[Blackout] Proposal for a Game about Accessibility Awareness. Presented at Fun and Games Design Conference 2012, Toulouse, France

 

Lilia Pérez Romero, Yu-Fang Teh and Maria Vrachni

“Blackout”, is a novel action (object avoiding) game with a strong auditory component that only allows partial vision of the environment, thus involving multisensory alertness and a high degree of mystery. “Blackout” intends to convey a sense of fear and impotence that a person whose vision is impaired might feel when being confronted with a potentially very dangerous situation. Our aim is to alert our potential player’s (children from 7 to 14 years old without severe hearing or visual impairments) in a fun way about the importance of accessibility awareness.

Story Synopsis

The player has been robbed and is chasing the burglar across a street with several bike, car and tram lanes and vehicles circulating in different directions. The environment is completely dark and cars don’t use light because of an energy crisis. Therefore this chase happens in almost total darkness thus being very dangerous for the player’s character who has to rely almost entirely in his/her sense of hearing.

Challenge:

To cross the street and capture the burglar without any visual aid other than a small flashlight, and a few other simple gadgets and to do so within the given time and without being killed by traffic.

Dangers:

Bicycles and scooters on the bicycle road, cars and trucks on the highway, trams on the tram tracks. If hit by a bike player loses 10% of his life, if hit by a car 30% and if hit by a tram 100%.

Aids or helpers

Zebra crossings: they are safe crossing areas, however, they constantly change place.
Flashlight: Lights a small area around the player.
Glasses: Light the scene for a short time (5 sec.)

Raising awareness about disability, accessibility, and social inclusion is one of the concerns of contemporary education. However, children tend not to be easily interested in this subject and they may even be prone to bullying their disabled peers. We think that playing is a good way to teach and it is one that children don’t oppose for it “talks their language”. With this in mind we present “Blackout”.