Disability in gameplay

 Gotta hand it to them...

As we consume and tell stories, the chief most goal is to open up to new worlds and experiences in a manner not so dissimilar to 'soul nurturing'; wherein the more our spirits are fed with new experiences- the richer we become as people. Discovering new approaches towards the way we see fundamentals of the world, being placed into the head of someone who's perspective we might never have seriously considered in the past, all fundamentals of successful impactful storytelling. Gaming can go a step further in many of these regards, allowing some aspect of the reality of the experience to become the gameplay features of the artwork, allowing experiences to play out in some small fashion for the players. Learning exactly how to exploit and build upon this is what makes Game Design such an endlessly challenging passion to lean into.

Disability is a basic and immutable part of life for a good chunk of people in the modern world, those who experience the everyday hustle and bustle and their lives from a different angle as their disabilities necessitate. It's a unique experience and way to live life that can be difficult, or even impossible, for anyone of different circumstances to really relate to; and capturing that experience, even within the space of a giant production video game, is probably too much of a tall order. However, disability, and the way we approach it, can make for interesting topics of consideration when it comes to building game mechanics. Sometimes reimagining basic gameplay systems we take for granted just for the sake of viewing them from a different lens, thus transforming an otherwise basic experience into something else entirely.

One such game, which got absolutely snubbed during the game awards and I will never forgive Geoff Keighley for it, is 'The Vale: Shadow of the Crown'. A standard named fantasy adventure guff about a young warrior woman having to survive in hostile lands, with the twist being that she was born with blindness. To encapsulate this, the game features very little visual information whatsoever, and conveys most of the game through 3D audio, performances and description. Most background images are swirling dark portraits infused with tiny specks of light whilst the player envisions the world they are traversing through their mind's eye. Of course it goes without saying that the game is fully blind accessible, and that it reimagines a lot of what we think we know about RPG games in order to establish it's premise.

Learning to anticipate the closeness of enemies by the sound of their grunts and charging screams, navigating through the brush by following the chirping of birds and the rustle of leaves, picking out calling voices in the market by homing in on the sounds of their barkers calling in customers. And, of course, inventory management without seeing an inventory. It truly does throw all the fundamentals on it's head by design and presents what would be rather standard as something else entirely. Whatsmore, the reliance on sound only elevates the level of audio immersion almost immeasurably. Intelligent sound engineering and solid vocal performances can connect with the other senses in an intangible manner, invoking otherwise static feelings and emotions as though rendered to hyper-realism by some giant AA A studio. (An igneous and unique experience that does a whole lot more for accessibility than poxxy 'Forza Motorsport' did; Geoff!)

But disability doesn't always have to be about what you make the player experience, sometimes it can be as simple as adding a character to Spiderman Miles Morales who happens to be deaf and communicates with American Sign Language. But if we wanna talk about deaf people, well... I'm going to have to bring up the real deaf game. Who remembers 'Quiet Man'? No! Don't go hiding yourself from the cringe of it all! Quiet Man was a game that was less interested about conveying experience of a man with deafness as it was about trying a unique gimmick to pump up the potential sales of a mediocre action fighter using a narrative device the developers couldn't even commit to for longer than a couple months.

Yes, 'Quiet Man' tells the story of a super hero level Deaf Man who beats up people in a live action cutscene narrative wherein the developers just pulled all sound in post. It's not like they shot the scenes to be understood without sound; they shot actual scenes with dialogue, they just muffled it and figured the 'mystery' of trying to piece together what the hell was even going on would make up for the crappy gameplay. Then, after an arbitrary timer ticked down, they just released a 'patch' that threw back in the sound so the already nonsensical narrative could make a tiny bit more sense. Kinda. Not really. The supernatural twist still comes out of nowhere and the game is altogether written as though by several arguing acid heads having a really crappy trip.

