Dead Space 2 to be Made Accessible Thanks to One Disabled Gamer

{sidebar id=1}One disabled gamer on YouTube and 20,000 of his closest friends helped bring a promise of fully customizable controls to Dead Space 2.  Executive Producer Steve Papoutsis of Visceral Games told Joystiq a patch would be applied to the PC version as soon as possible allowing further customization, including the ability to remap the forward command to the mouse button.

Gareth Garratt, a gamer with cerebral palsy, uses his mouse with his chin and switches to click in order to play games.  Although there are many assistive technologies that could be used, and are frequently employed by many in our community, Gareth chooses to keep things low-tech.  The problem comes into play when a game cannot be reconfigured to fit the controls needed for use with the individual gamer.

Some of us use multiple switches, reprogrammable dongles, voice commands or simply the mouse, but when you deal with a game that needs to use the keyboard and mouse, the most simple solution is to attach the move forward command to the right click button on the mouse.

Many first person perspective games can be controlled by using the left click as normal, the right-click to move forward and the mouse to steer.  You get 360° of control, albeit with extremely reduced flexibility and the inability to kite easily, but navigation of most FPS and FPRPG can be achieved this way.

We have had several discussions between various members of the AbleGamers volunteer staff about the situation. Most of us are extremely pleased with the outcome but there are some parts of it that don't sit so well.  First, there is not one gamer on the face the planet who DOESN’T want fully reconfigurable controls. I mean, honestly, whether you are able-bodied or disabled, why wouldn't you want the ability to play the game your way?  Of course you would.

And second, the petition for every game to be made fully reconfigurable is not new. It was started by a gamer who is a member of this community.  Nevertheless, petitions have a fundamental problem, they rarely, if ever, work.  Most of the time developers simply ignore petitions as they are a dime a dozen.

Take for example, the petition to remove rainbows from Diablo three.

The developers of Dead Space 2 could give a rat’s behind about the petition, which many of the online magazines are attributing this victory towards.  The company cared that a disabled gamer had the courage to post about his problem on line in an extremely visible way (YouTube) and the mainstream gaming media picked up on it, adding even more pressure.

As I'm sure you are aware, developers do not sit around thinking up ways to keep disabled gamers out of videogames. Most of them don't know the importance of some of the very simple things, like customizable controls, that can be done to increase accessibility. And ultimately, that's what we’re trying to do here at AbleGamers: raise awareness and explain the how-to on adding accessibility.

Whether the developers and the newfound accessibility out of the goodness of their hearts or for the good publicity it would bring, or a combination of the two, we will never know. But for Gareth and every other disabled Dead Space 2 fan this is a tremendous victory.

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