AbleGamers

Article by JOHN BRANCH
Published: March 5, 2011
New York Times

Hans Smith has spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy and a love of baseball. A 24-year-old student at Boise State, he uses a wheelchair and cannot dress or feed himself but appreciates the nuances of sacrifice bunts and cutoff men.

Hans Smith, who has a form of cerebral palsy, consulted with Sony designers to adapt the PlayStation 3 game MLB The Show for players with disabilities.

Playing baseball on a field with friends is not an option, so Smith enjoys the game on his PlayStation 3. Even that can be frustrating because he does not always have the dexterity to direct his video game players to do what he wants.

That should change with the release Tuesday of this year’s version of MLB The Show, the most popular baseball video game. To complement the beginner, experienced and expert modes, Smith worked with a Sony design team to devise an A.D.V.A. mode. It stands for Association for Disabled Virtual Athletes, an organization that Smith is starting with the hope of making games more accessible to those who can play sports only on a video screen.

“Now, whether you win or lose,” Smith said, “it will be based upon your ability to know the game — to know when you want to do a double steal, to know when you want to do a squeeze play, to know when you want to bring your infielders in — instead of, ‘Oh, no, I can’t hit that button.’ ”

For people like Smith, another hurdle has been removed by the design team at Sony.

“A.D.V.A. takes the controls of the beginner, and the skill and the strategy of the expert, and mixes them together,” said Kolbe Launchbaugh, senior designer of MLB 11 The Show. “What we’re trying to do is give you an easier way to physically play the game, but it’s mentally challenging.”

The AbleGamers Foundation estimates that about 33 million Americans with disabilities are video game players. Smith’s concern involves only sports-theme games.




“There is a demographic here that hasn’t been reached,” he said.

He did not intend to become another advocate. Smith was so thrilled by MLB The Show a couple of years ago that he sent a thank-you letter to the design team for giving him the chance to play baseball.

“For me, that was as real as it was ever going to get,” Smith said.

The design team at Sony Computer Entertainment America was moved.

“This all started not because of the letter, but because of what people did about that letter,” Smith said. “If they had chosen to ignore this letter, none of this would have ever happened.”

The design team invited Smith to its studio in San Diego, where he spent two days in late 2009. Smith sat in on meetings, and he was asked for suggestions to make the game better. He became sort of a consultant to the 70-member design team.

“We really liked the guy,” Launchbaugh said. “Really cool kid. Really smart. He fit right in with our team. We had a great time, and it kind of became a friendship.”

Eventually, it led to the A.D.V.A. mode. Launchbaugh said MLB The Show has about 70 settings that can be tailored to individuals. The A.D.V.A. default settings, set to Smith’s recommendations, can be altered.

“Last year, you could have gone through all of the settings to what A.D.V.A. means today, but it would have taken you about 20 minutes,” Launchbaugh said. “And you would have had to know exactly what you were changing and what it meant. This is just a really nice way to have members of his organization say, ‘O.K., I can just start with this setting, and it’s going to be compatible with me.’ ”

For Smith, a big issue was when he played the game online against other gamers. Until now, online competitors had to be on the same settings, “so the first inning they’d always be up, 6-nothing,” Smith said.

The new edition allows gamers with different settings to compete. The other player simply must accept the challenge.

Smith controls his wheelchair with a joystick, but the PlayStation controller has 12 buttons and 2 joysticks, demanding an array of quick-fingered combinations. During an at-bat, for example, base runners are usually controlled by several buttons while the player anticipates the pitch.

“This is difficult because you need, like, four fingers to achieve this,” Launchbaugh said. “So what we’ve done is, while you’re batting, base running is automatic. Once the ball is in play, you can control your runners.”

Fielding a ball usually means moving the defender into position with one joystick, then using buttons to throw. In A.D.V.A. mode, fielding the ball is automatic, but deciding where and when to throw is up to the player.

Swinging a bat requires a single button push.

“It’s not dumbing it down,” Smith said. “It’s trying to take the physical factor and remove it, so that the game becomes more of a mental competition.”

Smith plans to go live with a Web site, advasports.org, on Tuesday to coincide with the release of MLB 11 The Show. He does not know where all this will lead. But in a video game world where reality is increasingly treasured, and where more game systems use motion sensors to enable players to control the action, Smith wants to help ensure that millions are not left in technology’s wake.

“That kind of freaked me out — what if it got to a point where everything is motion?” Smith said. “I understand that it’s a marketing thing, and I understand that they’re trying to get people up to move. They’re trying to make video games look like a very good exercise option.

“But for people like us, it’s, ‘Oh, no, what are we going to do?’ There are these people out here who can’t do the motion; they can’t be the controller. So depending on how well the A.D.V.A. does, I hope in the long run, there will be more systems and more games that do this.”