The School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences welcomes the campus community to a public research presentation by Dr. Christopher Power, candidate for tenure track position in Computer Science, on Monday, February 11th at 12:30 pm at Robertson Library, Room 208. 

Presentation Title: Designing Accessible Player Experiences

Abstract: Digital games provide opportunities for players to escape from reality, divert themselves from everyday concerns and connect with other players around the world. For players with disabilities, gaming provides all of these experiences and more. Gaming enables players with disabilities to participate in a shared culture with their peers on a level playing field, giving them all not only something to play but something to bond over. Unfortunately, the majority of accessible game design is reactive, relying on checklist approaches from previous generations of technology to drive the selection of accessibility features. This leads to inflexibility that often chafes against the creative process of game design, and leads to an implementation lag in new solutions for the evolving space of barriers encountered by players with disabilities in games. In this talk, Dr. Power will present his research programme aimed at changing this paradigm of accessible game design. He will argue that to break the implementation lag, we need new design thinking tools that allow game professionals to proactively create games that give players the opportunity to tune their own experiences. 

All are welcome to attend.