I want to take some time to post here on IDIMama… I first wanted to introduce myself and where I am from. My name is Mark Barlet; and I am the Editor-in-Chief of AbleGamers.com a community site for disabled gamers. I want to also thank the folks over here at IDIMama for their recognition of “National Disability Employment Awareness Month”. I cannot stress how important it is that the Good Works System (GWS) folks have embraced this.

So why am I here, well as the Editor-in-Chief of AbleGamers, I am always looking for technologies that help get disabled gamers back into the game, and I saw the technology that GWS is pioneering, and reached out to them to see how I could exploit their work to help disabled gamers. Now to be honest when I reached out to GWS over a year ago, I was not sure if they had really looked at the cool things they were bring to market, and seeing how they may help the disabled gamers in the world, but after a conversation with Tony, I was sure that if they were not on board when I called, they were when I hung up the phone.

Gaming for the disabled is more important than ever before, mainly for two reasons. When you get on line and play your World of Warcraft, or Battlefield 2, you are not only going out and adventuring, you are also socializing… Now for many able bodied people, this is just another way to connect with friends, but for some people with disabilities gaming may be their main form of connecting with friends. The other reason disabled gaming is important to me, is because, like it or not there are two wars going on, and for the first time in our nation’s history those men and women who are serving left as us as gamers, and for many, they are not coming home the same way they left. They want to return to the things they love, and are finding that much of the gaming market is not designed for their new reality. If the games do not let them down, the peripherals market will.

This is why AbleGamers is important to me, and this is why I am so glad to see the folks at GWS on board.

Tony and I want to use the technology that GWS has brought to market and see how we can exploit it to bring as many disabled gamers as we can back into the game.

Hey Mark, great to see you here. We know that the Iraq War has had a high cost in terms of disability, and this seems to be almost ignored in the press about the conflict and how its going. Do you have any idea what per centage of the troops returning have related disabilities?

There is SOME data out there, but you have to dig it up because the DOD does not just share it...

In IRAQ ONLY, there has been 30,634 wounded troops. Now there is not a breakdown of what that looks like in the way of how they were wounded.

"In IRAQ ONLY, there has been 30,634 wounded troops. Now there is not a breakdown of what that looks like in the way of how they were wounded."

Unfortunately, that is a HUGE number. Troops in IRAQ are in far greater danger than in conventional wars. Jesse Ventura (former Governor of Minnesota and pro wrestler) said Iraq was the same war as Viet Nam, because "you can't tell the enemy from the civilians." I agree, having been in the former fracas. Of course the civilians and enemy can easily identify the troops and thats the danger and the disadvantage.
I'm sure though, that gaming is just as you say, a place for hanging out and socializing, and this shouldnt fall through the cracks. While there are probably a wide range of disabilities it should be feasible to change game input, etc to make games playable (or more playable) for these folks.
Are there specific games that have worked with their input requirements to make the game playable for folks with input challenges? Is there an industry movement at all about this? What is the status?

Welcome to the forums, Mark!
I think it is a general rule that the gaming industry has been reluctant to innovate control schemes, particularly regarding controller hardware but game input also. I think GWS products can do a lot to close this gap however. Certainly the FragPedal is incredibly useful, and I think the programmability options of the OmniMouse and AMP contribute to the solution as well. I'm optimistic that we can help improve veterans' re-entrance to society and capability set with these products.
I'd imagine that a very large portion of injuries are caused by IEDs, and as such involve missing limbs. Which sorts of injuries are most common in returning soldiers that are problematic to gaming, I wonder?

BlueBeard
There are games out there that have worked with us, and others, to make the interface as flexible as they can be. Not with a input device in mind, but as open as they can. So making many of the actions in the game mappable to a keyboard stroke. Once you have a keystroke, you open up MANY MANY avenues of control, everything from a frag petal to a keyboard alternative.

Some examples are EQ2 from SOE, and Warhammer online, both have looked at this issue, and worked with AbleGamers.com.

StussyD
The injury that is number one in this set of wars is traumatic brain injury. This is where the brain is slammed up against the skull, most likely from an explosion. The second injury is missing limbs. I agree with your assessment that GWS products may be a useful tool to get all disabled gamers back into the game.

