The World is the Client
Mindy and I had a good conversation at lunch yesterday… touched on a lot of topics, one of which being accessibility of virtual worlds. This prompted me to take another look at the IGDA Accessibility Whitepaper and to think about a number of talks I had with my diss supervisor John about this very same thing… the discussions I’ve had about accessibility and virtual worlds have always left me radically ambivalent: thrilled about the potential in virtual world systems for providing experiences in multiple modes for users, and daunted by the constraints and limitations current clients present in terms of, specifically, non-visual accessibility.
The lo-fi beginnings of an approach: relegate the operations of a 3D virtual world client to text. Most mmogs output all kinds of world occurrences in the text output already: expand the number of operations that get messages, dump to a simpler and more assistive-technology-reader-friendly application. For input, enrich the command language to allow the user to express in type the operations that currently rely on mouse and keyboard motion actions. Voila, you have… in essence, a text MUD, maybe not a great one in terms of its description, but hopefully functional.
But does this really present an equivalent experience to a 3D virtual world? Are there ways in which it can be made more analogous to what a sighted player experiences? I think it’s reductive to talk about an MMOG as just a MUD with a graphical client — this argument elides the spatial, quasi-kinesthetic experience of a interacting with a client that represents motion in real time. The information presented is largely visual, but it’s certainly not an experience of watching, and it’s more visceral an experience than a text application would provide. This experience of 3D gaming is stimulated visually, but it is translated cognitively into something more.
In my opinion, there are two approaches to replicating this experience. The first is to figure out ways to enable this visceral experience with non-visual information: sound, and especially, I think, some kind of next-generation force-feedback. The second, which sounds more fun to me, is to start toying with pervasive gaming and computing models that translate real-world experience into gameplay. GDC 2005′s upcoming ConfQuest lays the rules of an mmog over lived experience; PacManhattan translates the actions of Pac-Man to urban space. Mobile computing devices in this scenario could enable communications between these “virtualized” lived experiences and the digitized spatial experience of the virtual world.
I like the idea of reversing the common model: instead of presenting an interface with less multi-sensory richness to disabled users, blow open the interface so that the standard client is itself the less rich experience of the game.
I’m taking my first steps into developing in LSL within Second Life, so I’m looking forward to seeing what it ideas it can stimulate along these lines.