Several college students trying speak up for the people with a disability by their game _ 游民星空 GamerSky.com

Close your eyes and  just imagine that you are over 60 years old and you are losing your hearing. Every time you talk to someone but your answer is “what?” and “louder!”.

In China, one out of every three seniors aged 60 or older suffers from hearing impairment, But what doesn’t match their numbers is that their voices have been buried in the present era.

The puzzle narrative game, “Guihua Fall” was born in this context. It was produced by game design students from Communication University of China in conjunction with students from the School of Music and Recording Arts. They hope more people will start to notice people with disabilities through this game,. Apart form that, “Guihua Fell” is also a good quality indie game, although it is nowhere near mature, but you can still see its highlights in it.

What are the developers trying to express through the game? What can it do for the disadvantaged? With these questions in mind, we interviewed the developers of this game.

The journey begins as the osmanthus falls

You will immediately feel the chinese features right after you are in game. The mobile phone store with the character “拆(demolition)” painted on it, the old man playing chess on the roadside, and the main character of the game, “Mrs. Wong” - a retired female with poor hearing just like any other old lady you can see anywhere.

In the story, Mrs. Wong’s daughter wants to take Wang to her place and live together in order to take care of her mother. Meanwhile, it is the season of osmanthus blossoms, and Wong wants to give osmanthus cakes to her old friends for the last time, so she starts her little journey, a  journey to say farewell. She will do some favors for old friends, leave her dog to them, and leave the street where she has lived for decades.

During the gameplay, I feel like a hearing-impaired senior. The dialogue is partly “blurred” in the game which is a simulation of the declining hearing. Before the main story, there is a “phone call” plot where you can make the “blurred” part clear by increasing the volume. But for the rest, you can only guess what it means.

The designer of “Guihua Fall”, “Three Sentences”, tells us that “people with impaired hearing can actually only hear a part.” It’s kind of like being visually limited, which is why they tried to represent it with graphics.

“Recording” is the core gameplay. Some puzzles require you to record birds chirping, reading, singing and other background sounds and play them in the right place. However, you can only rely on your eyes to recognize those sounds.

Honestly, I didn’t like the design the first time I played it. It makes the game’s puzzle quite confusing at times, but after the developer’s explanation, I quickly realized how logical it is - Being hearing damaged, I had to count on my eyes and try to “feel” the sounds that I couldn’t hear.

The game’s quest system is inspired by TOEM, a game by Swedish developer Something We Made, in which you use the “camera” to complete various puzzles. “Three sentences” tells us that in future development they will expand the “recording” function, and its related puzzle design.

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The student “nanzhu”, who is responsible for the art, also mentioned that the unique hand-drawn style of " Guihua Fall" is based on some children’s illustrated books and cartoons. You may find familiar images in it.

The settings in the game are based on the hometown of “Three Sentences”. For example, characters like “old Yang”, who owns a cell phone store. Things happened to them, like " the old woman next door who is almost deaf", “the old man who asks old yang how to use his cell phone “.

Wong had to make constant compromises through her whole life. The factory where she worked is transformed and she lost her job, her carefully prepared performance was cancelled, she has to leave her dog, and as she ages, her “poor hearing” keeps her away from her love of music. To be “her ideal self” is a luxury.

The disability community is currently not getting enough attention. The reason they are seldom seen is that accessibility for them is inadequate. Most infrastructure does not have visible cues for the deaf, incomplete blind tracks are not helping and even dangerous for the truly blind, and wheelchair users have trouble reaching their destinations.

For most people, it’s not always easy to feel what they feel and picture what their lives are actually like. But through video games, you now have the chance to feel a part of their lives and the challenges they face.

Previously, there were also games that tried to do something similar, like the public service game “See”, which was targeted for visually impaired groups. It let the player role-play a blind person and travel on their blind stick and hearing. You will easily get to know the blind’s daily life: blind tracks suddenly end or occupied by bicycles, traffic lights without frequency tone indication ….. The roads we used to travel casually, for the blind is like walking on thin ice.

