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http://www.macgamer.com/features/?id=1573

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Terry Stewart, and I'm a Mac user of ten years, a player of Mac games, and I am deaf. In these past ten years, I've used my Mac for professional work such as web design, animation, school assignments, internet and, best of all, gaming. I'm going to tell you a bit about what it's like to be a deaf gamer, the challenges I've faced and some of the discoveries I've made... all on my Macintosh.

I love games; I appreciate a good mind-challenge and, of course, awesome graphics. I love LAN parties where I can kick friends' asses. I enjoy multiplayer gaming because in those situations no one knows that I'm deaf. In my Quake clan, I'm just another player. I prefer to play without any special treatment from other players and that I play so well the others don't know the difference. That's where skill matters, and nothing else.

I've enjoyed a number of single-player Mac games, such as "Myst" and its sequel "Riven". I also love good first person shooters such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which was great because of the intense visuals, the creativity of it, and of course the fun factor. I'm becoming more interested in the FPS genre because, professionally, I am starting to develop some virtual reality hardware and the first person style is great to test it with. I tend to avoid "Sim" games, only because there's no way to outlive them.

I can't, however, play every Mac game I want to. A lot of games rely heavily on auditory dialogue without captions or subtitles and, in games where you depend on the information conveyed in conversation, I can't win. Take Myst, for example: Back in college, I played it a lot. At the time the graphics were cutting edge and the atmosphere was both beautiful and eerie. The puzzles were entertaining and I loved solving them. Things went well until I encountered a challenge that I just couldn't solve. Myst players might recognize this scene:



I arrived at the rocket ship, entered, and inside I found a keyboard which was meant to be played and, then, the various notes entered into a puzzle lock... all by ear. I stared at it. "What now?" I thought. I even borrowed an automatic guitar tuner to try and read the note from my Mac's speaker in some kind of visual way, but to no avail. I was stuck. I tried to think up what kind of device I could use that would allow me to bypass this puzzle or solve it visually, but it was of no use. I was alone at home, brain-dead after many hours of playing this game. Sure, several months later I found someone who helped me with this particular challenge, but it was frustrating for me to have to do that. In spite of how well I had been doing up to that point, needing the external help made me feel like something of a loser.

You can see why, then, that visual representations of auditory clues in games are important to me, especially where dialogue is concerned. Some games do feature subtitles for dialogue, where text appears on the screen when someone speaks, and though it's better thannothing it's still not quite a complete solution. You see, subtitles convey the spoken word just fine, but as you know the world is full of a lot more than dialogue. This is why deaf people have come to love something called "Closed Captioning", which indicates more than just what's spoken - it also indicates what's going on in the whole auditory spectrum. You sometimes see this on TV; it's pretty common now that all television programs provide closed captioning.

This is what you see when you're looking at subtitles:



This is what you'd see when you're looking at closed-captioning:



Notice how the closed captioning shows not just what is said, but what is heard as well? That's very helpful for me. Unfortunately, though I've seen a lot of subtitling in gaming, I've yet to see any closed-captioning. It's common in TV and even movies, but not gaming. If closed captioning was a common feature of gaming I probably could have finished Myst on my own. I did try Riven, the sequel and, thanks to some help from my (hearing) brother, I was able to solve it in a few hours.

Captions aren't the only way to get the point across when sound is vital to a games' success. Take, for instance, an experience I had with Tomb Raider 2 a few years back. As other Lara Croft fans will tell you, you're often in danger of being attacked or eaten by something in this game, and it was no different for me: I was hiding out from a gang of tigers who were wandering around looking for their lunch. This was pretty scary for me, as I had no idea where they were at any particular moment and if I were to emerge from cover there might be a giant animal right there waiting to attack. This situation was definitely intolerable, as it made the game nothing more than a matter of luck, i.e. jumping out at any random moment and hoping for the best. I happened to procure a special chair from a now-defunct company called "Imeron" that had speakers buried squarely into its construction. With this chair I could start to feel the vibrations of the sound in the game and began to become aware of things that hearing people take for granted; I could "feel" the footsteps of enemies around the corner before I saw them and I was unaware that kind of clue was provided! Sitting on that chair, playing "Tomb Raider" was one of my best gaming experiences ever. The chair didn't actually provide directional sound, mind you, so my brother and I taped a small pair of speakers behind my legs so I could get a sense of left and right. I wasted a whole weekend playing like this. The sensory input from the chair speakers gave me enough clues to know what was around the corner and, for the first time in my life, I could perceive what was unseen in a game. I was thrilled, and my number of save games went down drastically (when I was unaware of what was around every corner, I'd save often in order to make sure I could restart easily). This speaker-in-the-chair method worked for other games as well, though not all games depend so heavily on sound cues. When I was playing Warcraft, for instance, there was little to be gained from the sound cues in terms of tactical advantage, but I was previously unaware that peons chopping trees made an in-game sound. It really started to annoy me, in fact; the speakers in my chair made it sound like they were actually chopping my butt off. Other games, such as Quake or Return to Castle Wolfenstein, don't offer much advantage for those who use a chair like mine, as the sound is so quick and furious it feels too chaotic and is impossible to interpret. For games like that, I just switch the chair off so I can focus.