From the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
"TBI can result when the head suddenly and violently hits an object, or when an object pierces the skull and enters brain tissue. Symptoms of a TBI can be mild, moderate, or severe, depending on the extent of the damage to the brain. A person with a mild TBI may remain conscious or may experience a loss of consciousness for a few seconds or minutes. Other symptoms of mild TBI include headache, confusion, lightheadedness, dizziness, blurred vision or tired eyes, ringing in the ears, bad taste in the mouth, fatigue or lethargy, a change in sleep patterns, behavioral or mood changes, and trouble with memory, concentration, attention, or thinking. A person with a moderate or severe TBI may show these same symptoms, but may also have a headache that gets worse or does not go away, repeated vomiting or nausea, convulsions or seizures, an inability to awaken from sleep, dilation of one or both pupils of the eyes, slurred speech, weakness or numbness in the extremities, loss of coordination, and increased confusion, restlessness, or agitation."

This post was last modified: 10-13-2008 03:04 PM by AbleGamers.

Yes, I've heard of these kind of injuries in Nascar and other high speed auto races. It seems that this might be a unpreventable kind of injury in that these guys use the best possible restraint and armor, but the shock will still be transmitted, and the small liquid reservoir around the brain allows it to be moved with great force even in this small distance.
Am I missing something or is there ANY technological solution POSSIBLE (that the military is working on) to prevent this trauma? To be honest, I couldn't even watch Ironman without thinking, "Yeah, great suit, but getting hit with a *missile* would cause such a brain/skull concussion smack that Tony Stark would have been killed despite it (the armor) anyway."

Greetings,

My name is Steve Spohn, I am the senior contributor for AbleGamers.com. I have been reviewing the mouse, it looks very intriguing. Although, helping veterans return to society is a great cause, the majority of people who would be interested in purchasing a mouse such as this, will be people who are looking in on games through a glass window. Hopefully through the efforts of websites like AbleGamers and technologies such as yours, more gamers will be able to stop looking in and wondering how great it would be to play that game because they can actually play thanks to new technology.

I have spoken to dozens of people in my disability advocate position who really want nothing more than to be able to do what everyone else can in videogames. You see, videogames used to be a refuge for people that could not go out and get socialization elsewhere. Nowadays, the complex controls on most platforms systems has made it so that disabled and one-handed video gamers are left out in the cold. Gone are the days of A B B A up down start. Instead, we have complex games such as age of Conan where even fully able-bodied gamers have difficulty mastering hitting more than five buttons at one time repeatedly.

I think in some ways the gaming industry is resistant to mouse ingenuity such as yours due to the fact if the game can be automated then people will not have as much of a reason to buy instead of rent. Although I can see this argument, my argument as well as AbleGamers ( which can be seen in interviews such as the one that we did with Popcap entertainment) is that the people who actually enjoy the game for what it is would not have any objection to having ways to play the game easier so that those that cannot play and unmodified version of the game without help will be able to play. The industry fear seems to be if they put in a way to make the game easier it somehow hurts their project, we say that there should be options that can be enabled to either slow the game down, optimize controls, automate trivial tasks, and other such things that third-party vendors are beginning to come up with.

I salute the idea behind your mouse and look forward to working with all of you.

Steve

Welcome to the forums Steve!

Considering the ultra-popularity of social gaming and its point-and-click gameplay, there is certainly a dirth of alternative mouse designs. It is surprising and a bit puzzling to me how uninspired and "safe" the designs of 99% of gaming peripherals are, when there are literally tens of millions of hardcore users. I believe that this is a result of a lack of shared innovation between game and peripheral designers, particularly in the PC market. This is why we see true innovation on the Nintendo Wii yet haven't seen a fundamental change in game input for PCs since the invention of mouselook. Even with console gaming, control schemes have mostly stayed put for 10+ years since the invention of the PS2, and no alternate-design controllers have flourished.
I think IDI Devices enjoy an advantage here in that their programmability mitigates the problem of control-synching with the game and game developers. While the design of console controllers is handcuffed by a need to conform to rigid control schemes, intelligent devices that allow the individual (and grouped) user to tailor his controller to his game and play style offer the flexibility necessary for a non-mainstream gaming peripheral to flourish.
What the game developers are reluctant to do, intelligent peripherals can empower the user to do for himself. Our goal here at IDImama is to foster a community of intelligent device users that, by tailoring their own control schemes, can empower themselves to "bend" a game to their liking. And while control innovation would be a lot easier if game developers cooperated, I think it is more immediately practical to provide the user the ability to lead by example. Unfortunately the sphere of influence of the mouse/keyboard doesn't encompass all aspects of gameplay, like speed of play, as you suggested.
Nonetheless, IDI devices can currently deliver extreme control flexibility, and perhaps in the future work WITH the game to radically alter gameplay.

-Steven