In addition, there are also public service oriented games such as “Room 301 in Building 6” which focuses on Alzheimer’s disease and “Biphase” which is about bipolar disorder. The “three sentences” tell us that the first one is a project of their seniors - also born from the game design major of Communication University of China. Although these are “student works”, they are certainly as valuable as the work of any established developer.

Gaming for Everyone

Gaming for Everyone is the slogan proposed by Microsoft in 2015. At the hackathon, several Microsoft employees designed a set of accessible gaming controllers  for people with limitations, and this soon impressed the Microsoft executives. Some time later, they officially launched the Xbox Adaptive Controller, which enables players who can’t use a keyboard or controller to play with it through their own modifications.

I mean, it looks really cool - if you didn’t know what it is, you wouldn’t even realize that it’s a device specifically designed. I realize that beyond the physical differences, we’re all “players”, aren’t we?

Products like the Tobii eye-tracking device are a boon to gamers with handicaps. Using eyes instead of hands to play games, allows many people who have never played video games due to physical defects to enjoy the fun of gaming.

Along with this, games are coming out. In the Chinese-made game “Blind Flight”, visually impaired players can just “listen” to play this air combat flight game; Naughty Dog developed “The Last of Us 2” has built-in text-to-speech, accessible UI design and automatic aiming system. A player with blindness cried with joy after playing it.

Game producers are trying to make games accessible to all players. Remember the classic “tree lifting” QTE in “God of War 3”? For those with damaged hands, it’s quite a nightmare. In the new “God of War”, disabled players can “skip” those difficult QTE.

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You can always see accessibility designs like “color blind mode”, “button customization”, and “assisted aiming” while playing games. You probably not feeling it, but it is precisely these that offer the chance for disabled gamers to enjoy videogames like others.

Breaking the barriers

On zhihu, a blind gamer shared his experience with those games that are familiar to us: Resident Evil and Tomb Raider, for example. With the help of screen-reading software, people like him are also willing to engage with games of higher complexity.

Games with less information on screen, originally developed for average players, have become their favorites. In 2017, a blind player of Rhythm Heaven sent a letter to Nintendo about what it meant to him to be “the only game I could enjoy with others”.

American StarCraft 2 player looknohands, as his name suggests, managed to fight his way up to the Master group of U.S. server with his crippled arm. In World of Warcraft, Undaunted, a guild made up entirely of deaf players, took the first server kill of the heroic boss “Queen Azshara”. - Just imagine how hard it must have been.

Streamer Rudeism has challenged to beat Dark Souls 3 with just one button. After a long time of struggling, he made it. Rudeism is able-bodied, and behind this challenge is his attempt to push people to focus on controllers that are truly accessible to gamers with barriers.

Many more people around the world are fighting for games to be available to all. One of the founders of the website Ablegamers had multiple sclerosis, which left her completely unable to control a mouse. Today, they run a lab designing more “reasonable” game controllers for disabled gamers. Similar volunteer organizations include the Dager System and Can I Play That? With united efforts, the videogames accessible to the disabled community are getting wider.

Video games are making the world a better place

The development of “Guihua Fall” was mostly done after class, strictly speaking, it took less than three months. This includes everything from designing, art, programming, music, and sound effects. It was all done by students from Communication University of China. Students from the game design program were responsible for the main body of it, while the sound effects and music were done by students from the School of Sound Recording.

According to the World Health Organization in 2011, there are 785 million people with disabilities in the world over the age of 15. I realized that what they were doing was not only just a fun game, but also very valuable work.

Guihua Fall is an immersive experience in the lives of those suffering from disabilities, and connects people through “empathy”. But most importantly, it gave me a new awareness that is worthy to be proud of for all of us in the game industry:

Video games are making the world a better place.