I’ve Burnt My Hand
Posted on 1st Apr 2010 at 11:09 by Joe Martin with 30 comments
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – I’m an idiot. Right now I’ve even got a constant reminder of the fact in the form of a bandage covering the middle two fingers and palm of my left hand.
Important life lesson: When trying to impress your girlfriend by making jerk chicken and homemade cornbread it’s important not to pick up the griddle pan that’s been in the oven for the last 20 minutes unless you're wearing oven gloves..
Fortunately, my hand is now pretty much OK and the burns, while painful and annoying, were only superficial. No lasting damage. On the downside, the exorbitant amount of bandaging and the blisters beneath have had an impact on my gaming life.
Jerked Chicken - hot stuff!
Playing action games at the moment is pretty much out of the question, as pressing W and S is pretty much impossible. I can hit A and D, but that’s useless unless I limit myself to playing Crab Simulator 2010. I’m fortunate to be in the position of playing games that can be done with just the mouse at the moment; tottering through Settlers 7 at work and The Witcher at home, both of which can be handled with just the right hand.
Still, the situation has got me thinking about how few games are designed for people with disabilities and so on, from the major to the minor. I’m reminded of Valve’s research into building games for deaf players and Dan Griliopoulos’ problems as a colour-blind gamer, not to mention the occasional sighting of controllers built for amputees. I’ve only scalded my hand and I’m nowhere near having comparable issues obviously, but there’s a certain sympathy borne out of it.
I see...a monkey!
It’s a shame that there isn’t more support for gamers with disabilities or medical conditions and so on. It’s obviously not feasible (nor really desirable) to have first person shooters designed for play with just one hand, but when it comes to some of the wider issues of proper closed captioning and colour palettes there’s much less of an excuse.
Can you think of any games which offer great support for these situations? Let me know in the comments below.
Important life lesson: When trying to impress your girlfriend by making jerk chicken and homemade cornbread it’s important not to pick up the griddle pan that’s been in the oven for the last 20 minutes unless you're wearing oven gloves..
Fortunately, my hand is now pretty much OK and the burns, while painful and annoying, were only superficial. No lasting damage. On the downside, the exorbitant amount of bandaging and the blisters beneath have had an impact on my gaming life.
Jerked Chicken - hot stuff!
Playing action games at the moment is pretty much out of the question, as pressing W and S is pretty much impossible. I can hit A and D, but that’s useless unless I limit myself to playing Crab Simulator 2010. I’m fortunate to be in the position of playing games that can be done with just the mouse at the moment; tottering through Settlers 7 at work and The Witcher at home, both of which can be handled with just the right hand.
Still, the situation has got me thinking about how few games are designed for people with disabilities and so on, from the major to the minor. I’m reminded of Valve’s research into building games for deaf players and Dan Griliopoulos’ problems as a colour-blind gamer, not to mention the occasional sighting of controllers built for amputees. I’ve only scalded my hand and I’m nowhere near having comparable issues obviously, but there’s a certain sympathy borne out of it.
I see...a monkey!
It’s a shame that there isn’t more support for gamers with disabilities or medical conditions and so on. It’s obviously not feasible (nor really desirable) to have first person shooters designed for play with just one hand, but when it comes to some of the wider issues of proper closed captioning and colour palettes there’s much less of an excuse.
Can you think of any games which offer great support for these situations? Let me know in the comments below.
30 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplySuch an addict.
I've even bought some leftover cornbread in with me today...
ovens are dangerous, especially those electric oven with hot resistors on top, i burnt my thumb on that once.
I bet it's had an impact on your jerking aswell.
/I'll get my coat...
In games, for the big names, colour blind players can be treated pretty well; Team Fortress 2 has teams of Red and Blu, easy to distinguish. Sometimes the design is good but the instructions are bad; instructions for Far Cry 2's diamond-hunting GPS says to watch the green flashing light- I've no idea which one is the green light, and even though I can only see one flashing light, for all I know that might be a red flashing light and I worry that there's another, green, light I can't see. Thankfully there are usually other cues such as sound or symbols.
Then there's the nigh-on impossible games. Torchlight, step forward. Whilst I can play this and have fun, apparently to really advance I need to look for items of a specific colour. Well, I can't. I'm getting enough enjoyment out of Torchlight to justify it's recent £3.75 special offer on Steam, but if I'd have paid full price, even at only fifteen quid, I'd be demanding my money back.
