Why spend time traipsing through software fantasy lands in search of magic keys when you could be solving the energy crisis... and maybe even global warming?
That, in essence, is the idea behind PowerUp, a serious game developed by IBM in conjunction with TryScience, a partnership formed by the New York Hall of Science, the Association of Science-Technology Centers and IBM. And who better than IBM accessibility researchers to make the Internet game accessible to players with disabilities?
Mark Laff, an accessibility research scientist at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, says PowerUp teaches middle-schoolers about alternative energy sources in a virtual 3-D game world that's light-years ahead of Pac-Man. Players' avatars are sent on collaborative missions "whose goals have a teaching point," according to Laff. Mirrors in a solar power plant that reflect sunlight into a solar collector may have been misaligned after a windstorm, for instance, and teams of players have to fix things quickly. Along the way they learn about conservation and solar, wind and hydro power.
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Marylou Molina, a senior program manager with IBM Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs, explained that the game arose out of IBM's sponsorship of Engineers Week 2008, a global celebration of engineers and engineering sciences. The theme was diversity, says Molina, "and accessibility was a huge part of that for IBM."
Using scientific content identified by TryScience, IBM built the game from the slowly warming ground up. Laff, fellow research scientist Shari Trewin and co-op student Anna Cavender from the University of Washington made sure it was accessible to students who are blind, experience visual or dexterity impairment, reading difficulty, or are deaf or hard of hearing. The approach, says Laff, was to explain the virtual world using text-to-speech technology and other options so players could adapt the game to their preferences, all the while "keeping the puzzle-solving aspects of it."
Working with Lighthouse International and United Cerebral Palsy of Suffolk County (NY), Laff and his coworkers configured in several keyboard mappings to suit right or left preferences, enabled both mouse and keyboard modes, and added automatic navigation components — auto-aim, to keep players oriented toward targets, and auto-walk, which plots a path to a target and stops when a player reaches it. The combination, says Laff, "helps lots of people with different disabilities."
Targets, by the way, aren't just buildings and power generators and solar dishes. Players get to neutralize dastardly Smog Gobs, too.
It is a computer game, after all. Just one that's serious... and seriously accessible.