[Audiogames: May Your Ears Be With You]

As videogames are to the eye, audiogames are to the ear. Audiogames are designed solely as sound environments, and originally they were developed for the blind. But as they're getting more and more sophisticated sighted players are giving them a try. And as you'll see below, some have gone wireless.

Turns out that there's a helpful overview of audiogames in the Wikipedia, from which:

"Audio games originally started out as 'blind accessible'-games and were developed mostly by amateurs and blind programmers. But more and more people are showing interest in audio games, ranging from sound artists, game accessibility researchers, mobile game developers and mainstream videogamers. Most audio games run on a computer platform, although there are a few audiogames for handhelds and video game consoles. Audio games feature the same variety of genres as videogames, such as adventure games, racing games, etc. [...] The main audience is still mostly visually impaired users. But commercial interest is growing steadly. In 1999 a Japanese company called Warp developed a game called "Real Sound: Kaze no Regret." It was released on the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast and it featured no visuals at all, just sound."

Here's a quick listen, a short mp3 promo for "Flight Commander".

There is even a site for blind gamers, Audyssey Magazine, and a clearing house and archive, Audio Games.

I particularly liked roaming through the Demor location-based 3D audiogame site. It has some great images, this mp3 recording of a game in progress, plus an excellent Quicktime demo that shows just how strange you'll look to the outside world.

Maribeth Back, from Xerox PARC, has written a very smart article entitled "Micro-narratives in Sound Design: Context, Character, and Caricature in Waveform Manipulation."

[Thanks to Ben Shapiro]

Comments

[cody]

I am across this list of games for the blind and vison impaired a while back while putting together sources for a new project.

I was blow away when I first started to look at these games. It just wasn't a possibility that I'd considered. Then I realized that I shouldn't have been so surprised.

Sound design in video games has just gotten to such a point that trying to play with the sound off simply makes some games unplayable. I remember playing Halo on a good surround sound system when it first came out, and how weird it was to actually hear someone sneaking up behind me in multiplayer.

I think if one were to combine some of the conventions being developed by audio games with Zach Simpson et. al's Shadow Garden System, which was recently showcased at the Indie Game Jam, you could have one hell of a console for blind gamers.

Also on the subject, I really interested in the Spoken Interface for OS X and the conventions that it might employ as it could have an interesting effect on audiogames.