FCC / CVAA discussion

Good catch, glad you cleared that one up. Completely off topic but here's a response for you:

I am currently working in Unity right now, greying out all multiplayre functions in my game, I am not giving up, but changing gears.

Don't you work for a studio?

 

Yes, a small indie studio that is creating a multiplayer game. For the record nothing in this law worries me in the slightest because the majority of it is trivial to implement and what little won't be trivial can be handled by the Asset Store.

 

Again, not every dev works with Unity, or even C# ...

 

We're a Unity forum and this law is entirely centered around multiplayer communication. If someone was able to make a multiplayer game with one of the visual scripting systems out there then kudos to them but the vast majority of people using them will either not be capable of it or will be using a solution that does all of the work for them.

 

Sorry, I didn't meant specifically links. Just replay. I should have weed links out.

 

That said, since it was brought up, have a link.

https://github.com/skeskinen/UnrealMimic

 

Says it's "Highly experimental"

Proper solutions will cost TIME/$$$

 

Good thing you choose the game engine where the solutions have already been developed and are highly stable.

 

My dude, what the F*** do you think the rest of your game costs? If this is breaking the bank for you, you have more to worry about than accessibility guidelines.

 

Well I am glad for that, wait, I use other engines too.. damn.

 

How many multiplayer games are you making?

 

I use the Blender Game Engine for custom signal analysis tools at work (which may or may not be considered "multiplayer"). We were thinking of marketing the tool set.

I was told that even tools built in game engines are required to be compliant.

But there are no asset stores for BGE, so they/I will have to build from scratch.

 

I do wonder, would FCC requirement apply to single player, where communication is involved with some form of bot / chat bot (which may, or not, including text to speech)? Or for example voice command based single player?

Technically it is not communication with other players via multiplier, but rather part of gameplay, acting as player / NPC, to interact with verbal / sounds. Which should be fine in theory?

 

Good point, in a few years we will be communicating with HMIs in the same way we communicate with other humans. I'm sure games will be among the first examples.

And as you mention, in-game bots may be among the first to test it all out. For single player it's all cool, but what happens when bots are part of the multiplayer game experience and any communication with the bots may also be integral to communication with the other human players..?? This could become Very complicated.

 

Our bots react to player sounds over VOIP so you need to stay quiet when close to NPC. We might add a swat 4 type game mode later on and we hope to have voice commands there so you can tell the NPC to drop the weapon, or we might just use the loudness of your voice as trigger.

 

Cool. But that does not address my question toward FCC.

 

Or if you are even lazier, just direct your players to Discord or Steam chat or some other prebuilt communication service.

How many people actually use in game chat these days?

 

Still quite a bit.
Depending on game.
Chat is better than hearing kids shouting in your ear, on some global in-game voip.

 

Say goodbye to lipsync..

 

Unless you're using lipsync as your primary method of communication, this makes literally 0 sense.

 

your comment makes zero sense, lipsync uses VOIP, what was your point?

 

Why would voip go away?

 

yea, probably was a bit inaccurate on my behalf, I was referring to everyone using steam chat instead. but I suppose you could have both..

 

The definition specifies communication between individuals. So no.

 

You have a very low opinion of what games are, what games can be, and the impact that games can have on people's lives. The good news is that games are better than you think they are.

 

There is no need to create your own TTS. Third party services have been available since 1982 on the C64.

 

There are plenty of people who can see well enough to play a game but can't see well enough to read a text chat window.

Chances are in years to come you will be one of those people.

 

The requirements apply to three very strictly defined things, text chat voice chat and video chat. Not waving your arms around.

 

There's no need to go by impressions from vague articles by journalists who have little experience of it.

The list of requirements it states upfront that only considerations that fit within reasonable effort and expense are relevant.

 

My entire problem with this law is that it is a law and not an incentive or something similar, and that it regulates what must be included in a game, and not what is excluded.

