Designing a First Person Shooter Game for Quadriplegics
In short
A zombie shooter you play with your face. Six expressions walk, turn, jump and shoot. I designed it with a high-school student I mentored, and I was its first player. It won first place in the Student Game Competition at CHI 2021.
Why this work
Games are also where people meet, through multiplayer play, online communities and streaming. Players who cannot hold a controller, click a mouse, or press keys while moving a mouse are shut out of much of that.
Existing alternatives give few inputs, and some are hard to learn.
What we built
The game is a single-player 3D shooter made in Unreal Engine. The goal is to defeat 20 zombies before they defeat you. A camera reads six facial expressions: a smile walks forward, a frown aims and shoots, and others turn, walk backward and jump.
I used my phone as the webcam. Speech recognition was too slow for combat, so voice handles reloading, pausing and menus.
How we tuned it
The expressions are ones I could make comfortably and the software detected reliably, mapped by my own associations, such as smiling to move forward.
The first version was too hard because of its pace. We halved the zombies’ speed, cut their number, and added auto-aim. Turning was the hardest problem, and we solved it with an expression that switches turning on and off.
What it showed
After the first playtest I wrote that the tool gave me hope of going back into the game world. A friend once sat beside me telling jokes to make me laugh and misfire, and that turned out to be the most fun part.
We hope game developers will adopt facial-expression input as a standard accessibility option.
Cite this paper
Atieh Taheri and Ziv Weissman. 2021. Designing a First Person Shooter Game for Quadriplegics. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 493, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451850
BibTeX
@inproceedings{10.1145/3411763.3451850,
author = {Taheri, Atieh and Weissman, Ziv},
title = {Designing a First Person Shooter Game for Quadriplegics},
booktitle = {Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems},
series = {CHI EA '21},
year = {2021},
articleno = {493},
numpages = {6},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
doi = {10.1145/3411763.3451850}
}