building at the Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton, Mass. In the game, players navigate the building searching for jewels and avoiding monsters.

"As you find these jewels," Merabet says, "you're actually exploring the map, and at the same time, this map is forming in your mind." In an experiment, the researchers had one group of blind subjects play the game and taught another group the layout of the building using the same building simulation but without the game component. As reported in the journal PLOS ONE, when the researchers then took the study participants to the real building, they found that both groups could navigate the building but those who had played the game were better at finding shortcuts—thanks perhaps to their superior mental map. Those who had played a game based on a different building, Merabet says, were lost. A video explaining the game appeared this week in the Journal of Visualized Experiments.

For this kind of thing to work, however, first you need an entertaining product. "A good game for blind people must first and foremost actually be a good game," says Michael Feir, the creator of Audyssey, an e-zine about audio games, which has now morphed into a game review site and online forum. "No amount of fancy audio work or accessibility will save an ill-conceived game from being thought of as such."

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