Regardless of what seems like the right thing to do, I don't think it's acceptable to force people by law put in time, effort and money to add things to a game to make them more inclusive. A game is a product which, like any other product, has a limited scope of usability. Books are not regulated to have Braille accessibility, bicycles are not regulated to be accessible to people without legs, there are a million products out there which have significant impacts on people's lives which are not regulated to be accessible to people with particular disabilities. When products can easily include accessibility, they often do. But even if they don't, regulating it is still not right. Because despite what some people seem to think, a game - like most commercial products - are not the equivalent of a public space like a road or a shopping center. Games are not created in a finite space - they do not take up room that could otherwise be used to develop games for disabled people or inclusive of them - and they do not belong to everyone in a collective sense. This means that there is no negative impact on disabled gamers' lives, and the freedom to create whatever you want should prevail.

I don't actually have any problem with putting in a basic effort to make a game accessible. If I was making a multiplayer game, it's trivial to test the menus for color-blindness (at least I assume it would be). If I was making a chat system, adding text to speech is not that big of a deal, and seems like a good idea for all sorts of reasons.

What I object to though, is the idea that I would be breaking the law if I don't add these things. The main reason is that like I said, this regulates what should be added to a game. I can imagine, in extreme cases, games being regulated in terms of what they should exclude - although generally I think it's a bad idea by default. But opening up the possibility of regulating what is added to a game to suit a minority is a very slippery slope. I don't think there is a precedent for this, and I can see what kind of precedent this might set for future, slightly less defendable laws. If games are such important things to people's lives, and there are already laws in place that allow regulators to define what must be included in the game, then there is almost nothing that cannot be targeted in terms of influencing the design of the game according to the desires of a particular minority or group.

 

Good idea, I think we should raise taxes big time and we should start to pay out for
- game developers
- restaurant owners
- public restroom businesses
- any kind of other businesses

who may take our money in order to make them condescend enough to cater everyone. I get it.

 

I am a follower of your tutorials. Can you make a tutorial about how to implement this in my game? I am very busy, and don't really have time to figure it all out myself. If you don't, it means you don't care about disabled people.

 

Tell me, do you really think that a restaurant would not want to include a disabled bathroom? They have nothing to lose by doing so, and everything to gain.

 

Except it costs money to change the bathrooms and other common places (including the restaurant itself) to be inclusive, just like it costs money to make the games inclusive. No difference here.

 

But there are many customers who might be disabled. And an effort to apply social pressure on a restaurant that is simply too lazy to have a disabled bathroom doesn't seem too difficult to me - people and businesses have been successfully 'socially prosecuted' for far lesser faux pases.

 

I guess you are ready to bend over and get fined then.

Why should I even have to study all this? Why should I have to read it, and implement it into my game? I am a solo dev. I only have so many years in my life. I am in my second year of dedication to this project. It is my magnum opus, and now I got some bureaucrat telling me I need to add more features, when I am still dying inside cutting out features I know will never make it into my game, because I simply do not have that much time in my life.

Just another week or two of bug hunting and coding to get this implemented, right? That's it! And for that, I guess I can just cut out customizable team colors, or maybe get rid of random city generation and serialization. No big deal.

Why is my art-form now being dictated by some twitter bureaucrat?

EFF* em. I WILL NOT COMPLY. If they fine me, I will not pay. I'll take it to the US Supreme Court if I have to, and I WILL WIN.

And I know how government works. This is their foot in the door. They do it for the children, or for the disabled, or for the oppressed, when it is nothing more than than a bored bureaucrat trying to justify their weaselly existence.

I WILL NOT COMPLY.


*EFF = electronic frontier foundation.

 

What I have learned from the asset store, (I have already spent over $1000 this year, and so far, the only assets I use are art assets, the rest, just do not quite work with my game):

If you are doing a cookie cutter, basic re-hashed genre of a game, asset store assets integrate pretty easily. If you are doing something original, most of them have faults that make it near impossible to integrate with your game, and you might as well code it all yourself. Because when you buy an asset store asset, you still have to dig into the code, figure out what the coder was doing, and then figure out how to link that to your own systems.

