Not knowing where to go or feeling confused about how to move from one location to another can be a challenge for many gamers, including new or younger players, low vision gamers like me and those with cognitive impairments. However, getting unintentionally lost in a game is an all too common and very frustrating experience.
Studies have shown that gaming improves both spatial awareness and navigation skills.
I often face barriers when navigating the world, so it’s thrilling when I get to experience driving a fast car in the dystopian London of Watch Dogs Legion, swinging through New York as Spider-Man or climbing a mountain on a secret pirate island as Nathan Drake in Uncharted 4. This is particularly important to me as a low vision gamer. One of the joys of gaming are the places you get to explore that you would never be able to visit in real life. As a streamer and disability consultant, Amy passionately advocates for gaming to be accessible for everyone. We invited visually impaired video gamer, activist and campaigner Dr Amy Kavanagh to compile a list of games with helpful, well thought out and intuitive navigation. Still Life - capture the inanimate, mundane and overlooked elements that make the game world what it is.Īrchitectural - find ways to photograph the buildings in various states of build, decay and renewal. Sports - capture sporting moments, including not only players, but the crowd and coaches. Photojournalism - create a photo diary of the events of the game to be annotated later.įashion - document the different outfits and wardrobe styles your character chooses. Portraiture - capture images of the people you meet. Some families have tasked their expert players with capturing a certain type of photograph as they play: This means you can take really beautiful and engaging pictures in the games you play. Beyond this, many games offer a Photo mode that allows you to freeze the action and take control of the camera - even letting you control effects, depth of field and shutter speed in some cases. At a rudimentary level this allows you to take pictures of your adventures. All modern video game consoles enable you to capture an image of the screen. Photography is one aspect of this as Paul Buttle recently highlight on Twitter. This means that you can often put video games to unusual uses. However, because games are open to the player, how you play, the direction you move and what you do in the game is up to you. The spaces and places that video games create are often designed with a particular interaction or way to progress through them. Games like Watchdogs 3, Red Dead Redemption, Sea of Thieves and Fallout. There are other games where you create your own character and it enables you to choose someone who looks older. There are other games where the character has a mythic quality that disguises old game, like Geralt in Witcher 3 or Kratos in God of War. This includes games where an older character has a heroic role, like Joel in The Last of Us or Corvo Attano from Dishonored 2. Either way, these games offer a chance to step into the shoes of a senior character. This may be because of the stage of life they are at, or because of a role they play in the game's narrative. There are some games that specifically star older characters as the main protagonist. It's therefore, no surprise that games are made to appeal to a wide range of ages and address topics that are important at different stages of life. The average age of a video game player is late 30's and 31% of 45-64-year-olds in Europe play games regularly. These days though, people of all ages play games. Video games are often considered to be a young person's pastime. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (2011) The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)
These perfect scores are far and few between: It was three years before Edge gave a game a rating of ten out of ten. Started in 1993, it became known for good writing and a high bar for game scores. Edge Magazine is a prestigious and long running print magazine.