[games_access] epilepsy and gaming

[Eelke Folmer]

Hi,

After the "virtual" lawsuit against Secondlife for not being
accessible a few months ago I found another one (which is actually
even older) http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/james-sokolove/ which deals
with epilepsy. Maybe we can include epilepsy also as a disability in
our research. Its funny I see so many games with epilepsy warnings but
I've never considered it to be a disability. (cognitive? or perhaps
visual since they're triggered throught visual stimuli) Anyone have an
idea for this?

I wonder what kind of guidelines game developers have to follow to
prevent people getting epileptic seizures? 50 million people worldwide
suffer from epilepsy. Maybe game developers can offer an epilepsy safe
mode which disables stroboscopic light effects in their games. (though
only 5% of the people with epilepsy are affected by strobe lights,
according to wikipedia)

Anyway Jim sokolove seems to be the guy behind the lawsuit, maybe we
can hook up with him.
http://www.jimsokolove.com/other/video-games/index.aspx

does anyone know any studies dealing with this?

cheers Eelke


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Eelke Folmer                           Assistant Professor
Department of CS&E/171
University of Nevada              Reno, Nevada 89557
Game interaction design        www.helpyouplay.com
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