Phenomenology

Phenomenology

“Select your preferred use motion or traditional controls” a statement presented to the player at the beginning of Sony’s first party game ‘Until Dawn’. As a player wishing to forget about all of the surrounding world and to be totally ‘immersed’ within the environment and storytelling presented, choosing traditional controls seemed correct right? Leave the body the player is confined to and experience everything inside the perspective of each key actor. Yet after reading this week’s articles I’ve soon came to the enlightenment that maybe they weren’t for me; even for as ironic as it may seem, that the able bodied person wishes to lay dead still in bed using very little motive functions to operate the game. Yet for some these very simple motive functions are complex and sometimes impossible feats made easier by such an option that maybe Until Dawn was offering straight out of the gates.

              After reading about the encounter between Voelker and a mystery father wishing to play with his son yet being prohibited by the loss of his finger on one hand and the intense reaction he had to such a simple option being offered. The increased awareness of such a feature hit me, I returned to the title and tried out a chapter with these functions only using one hand to see if such a thing was possible.

               Which for most part was near impossible with the motion controls being somewhat useless and janky and really requiring two hands to operate with over extended motions needed to help emphasis which option I wished to pick. And so the intentions behind the motion controls became clear they aren’t really intended as a subtle way of disabled gamers to check on accessibility features without diving deeply into the menus which in some cases is hard enough for these gamers. No it’s for the abled body gamer who wishes to try something else, to experience the game with the full awareness of the player’s body. This really does seem like a missed opportunity to make this set of controls a way for disabled gamers to jump straight into a game without the hesitation of menu diving for options which as stated in the Polygon article can be a feat in itself.

              These settings however do succeed in making the player aware of its body and helps amplify the intensity of the decision making with the timer making you fill as if your tripping over yourself with the shoddy motion controls, purposefully crafted or not. However I can’t help but feel that this was a missed opportunity by developers to really push accessibility in games, offering motion controls to people who precession thumb stick aren’t an option. 

References;

Polygon,(2016)Why game accessibility matters[Internet] Available from: <http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/8/6/5886035/disabled-gamers-accessibility>

Cyborgology,(2016)Games Design and Digital Duelist Ableism[Internet] Available from:

<https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/06/07/game-design-and-digital-dualist-ableism/>

SupermassiveGames,(2015) Until Dawn. Playstation, San Mateo: Sony Computer Entertainment.