I wrote this article for Henry Jenkins, and am reprinting it here for you. Enjoy!
Hi Everyone! Henry, thanks for inviting me back for my annual round up of all the interesting things that happened this year at the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC). For those of you who are reading my posts for the first time I’m Eitan, local Boston game nerd and developer. I used to be a grad student at MIT doing games research, and now I’m the founder and creative director of Fire Hose Games.
But enough about me, let’s talk about games! This year I’ll be doing two posts: Talking the Talk, and Walking the Walk. The first (today’s post) will be all about interesting talks, lectures, rants, and totally inappropriate outbursts heard at the conference. The next post will be all about the amazing developers I was lucky enough to meet who are making things happen. So let’s get started – what was awesome?
Usability, Motherfuckers!
Sure, it’s a little self serving to talk about your own session first, but it was a damn good talk and I want you to hear about it. A lot of people out there can’t play video games due to some sort of disability (this applies to computer systems in general). However, with a bit of extra thought and planning game developers can frequently make their titles work for many of these disabled groups, and in the process make their game more usable for everyone. This can even lead to increased sales, so spending money on making a game highly usable will often earn money! I covered a bunch of concrete tips for things that developers can do to make their games more usable, and pointed out examples of games that exemplify this behavior (like Half Life 2 and Peggle) and games that could do so much more (like Trespasser and Puzzle Quest). If this sounds interesting you can grab the slide deck here.
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