Thank God for discounts and try-before-you-buy demos.
You'll have noticed I've only talked about action/shooter games. To be quite honest I've given up on RTSes. I last played one about seven years ago and it was the usual mess of gazillions of tiny little coloured men/symbols/flags, none of which I could distinguish with any accuracy. I recall one medieval RTS where I not only couldn't distinguish the two opposing sides, but I couldn't even tell the soldiers from the trees. I can't imagine that this has got any better now that every blade of grass is rendered too.
Half Life and Quake wall switches that flip between red and green can sod right off, too.
Now I could understand this failure to accommodate disability if we accounted for a teeny tiny percentage of the developer's customer base, like, say, registered blind or amputees. But one in ten blokes? Having two daughters, I'd love to believe that this is a sign that games companies are targeting the female demographic (girls generally can't be colour blind, the genetic defect is almost entirely male and almost entirely white). But really, it's just a sign that the companies don't care. I mean, how much money do they save by designing a texture that is red/green instead of red/blue? Are blue pixels expensive?
It's not just the PC. I've also got a Wii. I have no idea whether I'm playing Mario or Luigi. Rubik's World is a bit hit-and-miss too.
Hey corporates, it's this simple. I have a nice enough job that I have to pay 40% tax. Cater for me and you'll get my money. Don't and you won't. You want to discriminate against ten percent of white males? Probably best not tell your shareholders about that.
My Dad is red/green colour blind, so I carry the gene. Not sure if it's the same with your girls as it is with me, but I can see what you're meant to see and also what a red/green colour-blind person would see when they use the Ishihara colour tests. It confused the hell out of the opticians when I was a child. They'd ask what number I could see and if it was one of the ones with two numbers (one for colour blinds one for normal vision) I'd always ask which number they wanted as I could see two. Your daughters also have a higher chance of being tetrachromats too. Which I really want to be tested for as the basic tests I've done so far show that I am. I am also bitchin' at colour matching. Oh and red/green colour blindness does have a bonus, you guys can spot camouflage soooo well ;)
Anyhoo... back to the games for people with disabilities thing, I am really hating this new trend for 3D. I only have vision out of one of my (awesome) eyes, so 3D glasses just mess everything up for me. It's almost as bad as when those Magic Eye pictures were the in-thing. If you don't have stereoscopic vision, forget it. Almost forgot, being a cyclops means that games with dodgy fov can really mess with me too and give me motion sickness quite quickly. I couldn't play HL2 at all as it made me soooo ill. Changing the fov and refresh rate helped, but I think it was too late and I associated HL2 with being sick :/
Crab battle!
*puts hand up*
Same.
Luckily this doesn't tend to have too much effect on my gaming but I find it can be quite difficult to tell light green and yellow apart. I make do :(
I mean, anything for the Wii that doesn't require the nunchuck works... as do light guns for things like Time Crisis.
I know that Bust-A-Move for the Playstation had shapes within the bubbles, so those with colourblindness could still tell the difference between the blue balls and the red ones.
The scar from the chunk of skin I managed to leave behind on a sharp drive bay on my new case is just fading. When I used to build computers for a living I constantly had at least one cut healing somewhere on my hands...
Walk into an A&E department in chef whites though and they'll just ask "cut or burn?"
Ha I did the exact thing the first time I made Jerk Chicken!! Tasted great but I can't say I enjoyed it as much as I should have with all the pain.
I know I'm a smaller demographic, but TBH, after playing the EXCELLENT Arkham Asylum, I'm left wondering why so many games are unnecessarily complicated. I was able to play it just fine, and beat the snot out of it. Sure, there's The Witcher and Torchlight and such, but MMOs? Problematic. Guild Wars finally made a decent enough controlset that i am STILL playing.
Come on guys... We do exist. I won't quit gaming until my condition completely claims my hands, and maybe not even then.
I would think that the little add-on mini keyboard type accessories with the customizable buttons would be great for people with a few disabled fingers, but a completely disabled hand would make them useless. As I have been fortunate enough to still have full use of both hands however, it is just a guess and nothing more.
How about a review of one of those customizable mini-keyboard accessories while the fingers are still tender to get an opinion for those with slightly disabled hands?
How long did you take to wrie this article :D... i see to many S's and W's
:D
http://benheck.com/10-24-2007/benhecks-new-single-handed-access-controller-revealed
erm diablo II possibly:D