Access Denied
While Ubisoft is busy showing us their middle finger these days, it seems that the collector’s edition of Silent Hunter 5 is being shown the door in Germany. It seems that someone at Ubisoft forgot to account for the German constitution and left in images that violate the same – that’s one heck of an “oops”. This, of course, comes on the heels of a denial of service attack on those same Ubisoft servers that Assassins Creed 2 customers are required to keep in contact with for every minute that the software is in use.
Meanwhile Gabe Newell, who founded Valve along with Mike Harrington, was busy accepting his Pioneer Award at the Gamers Choice Awards…where he took a few moments to sound out about, amongst other issues, digital rights management. In an article over at Arstechnicayou can take a look at the picture of Mr. Newell with the screen behind him sporting foot high letters that spell out “DRM is entertainment as dis-service”. Here is a quote garnered by Ben Kuchera:
“One thing that you hear [Valve] talk a lot about is entertainment as a service, it’s an attitude that says ‘what have I done for my customers today?’” he said. “It informs all the decisions we make, and once you get into that mindset it helps you avoid things like some of the Digital Rights Management problems that actually make your entertainment products worth less by wrapping those negatives around them.” – Gabe Newell, via Arstechnica.com
A bit closer to home, because it is closer to our hearts, is a whole different set of initials: ADA. It appears that Sony was forced to dip its toe in the waters of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in Stern vs. Sony. If you haven’t read the article about it over at Terra Novayou should (that’s an order from the nuns at No Prisoners, No Mercy). The article is by “Greglas” and is entitled is Everquest II a place of public accommodation. In short the answer, at least in California is “no”. But it appears that the answer is not a final no but more like our mothers “I will think about it” no. As the article reports, in other states like our home state of Illinois, the ADA is not limited to physical structures. In Stern vs. Sony, Judge Percy Anderson relied “on past decisions in California courts interpreting the ADA”. Judge Anderson concluded that the ADA did not apply in this case because “SOE games are not physical places or services connected to physical places”.
Mind you no one here is a lawyer, but our own Julie has had to deal with ADA on a professional basis on prior occasions (and was raised by a mother with cerebral palsy). One operative phrase that might end up being applied, even if the “is cyberspace a public place” hurdle can be passed is reasonable accommodation. Even if courts do eventually find that the ADA applies to Cyberspace as well as physical space will the “reasonable accommodation test” be applied? In other words if it were applied (and we have no idea if it would be) what could Sony be reasonably expected to do to accommodate needs which were the subject of the lawsuit? Interesting changes may be “afoot”.
See you online,
The No Prisoners, No Mercy Team
I, for one, am all for making games more accessible. My best friend of almost 20 years now has Cerebral Palsy, and only full use of one hand. He can kick my butt any day in a fighting game though. He’s able to play using just one hand, and he excels at it.
The problem comes in, though, with games like Guitar Hero/Rock Band where it is almost required that you have two good hands. But, thanks to this handy thing called the internet, and the site AbleGamers.com, he has actually been able to rig the guitar to play with a foot pedal instead of the hand pick.
The question comes in, then, should Activision be required to include a foot pedal with their game so that gamers can “pick” with their feet? It would be nice, but I don’t know. I feel that if every aspect and possibility of accessibility was put into a game, the costs would skyrocket. Companies are usually on some sort of a budget, and most of that is in order to keep costs down. Just think of how much more it would cost SOE to do a full voice-over walkthrough of their game for blind gamers, which is an extremely small demographic of gamers as a whole.
AbleGamers.com has a really good article on this whole lawsuit, and their reaction to the outcome. The article can be found here:
http://www.ablegamers.com/general-game-news/blind-suit-tossed-out.html
Unfortunately, lawsuits like this tend to cause more trouble than their worth. While I think Sony and other companies should open up their game to the use of Third Party Addons (like WoW, not bots), I don’t feel they should be open to lawsuits if they do not include full accessibility in their games. In the case of AbleGamers, which you’ll read in the article, this lawsuit set them back and made companies afraid to talk with them, out of the fear of being sued. It’s pretty sad how we’ve become such a lawsuit-happy country. It’s starting to remind me of an episode of Sliders, where they were in a dimension where they had to sign a waiver and have a license to eat a hamburger.