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| The Escapist goes to bat for the deaf. Don't hear the crack of the bat, the roar by Worm 11/11/2008, 11:07am PST | ||||
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http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_175/5468-The-Silent-Majority
This image is just one little girl's dress away from being a Max Hardcore video cover. I realize they need hip stylized images to pull us all in, but do we really need to invoke ancient cliches of the deaf in the process? Well, apparently. It's not that hard to understand the plight of the deaf gamer - just try playing Dead Space with the sound turned off. It's an odd one to pick, because no one can hear you in space(heh), you think they could have just picked something else to avoid that stupid joke, right? Though you've got to realize that it was cherry picked as a game that crystallizes problems which will never be truly solved for deaf people. Summing up the crisis of the deaf as not being able to play Dead Space is pretty fucking weak apart from anything else. The tension sounds and alerts of an approaching monster in Dead Space, or gunfire will never be realistically replaced by *gunfire* and anyone who has played a video game while blasting music can understand this. So they start out with an unsolvable crisis and then mention subtitles. I always turn subtitles on in my games, since sometimes the audio is hard to hear (especially in fucking Fallout 3 when your radio isn't muted during a cutscene) and it sucks when the games don't have subtitles since I love them. Though that's pretty much it, you can subtitle the game. There was something in the article about a modding group subtitling Doom 3 and adding a radar, now since every game can't possibly have a disability radar, you're left again with the same conclusion we've always had, add subtitles. I don't even see the purpose of the article other than to point out that it's easy to add subtitles and since they needed a "trend in gaming", which is gaming's relying more on audio(?). I don't think any more is being telegraphed by sound than it was in Blood, I'm really trying to dig here and all I've got is L4D(the little music noises that signify a swarm or a tough monster approaching), Dead Space(on the escapist's word), and Geometry wars(even you hear most spawns when you see them). |
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