SO far, nothing has been seamless. As I said, I have spent weeks looking through assets, and in the end, concluded every time... ..I can't use the asset I bought. My latest was emerald AI. the only I think I will be able to use is AStar project.

But again, why should I be forced to spend my time trying to figure out how to implement all this? Why should I be forced to pay for it? Why should I be forced to hunt down the bugs and nuances that occur as I add other features?

 

...

As far as I know you don't need to study any of it if you are not interested in any of it and are not using communication features in your game. I was saying it is some good stuff in general. The idea of it. The goal. Not the regulation but Inclusive Game Design itself. It helps to put a different focus on a game strengthening feedback in some ways, increasing usability in others. Makes your game accessible to more people.

I completely agree trying to do all of this would greatly increase the scope involved in creating any game. But the only part that is currently regulated is communication features. Basically I think if you aren't making a multiplayer game then you don't NEED to do anything. If you WANT to implement some of the basics of Inclusive Game Design that is where that information on that website is great to have.

 

I believe it is pretty well understood that this affects communication within multiplayer games only.

If your game does not incorporate communication but is multiplayer, you may refer your users to third party chat services. as Kiwasi mentioned

It also increases costs, time, complexity, bugs...
It puts added stress on recreational developers by threatening them with potential fines and lawsuits (which equals more time/money/research)

Any imposed requirement will ultimately take time away from the developer and their innovation time.

This will add a lot of time and thought for people who are only trying to test out a concept, or build a tool..

I wish all of my games could be fully accessible to everyone. It would be great, to include after the game has been tested..

 

I agree I think we are saying the same thing.

 

Because VoIP and team chat are that original ideas. Well. Okay.

 

There are a thousand new genres, waiting for devs to catch up with technology out there.

Sarcasm, is not original, by the way.

 

And what's your point?

If you're doing these "original features" like VoIP (which I highly doubt), it's not too complicated to put speech-to-text technology in there.
If you do team chat, it's not too complicated to put
- speech-to-text
- additionally to the team colors some sort of sign there (glyph which distinct per user or per team)
- and/or make sure that the colors are recognizable for colorblind people

They aren't asking you to license an entire engine for this or develop a multi-million dollar system. Each of these are pretty straight-forward.
Should you work with it in case you choose to provide these features? Yes. Should you include these features (VoIP and team chat)? That's questionable in this day and age.
Should you put the accessibility-features in there? That's a good question, I guess if your game is possible to play by these groups, probably yes. And it's a good idea to do it anyway. Otherwise, if your game is inaccessible for these people anyway or you don't do in-game communication, this law does not affect you.

 

Are all team chats the same? Will they always be the same? Will there ever be innovation in team chat? How good is voice recognition and voice manipulation technology these days? Is there fun to be found in these technologies? Is there immersion to be developed? Do people have to be great military tacticians to leads raids? Do they have to be great actors to provide immersive chat in games? What can chat add to the future of gaming? Or will it always be simply dudes screaming "OH MY EFFING GOD! NO WAY!"

 

Probably.

Does not matter, average people will have these features turned off, who needs them will be grateful to have them, even if it's imperfect sometimes.

 

I made my point for those who know what originality is.
those who do not, will just have to keep asking, until they figure it out.

 

What you just described has not applied to any of the assets I've purchased from the store. That said I almost never buy gameplay or other runtime assets. I almost always purchase content creation and editor extension assets like Dungeon Architect, Gaia, MapMagic, Odin Inspector, etc.

If I do purchase runtime assets I don't purchase ones that try to do the entire task for you. I most likely wouldn't purchase an asset that handles an entire chat system (though it depends on how much it handles this accessibility problem) but I would purchase a TTS solution to integrate into my own chat system.

 

No worries, its already released

 

Pretty sure you cant aim for S*** then either, which is crucial for a VR game with real life realstic holo and red dot sights.

¨

My point being, some games will never be available to disabled people

edit: Or just throwing a grenade for a disabled person

 

Just imagine how many games would have been Early Access if more developers had known this was coming.