Are Valve helping the hard of hearing?
Valve have been a pretty eccentric company for a while now, releasing some of the more popular multiplayer and singleplayer games for the PC (and now consoles), and it seems their eccentricies continue.
Joystiq reports that Valve's Managing Director Gabe Newell conducted a focus group with those hearing-impaired gamers out there, supposedly to help further the gameplay and introduce a romantic element.
Romance in games is a funny one, but as many players fell in love with Alyx during Half Life 2 (and who can blame them), it's not something completely alien - though the romance itself is a little out of the ordinary.
Gabe explains it as this:
[Alyx] had a crush on someone who was hearing impaired, so she taught Dog how to sign so she could practice. Something happened, maybe, the person is off fighting the Combine someplace else, but that's why she and Dog would start signing with each other when they wanted to communicate without making noise, or communicate without other people knowing ... It gave us the excuse to build the technology for signing.
This isn't a definitive confirmation of signing tech making its way into the game by any measure, but it's a good step along the path to make gaming even more accessible to everyone.
Problems they might face with facial animation and body language could be overcome by more development time (and money), but until an easier system can be developed it's not too likely to be included in every game for a long time.
Still, progress is progress and if this can give hearing-impaired gamers a similar experience then we're all for it. Head to Joystiq to read more about the sign language.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012