Okay, here's a disclaimer before we even start. This is not meant to be offensive. It is not a troll, or inflammatory. Please keep it on topic, and put your jokes in another thread.

Imagine a first-person game where every member of your team has some form of disability. You're a team of severely disabled people, verses another team of severely disabled. Both teams would be competing to complete a task (Capture The Flag, or some other objective).

Having disabilities means no one character can complete the complex tasks alone, you are naturally required to depend on your teammates.

I'm looking for disabilities with interesting modifications to game play mechanics.

Here are some ideas for classes I've thought of so far:

Definite Classes

Little Person
- Can fit into small spaces and is normally mobile (though slower than someone with longer legs).
- Can't reach anything up high without help.
- Can be picked up and/or hurled by larger classes.
- Very easy to push around though.

Bad Back
- Can't carry anything heavy. Otherwise mobile.
- Running for long periods hurts.
- In pain for much longer periods if hit hard enough.

Paralyzed from the waist down
- Wheel chair bound. Can't go up stairs, can hop up steps, can move fast.
- Can carry medium loads on his lap but moves slower during that. Harder to brake when loaded.
- If gets knocked over, it's a little bit of a task to get up.
- If gets knocked out of chair, he has to crawl back to his chair.

Overweight
- Maybe he can fall on people to slow them down, or block walkways with his largeness)
- Slow
- Strong?

Other Possible Disabilities (possibly each player is randomly alloted these disabilities so that each game, a new, personalized strategy must be devised to win.)

ADD How would we do this? anything that you see that moves becomes EXTREMELY BIG and bright on the screen, everything else gets dimmer and greyer, making it harder to focus on what's actually important. Imagine a History Channel special or a Worlds Scariest Police Chase video where they grey out a video and highlight one portion of a video, except the highlight is on stuff that doesn't matter.

ADHD
Like ADD but additionally, you can't stop moving, making it very hard to stay still in key situations (walking tight-rope, or hiding).

SAD
Social Anxiety Disorder, the fear of people. Your character has panic attacks whenever there are characters he doesn't know (the other team) around him, even if heard. It's the excessive fear of what people might think about you.

Long-term Smoker (OR drug addict?)
The character runs out of breathe if he runs too far, and must take smoke breaks throughout the match.

Blind?
This one would suck, and might not be very fun to play. Unless you're like the Dare Devil and can see with your sight!

Deaf?
This one might suck, but it might be cool. People would have to have a key to tap you on the shoulder to communicate with you, or you'd just have to know what to do.

Chronic Fatigue
You're always tired. This one sucks. I should know.

Sickly?
Parkinsons (shakey, can't grip controls or items well?)
Cerebral Palsy (wheel chair bound and no motor control?)
Double Arm Amputee
Diabetic (how would this affect anything?)
Foot amputee runner?

(what drawbacks? Easy to unbalance? or is he the flag runner?)
Speech (people can't understand what he's saying...)
Alcoholic

Ailments

Stunned/pain
The more pain, the more red, dark, and blurier the screen gets. The inability to focus.

I think this game, if done right, would do a lot to spread the understanding and empathy of people with disabilities more so than be a slap to the face. Moreover, I hope it would be a fun new way to look at first-person shooter strategies so that you're not thinking of playing "the cripple game" but rather "the fun, original game."

I haven't really decided if this would be a "shooter" game, or a more indirect form of combat. (Pushing people, hitting them, blocking them, insulting their mothers, etc.) I think it would be a fresh expansion of the FPS genre, since most of them feel generic outside of the storylines nowadays (to me at least).

So what other disabilities can you think of that would pertain to this? Any ailments? Any modifications to ones I've mentioned?

I'm welcome to your feedback! Thanks!
--Chris Katko

I knew this would come up, so very quickly:

I have disabilities.

There are zero representations of me in video games.

That is offensive.

Back to the thread.

Team Fortress 2 might be a good base point to use for a teamwork game. Not so much for the Left 4 Dead series.

Does it have to be a FPS? I guess you want that for the 'special perspectives'.
I think a (isometric) puzzle game could do well too. For instance for the ADD person every brick and stone on the map could become a clickable item.
Blind people could have a 'memory' of the path they were shown to walk only. (Easy backtracking in mazes, but no to little exploring.)
You want this to become a sort of multiplayer online shooter?
Maybe it would kind of cool if good players were given a handicap as their skill progresses. (How would a combination of ADHD and chronic fatigue work out? )
I do think you should separate the abilities from the disabilities in a sort of RPG style: a blind craftsman, an engineer with chronic fatigue etc. In that way most disabilities are really disabilities.

I find that offensive... or over the top fictional. But I think you're going for some sort of realism that shows real problems (and solutions). In general I think it is offensive to think of peoples abilities directly related to their abilities.
By the way your game is sure to be offensive, because you are entering the domain of politics/ politically correctness. Is an addiction a disability? Can a good diagnosis of ADHD be made? Etc. So you shouldn't be discouraged by any offense people take... I think. (Feel free to be discouraged by any other reason )

I think it's ignorance... It's kind of hard to work out how a character would behave, if you're not familiar with the conditions in question. So if you're working out a character it's not something that could easily 'pop into your mind' as a trait of your character.
Starting out a character on the premise of a disability and thinking of a character solely in terms of his disability seems more offensive to me. (It's not like you are doing that.)
Could you give an example of how chronic fatigue would work in the game?

