In response to "The Silent Majority" from The Escapist Forum: Mass Effect was pretty good in this respect, it had subtitles similar to those in the Source games. Gears, not so much, but it did feature the "rumbling controller, press Y to look at what's going on" mechanic. Actually, I think the added cues from rumble make a lot of genres which might be unplayable to someone deaf much more so. I've played Forza with the sound off, and while nigh-crippling when I wasn't used to it, without rumble it would have been unthinkable. Should the deaf show preference for console gaming? It's food for thought.
If anyone here has more interest in the Deaf gaming community, or what games scored - you can check out the following link.
As of last year, I know ORANGE BOX was the only game ever to score a 10.
http://www.deafgamers.com/dgclassificationtable08.html
http://www.deafgamers.com/dgclassificationtable07.html
There's also a ton of articles about how to make a game more appealing to the Deaf and hard of hearing.
- Clov3r
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In response to "There is Research to be Done" from The Escapist Forum: So, looks like I'm not the only one who was disappointed with DEFCON's base AI, then.
Anyway, it's interesting to see the links between academic artificial intelligence research and computer gaming. There's a lot of potential in this research for computer games to benefit from, because there are few things which cause a bigger drop in immersiveness than AI representations showing little intelligence.
I suppose, however, that there are some critical differences between making a game's AI very intelligent and making it fun to play against. An intelligent AI which was specifically designed to play a game well might work in conjunction with the "game" aspect of a project like Façade, but it may not work so well in a competitive first-person shooter, for example, short of limiting the AI's reaction time so that players can get a fix on them.
I've never understood why procedural narrative advocates are so deadset on destroying linear narrative as if the two are somehow incompatible. For as much as people harp on creating a world where they can do or say anything, the first few stabs with games that allow this hint at what every person's ambition actually is: break the rules that real life imposes on us. That has enormous merit, but I don't know why people think there is a video game behind being totally free of rules when all a video games is at the core is a bundle of rules with paint.
Even the best procedural world is going to have to face the fact that people are going to ask what their purpose inside that world is. What do the rules mean, what does breaking them mean, and how does that affect some grander scheme? Even a procedural narrative is going to have to define a series of reactions that ultimately prey on the player's pre-conceptions of good and bad, win or lose. The fact that the player is going to ask the game for that conception is why a linear narrative is always going to be a reality in even the freest worlds.