And of course we can hardly talk about disabilities in gaming with mentioning the countless limb deprived characters who populate the industry. Venom Snake from MGS V who replaced his hand with a bionic metal rocket fist- Billie Lurk from Dishonoured who boasts a dark magic whale-bone prosthetic, Sekiro from the game of the same name who has a special replacement arm that can be fitted with special attacks. At some point 'missing an arm' becomes more of a fashion statement than an actual liability. Heck, most gameplay protagonists just end up replacing the arm with something much cooler anyway! The protagonist of Hi-Fi Rush and all of his friends are missing a limb somewhere, just because. At least Johnny Silverhand's limb is a reminder of his service in the Corporate Wars, the first significant life jolt which spiralled him down the path of bitterness and 'f the system' rebellion. 

So yeah, certainly more could be done with the concept of disability in the world of gaming- heck, we're yet to receive a single game starring anyone in a wheelchair that I can think of, and I bet there's some really interesting gameplay scenario's that could be worked around that. (Which don't just involve tackling stairs, I mean. I'm talking actually interesting ideas- like a detective story with limited mobility or something!) But already some cool ideas have been broached (I love the way that games take the 'missing limb' trope and regularly turn it into a cool upgrade rather than an impediment) some arguably horrific examples (Deaf Oedipus Complex discount Leon Kennedy wasn't my favourite.) and some genuinely incredible ideas that deserve vindication. (Give 'The Vale' that award Geoff Keighley, you coward!) I'm excited to think about the future potential scenarios!

The game which took out the sound for DLC

What is the music of life?

One of the cool things about the world of storytelling is the plethora of new and interesting ways one can find, or invent, to impart news ideas and experiences to the user. Maybe you want to give people the feeling of looking at folks in a dark room without obscuring their sight from what's happening, well in that case you can do a David Productions for Jojo and invert the colour scheme to make things visually indicative without having to outright say it. Maybe you want to imply that a long journey has been undergone without taking the audience through every single step of that journey because that would be long and unnecessary; (Zack Snyder!) well perhaps you could do something akin to Peter Weir's Gallipoli, where for one scene the camera is pulled back on a single wide shot across a wide space, allowing the actors to make their way across the land in their own time. Let the scene breath, but don't just have it slog on for five minutes under the justification of "It's the opening, people don't mind looking at the same thing constantly for the opening." Yes I do, Snyder, Yes I do. And if you're trying to tell the story of a deaf protagonist in a video game you can just... remove the sound? That seems a little... brash and ill conceived. Two prime descriptors to sum up 'The Quiet Man' as a whole.

Do you remember that game? I may just never forget it. The scars of that Quiet boi runeth deep in my psyche whenever I see that Square Enix logo during press events. First I get all excited fooling myself into some delusion that this will be that FF7 PC port that we desperately need goddammit, but then my breath catches as I allow myself to be swallowed by a terrible recollection and I think "Oh no. Could it be... him again?". Of course, no reveal could be as brazeningly maddening as  The Quiet Man's was, so let me share what the experience was like for anyone out there who was unlucky enough not to be there. So the reveal followed some alright looking titles, but there was nothing heartstopping during that particular E3 conference and so everyone was on the edge of their seat for the title that would blow our collective socks off to become the king of water cooler talk tomorrow. And then it happened, the screen faded in to one of the most high poly human face renders we've ever seen, of a young man walking down an alley with headphones in before a group of... stereotypical vaguely-Mexican thugs approach him? Huh, I figured this would be slightly more highbrow, but the graphics look amazing so I guess we'll let i- oh that was just a stylised live action intro? The ingame models look like potatoes? The sound for the clip isn't playing right? 'The Quiet Man'? Okay... what was that?

Sentiments of "This is weird" and "Looks kinda bad" would stay with me throughout the entire marketing cycle and into launch, thankfully ensuring that I would never make the mistake of diving into this game. (At least, not without knowing what I was getting myself into) It seems that many others shared my skepticism too, because this game pretty much faded from the public eye until it came out and was a sleeper... well, just a sleeper actually. (There's no 'hit' to be found in this software's files.) All that was learnt was thus; the protagonist was said to be deaf, hence the name and the strange underwater sound effect accompanying the fight scenes. At the time I remember thinking; oh, that's an interesting twist on the traditional character, I wonder how that will come into the play and ways in which the team thought to utilise it. Quiet curious considering that now, with hindsight, I can't conceive of a single way to bring this to life that would have made it any less crap than it ended up being.