I remember playing a D&D match, where after an accident with a ship(it exploded), all the players were left in the beach, each with different disabilities; one was deaf, another one couldn't walk, my body was severely burnt, which didn't help my 18 charisma score as a sorcerer.

Anyway, it was kind of a fun part, since we had to find a way that someone went to town and got some healers to the beach, and deal with the consequences of these problems later. We had to do a LOT of teamwork for the rest of the match.

So maybe it would sound less offensive that instead of picking disabilities that someone could be born with, make them the consequence of an "accident" or something.

Postal is intentionally offensive in a childish way. My proposal only uses people with disabilities as a game mechanic--not the butt end of a joke. It'd definitely be a thin line to walk though, I understand!

I'm 5'3" and 120 lbs, and I've literally been thrown over and over by larger people. At concerts, even at work by a manager into a sideways mattress. If I'm not offended by it, I don't really see what the difference is between me (one of the shortest guys you'll ever meet) and this fictional, man-defined, "little person." (Defined as 4'10".) I'm 5 inches taller than the definition, but politically, I'm not allowed to exploit all of my physical characteristics in a video game? Now, I understand that you're not targeting me, specifically. But I find that side of politically correct society to be more odd than me.

That's cool too! It'd probably be much more in the realm of my coding ability but I'm not sure at the moment.

That's the point though! It's hard to empathize without research or personal experience. I have personal experience with chronic back problems (and the pain and chronic fatigue associated with it), being short, and growing up bipolar disorder and with social anxiety disorder. I know many people with fatigue issues stemming from smoking or being overweight. Having used to have many panic attacks, I understand Agoraphobia (not the fear of outdoors, but actually, the fear of seeing things that might cause a panic attack.)

The rest, is an exercise in online literature to find out how people with these disabilities act and have to deal with their problems.

I don't know if I'd want it, because it's so horrible for getting tasks done. It's basically the feeling of always being tired, sleepy and weak; and the sleep you do get never seems to alleviate your problems. So in a game, the character would visually be tired (lower in perception, so less onscreen stats. Calculated numbers would take longer to compute for your HUD), sluggish, and physically weaker.

I will say this, it will be hard to balance the intended consequences (understanding and empathy for disabilities) with the fun factor.

Ultimately, this game would offend many people, but for the wrong reasons. Because everyone has been taught to tip-toe around people with disabilities so much that any mention that people with them are different (which we are) is automatically tagged as offensive. Calling me less human, or my opinion irrelevant, because of a disability I have is offensive to me and a grounds for butt kicking. But saying I can't do heavy lifting because of my bad back, isn't offensive to me. It's logical. It's all in the context. People with disabilities are distinctly different, and unable to do all the things a perfectly healthy adult can do. But that doesn't imply any form of negativity. It's just logical. Most people in the world are disabled in one way or another, and we have to work around those issues. Some people are hot tempered, some people have zero self-motivation. There just social mechanics that we have to work together on to move forward.

Though, for people without disabilities, or personal experience with them, I can understand how people would take the safe route and assume it shouldn't be said. But that automatic rejection destroys the freedom of speech. When people don't consider all the angles, it destroys the chance of complete understanding of a topic. I think if we automatically rule out a game with disabled people where their disabilities are very important to success, we're ruling out a fun way to get people to empathize without feeling like they're being preached to.

We did that once as kids! We all had mental disorders, and so it was fun to try and act the part. One person head voices, so another person also played the voice in his head. He would yell "You're gonna mess it up!" and random gibberish to the point that the person with the mental disorder actually started getting really frustrated and freaked out. My charactor had hallucinations. We had fun, and we had to think about what someone in those shoes would be going through.

Typo?

Agreed. Having three or four distinct characters is better than having a bunch of ones.

Also, ignore anybody who whines about it not being politically correct.

I don't think you've watched too many people with wheel chairs!

Speed and Agility (he does his first backflip around 2:30!)

Hopping

MURDERBALL

I wonder if the wheelchair movement system could be initially hard to learn (like a helicopter in Battlefield Vietnam) but the finesse grows on you (like it would in life). Perhaps something odd at first, but powerful once learned allowing tricks like in those videos.

I just listed random ones.

Yes! Definitely. I'm looking for brainstorming ideas so that I can take the ones that would most be a distinct major class system (big guy, small guy, wheelchair guy, etc). Additionally, "minor" traits can be added to each team (deaf in one ear, chronic fatigue, red-green color blind!, etc) depending on the game type requirements.

Thank you for the encouragement!

Sure, somebody in a wheel chair can go damn fast down a slope. They're going to go a lot slower up it though, and nowhere near as fast across level ground. I think for the most part a person running could have kept up with him. He never really got moving really fast. Or at least, it didn't look like it.

That looks more like a half step and he requires a large enough surface on the other side of it to rest the chair. Most steps are not like that (he appeared to be going up and down a sidewalk or curb or similar). I thought you meant steps AKA stairs.

Just what is politically incorrect about putting disabled people in a game, unless you're doing it in a way to make fun of them?

Yes, certainly. That still doesn't make it politically incorrect however. And I'd be willing to bet that not many people who are actually disabled would find the idea offensive. The only disability someone who finds the concept offensive has is terminal stupidity.

{"name":"1135260497344.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/f\/7f9b60a74539f9840ed515c9b6c56373.gif","w":600,"h":203,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/f\/7f9b60a74539f9840ed515c9b6c56373"}
- Our guest scientist needs a personal assistant.
- I'm good at working with disabled persons in a correct way.
- Those lights are S-T-A-R-S! They are VERY far away!