Gambit Game Lab, a collaboration of developers at MIT and Singapore, have developed AudiOdyssey as a proof-of-concept that games can be created for the disabled to enjoy, too. (You might remember Gambit as the winner of the grand prize of Microsoft's Dream-Build-Play game development contest.)

Gambit's mission is to develop games for a global market, rather than build for one language/culture and translate it elsewhere. One MIT designer got to thinking about markets in something other than a geographic sense, and wondered if a game could be built to include both blind and sighted gamers.

Thus AudiOdyssey, which served as Eitan Glinert's master's degree thesis at MIT. In it, one performs as a club DJ (named Vinyl Scorcher) who matches clapping beats to pump up the crowd and bring more clubbers onto the dance floor. A Wiimote or a keyboard is used to match the beats — hear one to your right, swing the Wiimote in that direction, or hit the right arrow, for example. The game was engineered to deliver the same experience for a gamer regardless of sight.

“Choosing music as our central game theme works perfectly since both sighted and nonsighted users are equally familiar with music,” Mr. Glinert said. You can download the game here.

The New York Times' Education Life section mentioned it among 22 other student innovations in the past year. Since graduation he's gone on to found Fire Hose Games, in Cambridge, Mass., to develop video games with a positive social impact.

Update: Eitan wrote to provide a link to his thesis, and says he'd be happy for any devs — pro, amateur, dabblers, whomever — in the Kotaku community to take a look at it in case they might find it useful for their own efforts.

Bright Ideas: See Me, Hear Me, a Video Game for the Blind [New York Times, thanks Sensai-N]
The Human Controller: Usability and Accessibility in Video Game Interfaces [Eitan Glinert's master's degree thesis at MIT]

We've gotten a number of emails from myopic, stigmatized gamers that Dead Rising has a bit of a blurry text problem. And in that regard, my homoerotic, velvet-swishing soul mates over at Gay Gamer have some bitching to do:

Dead Rising has the smallest text I've ever seen. I'm playing on a 36" TV and I have to sit on the floor up near the screen to see anything. I absolutely can't play for a long period of time because my eyes start to strain themselves and hurt. This has never happened to me with a game before. Is anybody else having this problem?

In all seriousness, even using component cables the picture is sharper, but the text is still like reading a font at size 12 from six feet away. There is no option to increase the text size - talk about stupid things ruining the game experience. I'm begging for a text size adjustment patch to be uploaded to the marketplace for download - oh, and for free! Look for our full review of Dead Rising as soon as I stop massaging my eyes to make the pain go away.

Which just goes to show that my mother's curious aphorism was right: too much wanking off to imagined gay video game characters will make you go blind. Florian Eckhardt

Gaming blog Inverted Castle happened upon a freeware game for blind players. The "audio only" Sonic Invaders is like Missile Command, except that players don't rely on images to play. With an arsenal of guns, you hear incoming ships. Like visual shooters, Missile Command is based on timing. Players must hit "B" at the precise moment to destroy their opponent. There is info displayed on screen such as your score and reload time, but it's merely redundant. Sexy Greek accented in-game voices guide players through. "I think the game would be even more striking with no video at all," says Inverted Castle. Agreed.

Full Story Here [Inverted Castle]