Earlier this year, a minor injury to my right eye left me temporarily blind. I could do little but sit in bed and listen to audio books, until someone told me about the video game BlindSide, which doesn’t, in fact, contain any video. It is a meticulously designed, audio-driven thriller that is entirely devoid of graphics.
Built to entertain blind players as well as those who can see, the audio-only game’s accommodation of disabled gamers is a pleasant anomaly in the gaming industry, even though the number of gamers with disabilities is significant. The latest Americans with Disabilities report, which draws on 2010 census data, estimates that nearly fifty-seven million Americans, or roughly nineteen per cent of the population, have a disability, with over thirty-eight million suffering from what the report considers to be a “severe disability” of a physical, mental, or communicative nature. While nearly twenty million Americans “had difficulty with physical tasks relating to upper body function,” more than eight million over the age of fifteen have difficulty seeing and seven and a half million reported difficulty hearing. There is certainly overlap with the fifty-eight per cent of Americans who, according to the Electronic Software Association, play video games; the Able Gamers Foundation, a charity organization for disabled gamers, estimates that there are thirty-three million gamers with some kind of disability.
In the nineteen-eighties, gamers like John Dutton, a quadriplegic who learned to use the Atari 2600 joystick with his mouth and chin, drew attention to the need for hardware that disabled gamers could use. In 1988, Nintendo released the NES Hands Free, a video-game controller designed explicitly for disabled gamers, which was worn like a vest. It had a chin stick for movement and a tube that players breathed in and out of to control the “A” and “B” buttons. In the nineties, attention shifted to making in-game control schemes more accessible, leading to releases like Shades of Doom, a first-person shooter for visually impaired gamers. More recently, the Call of Duty franchise, inspired by the quadriplegic professional gamer Randy Fitzgerald, introduced a special button layout for disabled gamers which makes it easier to aim, while the Able Gamers Foundation has published a guide that shows developers how to design more accessible products.
It’s still uncertain how much better Sony’s PlayStation 4 or Microsoft’s Xbox One consoles will be for disabled gamers than their predecessors. The consensus so far is that the Xbox One has a slight edge on accessibility over the PS4, given its extensive array of voice controls, but it will ultimately be up to individual game developers to utilize the consoles’ processing power to introduce features like color-blind modes and in-game text-size adjustment for visually impaired players. Microsoft’s updated Kinect accessibility guidelines for the Xbox One, for instance, reveal that the new system will not support sign language, and reiterates that Kinect’s ability to work with seated players is “largely dependent on the actual game itself.”
Though disabled gamers may still be cut off from traditional gaming systems to some degree, a growing number of developers are using the built-in accessibility features of mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad—voiceover, assistive touch, and guided access—to create games for physically disabled and visually impaired players that don’t require the specialized hardware that living-room gaming consoles often do.
BlindSide is one of those games. It’s a survival horror setup, about an assistant professor named Case who wakes up next to his girlfriend, Dawn, in their apartment, after what initially appears to be a power outage. But Case, Dawn, and everyone else have actually inexplicably become blind. At the same time, scary-sounding monsters roam the city. Because Case is new to the feeling of being blind, one of the objectives of the game is to teach players to navigate the environment using audio cues, both from Case, who yells when he bumps into things—“The door is to my left, the kitchen is to my right”—and subtler hints, like the way sound travels in a particular environment. For example, if you’re facing an open window, you hear traffic noise in both speakers, but if you turn to the right, you only hear the noises in the left speaker. Other sounds—a dripping faucet or a noisy TV—also help you get around.
The game can be played on a Mac or PC using the arrow keys, or on an iPhone or iPad, where it uses the device’s motion sensors to track which direction you’re facing in the real word to replicate in the game. Playing with the iPhone made it much easier to draw a mental map of the in-game environment, although I did bump into real furniture every now and then, trying to find my way around obstacles.
The game was the result of a high-school chemistry-class accident. Aaron Rasmussen, half of the development team behind BlindSide, was blinded after an explosion involving red phosphorous and potassium chlorate. “I woke up from the emergency-room drugs and everything was black,” Rasmussen said. His corneas, which were damaged, eventually grew back, restoring his sight. “The whole experience made me value my sight more, in a way that makes me treat it with more care.”
In May, 2011, Rasmussen met with a former Boston University colleague, Michael T. Astolfi, who was completing a master’s degree in the design and psychology of video games at N.Y.U. Rasmussen told Astolfi that he was working on a script for a video game based on his experience of being sightless. Later that night, Astolfi realized that Rasmussen’s script could be turned into an audio game with a sense of physical space. “Twenty-four hours later, I sent Aaron a prototype of BlindSide’s basic gameplay,” Astolfi told me.
The pair raised over fourteen thousand dollars on Kickstarter in December, 2011, and worked from their respective cities—Rasmussen in Los Angeles, Astolfi in New York—to build the game over the course of twelve months. Rasmussen, who has dabbled in everything from software to robotics, wanted the game to feel like a rough simulation of being blind while remaining fun, and hit upon the idea of an exhilarating horror game.
First, Rasmussen and Astolfi modelled real-world locations in 3-D. They then reproduced the sounds that one might hear in each environment; there are over a thousand sound effects in BlindSide. “The biggest challenge was determining the right ratio of authenticity and playability,” Astolfi said. “There is an immense amount of subtlety in audio, especially in the difference between an audio source playing behind you and one in front of you. We found that most people didn’t notice the difference on stereo headphones when it was realistic, so we had to exaggerate the effect of your head blocking high-frequency sounds behind you, so that it was more useful to the player.”
Since its release, last year, BlindSide has been downloaded thousands of times on iOS and PC. In June, it won an innovation award at the Games for Change Festival, which recognizes humanitarian and educational games with a social impact.
Others have sought to build on the game. Rasmussen and Astolfi helped the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute create an assistive app using the technology that powers the game, and a blind woman in her twenties asked about an accessible programming language that could allow her to create her own audio games. (Unsurprisingly, blind players typically finish the game faster than players who can see.)
While there are no plans for a BlindSide sequel, Astolfi and Rasmussen are hopeful that it will inspire other developers to create similarly accessible games. The audio-only iOS horror game Papa Sangre, for example, has already led the studio Somethin’ Else to create two more audio-only titles for iPhone: The Nightjar, featuring the voice of the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, and Papa Sangre II.
“There are gamers out there who are anxious for more accessible content, and very little, if any, of it is coming from established publishers,” Astolfi said. “People with disabilities are a group that has, in general, not been targeted by major video-game releases. But as the indie game movement continues to grow, I think we’ll see more games designed specifically for this audience.”
Yet a large part of BlindSide’s success seems tied to the fact that it doesn’t feel like a game that’s been designed for disabled players. A game with no visual stimulus can be just as engrossing for players who can see as for those who cannot, it seems. “Our favorite feedback on the game was actually a negative comment,” Astolfi said. “It was a three-star review from a sighted player who said he found the game too scary.”