Not everyone was lucky enough to get out of the way of this steamroller video game, however, some were caught underneath it's death treads and issued their dying warning to the rest of us, heroically trying to save the masses. And from what did they ward us? That The Quiet Man was a dumb idea. Ostensibly an action fighting game with a dramatic plot and an intense earthy storyline, The Quiet Man managed to offer actually no variety in it's gameplay, locations, or enemy archetypes. Okay, to be fair the locations did change, but they were all rendered in such a way that they looked identical, which is a curious way to self sabotage I've not quiet seen before. The fighting controls are a joke compared to actual games with fighting mechanics (hold you head high, Yakuza) and the challenge of the game is pretty much set to snore through until the final boss, assuming you make it that long. But the real sin which cursed The Quiet Man, and the reason I still recall one of the most forgettable games of it's generation; is the live action cutscenes.

Now I've spoken about my feelings on Live action cutscenes in gaming before; but to sum it up briefly for you: I think they're cheap and/or cringey. And to be fair, cheap is pretty much right. The amount of money it takes to create and render a decent looking cutscene compared to what it takes to rent a camera with some film and shoot some b-roll over in some abandoned studio somewhere, isn't really comparable. Unless you're packing your cutscenes with real actors who expect to get paid or something, you're sitting pretty! Of course, another added element is that you can, though few example in the gaming world do, take advantage of this to capture all those idiosyncrasies that modern computing software just cannot perform. Subtle facial movements, eye trackings, natural movement; all the things to sell real characters in a real story. If more Live action cutscenes did literally any of that, I wouldn't have a problem with them like I do. So how does The Quiet Man utilise them? Well they take out the sound of course...

Get it, cause he's deaf. Yes, yes and yes again; The Quiet Man has entire several minute long cutscenes, most of which consist of just characters talking, without the player being able to hear any of it. And before you all turn around and say "Oh, but that's brilliant! It captures the isolation and fear of being a deaf person in a world tailored for those without hearing issues", or some such rot, let me disabuse you of any allusions; this isn't the game trying to rope you into the protagonist's struggle. Because the protagonist can very clearly read lips and in fact converses several times in these cutscenes whilst you still hear jack. They could have thrown in subtitles, they could have had at least the protagonists' dialogue be hearable, they could have filmed any of these scenes in such a way that you can infer context and get to grips with the narrative, without being left bored and confused by everything you're experiencing. Instead, it comes across like these are just normal cutscenes that someone decided to strip the audio from. Because that's what they are.

Whether this was the grand plan all along or if someone just has a 'eureka' moment in the editor's longue; the results are jarring and downright sinful. Imagine watching a low effort drama with absolutely no sound; that's basically playing The Quiet Man. You don't know which character is which, so people commonly get confused on whether the person featured in flashbacks is the protagonist's mother or girlfriend, scenes that wouldn't drag if dialogue was being made do drag because you're not receiving any information and, most dumb of all, a key plotpoint of this story involves a betrayal. That's right, there's supposed to be someone that the protagonist trusts to ride-or-die levels, only for that person to betray them. Well how am I supposed to form the emotional connection which makes that betrayal worthwhile if I DON'T KNOW WHO ANYONE IS? It's frighteningly stupid decisions like this which propel an already mediocre game into outright absurdity.

Of course, in the end the team couldn't deprive these sound bites forever, and a short time after launch a free DLC was dropped that gave us back our MP3 files, something that they held a countdown to and everything; to let you really know how much this game would be revolutionised once you were able to actually hear the actors. And of course it proved nothing. The story was infinitely more mundane than whatever you came up with in your heads and that shallow stunt to maybe win back a few more eyes didn't amount to much of anything. I cannot fathom what studio decision led to the comedy of errors that was The Quiet Man's whole existence, but I'm forever grateful they happened else I wouldn't have this bizarre story to think back on every now and then. Thanks for the giggles, Human Head Studios, hope you better luck with your games in the fu- oh wait, they're the guys from the whole 'Rune 2' debacle, aren't they? (Damn, some people get none of the luck.)