Mark of Excellence

Good Karma and Good Business

Welcome to the mark of excellence edition…

What, you may ask yourself, do a wheel chair, video games and excellence all have in common? The answer quite simply is when a video game is accessible to everyone and we mean everyone. Two discussions on making games accessible recently drew our attention to the matter. The first is the source of the logo at the top of this article. The link points to an english language section of a site that is not in english. It is, as you can no doubt tell from the logo, a web site about making video games that really are accessible to everyone.

The second discussion was an article in the local paper entitled “Senior Tour”.   This particular senior tour, however, was not sponsored by any professional golf association. No, this senior tour was part of a game that has caught on in some of the local senior communities – Wii Bowling.  In fact you can find an interesting blog entry on a local Wii Bowling tournament here.  We could tell you all about virtual bowling tournaments but Jack Roche, who apparently was part of one of them, can do a much better job of it than we ever could.  Go read the blog entry, we are nuns and we have rulers…that’s an order!

We have discussed much on accessible games of late on our show, but most of it has been in the area that we discussed with Scott Hartsman; games such as those on Facebook made by Zynga.  Beyond Facebook games there are games that are more accessible for a far different set of reasons…they are accessible to gamers with disabilities.  Game publishers always seem to be looking for ways to expand their market and what better way than this?  Beyond the good karma it brings by benefiting disabled gamers (such as some of the players in the virtual bowling tournament) it is just good business. 

This is also a subject that is near and dear to the hearts of the No Prisoners, No Mercy team as Julie was raised by a mother with cerebral palsy and that both Fran and Julie took care of Fran’s disabled mother for five years.

And while we are on the subject of marks of excellence…

Now THATS a GM we like!

We have all had the chance to interact with gms (those staff members behind any game that unstick those who are stuck in the game in some way).  Some are good, some not so good.  We have played mmos where the GMs have taken several days to answer.

Recently Julie had a chance to interact with a GM that stood out head and shoulders above the rest and that is GM Carlin from Fallen Earth and the Icarus Studios.   When a member of her clan (guild for all you WoW players) paged a GM, the answer was swift: it took about 30 seconds to reach GM Carlin.  The GM solved the issue in less than a minute,  and waited until all players got credit for the quest with a slight glitch. 

But here is the part that stands head and shoulders above the rest…

Several days later when Julie Logged on again, she received a message from GM Carlin who wanted to make sure that all of her questions had been answered.  So here is a big salute to Icarus Studio’s GM Carlin:

A big salute to GM Carlin from Icarus Studios' Fallen Earth

 See you online,

The No Prisoners, No Mercy team