| Written by Mark C. Barlet, on 05-07-2008 21:34 |
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 Last Friday AbleGamers had a great opportunity to talk to
Garth Chouteau, senior director of Public Relations for Popcap Games. Joining
myself (Mark Barlet, Editor-in-Chief) was Steve Spohn, Senior Contributor for AbleGamers.com,
and Michelle Hinn, Chair of the Gaming Accessibility Special Interest Group of
the IDGA (AKA GA-SIG of the IDGA, OKAY). Now for the record, Michelle requested to be the audience for this interview, however her creative mind came up with a few great questions off the bat.
Below is part one of a three part interview, keep in mind
that this interview was hand transcribed from a real conversation. So the writing style may be a little
different than you're used to, because his speech transposed on paper versus
something that was written for print to begin with.
Mark: Welcome Garth
to the AbleGamers site, would you like to take this opportunity to let you
share with the community who you are.
Garth: I am the
senior director of Public Relations for Popcap Games, I've been doing high-tech
PR for twenty-three years and much of it has been in the game space. Specific
to games, my first gaming PR was with Data East about 20 years ago, and sense
then I have done PR for various times for Storm Front Studios, Total
Entertainment Network. Pogo.com and now Popcap Games, and in between there I
worked for a number of years for AutoDesk heading up the PR for their
multi-media products which at the time included 3D Studio and Animator Pro
which as far as I know is still used pretty extensively in video game
development. So between the actual video game experience and AutoDaesk and
other places I've been I would say the majority of my experience is in games or
very directly related to games.
Mark: Great, Steve and I really wanted to talk to
you... A couple of weeks ago you guys at Popcap released some information on a
survey that you guys did. Can you tell us at AbleGamers some of the finding of
that survey?
 Garth: The survey
was first and foremost prompted by some work that was done at East Carolina University
a clinical study that involved 130 subjects and took about six months and that
survey produced some very interesting findings including ...terming for the first
time scientifically that casual gaming, such as Bejeweled, Peggles and Bookworm
Adventures can have a significant effect on mood, and the professor overseeing
that survey was particularly intrigued by the prospect of improving mood
through playing casual games, and said, "Garth look what we need to do next is
go down this path with respect to people who are clinically depressed, and if
we can have the kind of results that we're seeing here with average subject who
is not diagnosed with depression.
Imagine what the effect may be with people who are in fact depressed" so
that got me thinking, "Gee we've done other surveys in the past, and we danced
around the question but ever drill down very far in this issue of what
percentage of our customer base in the overall casual gaming audience is
disabled." We had reason to believe it
was somewhere and 10 to 12 percent range, but between those kinds of anecdotal
pieces of information and this study," we should really do more here." We should figure out what's really going on,
or do our best to find out. So we
decided that we were going to conduct a study, or the survey, specific to
people with disabilities, how do we say that.
We went with our usual survey firm, but we did a lot more in the way of
due diligence to make sure that the questions were correct, but also very
appropriate, to personal or ...we wanted to be respectful but at the same time,
we need to get a certain level of information.
So we ran it by some of our disabled customers, we ran it by a couple of
doctors, psychologists, and a professor at ECU, to the point where we're pretty
confident that we can get the information we wanted without offending people
are making them feel as we were exploiting them or invading their privacy. I will tell you that, we did get a couple,
two or three e-mails from people who "why are you doing this? Why do you need this level of information for
me? What is the point of this, a lot of
personal information." We got five times...
six times as many e-mails from people who said,
"I took your survey, think you, thank you for caring. Thank you for asking. Thank you for wanting to know more about how
I and other people with disabilities play these games." And when you add to
that the number of people who were in the survey itself. It took some opportunity to comment, we ask a
lot of open-ended questions, they're just fields , you can type as much as you
want. We want all the information you're
willing to give us. And so if you factor
in all the people in those took those opportunities to also convey their
appreciation. It was overwhelming. It was almost 10 or 20 to one people saying
you we are glad that we did the survey.
So that was very reassuring to us, to say the least, in terms of the
actual survey results I would say. The
percentage, the 20% that we came back with as far as casual game players, who
have some sort of disability, was somewhat surprising to us. We did not think
it would be that high, but when you think about the percentage of overall
consumers in the US who are disabled.
This isn't that far beyond that.
So you can look at this percentage 20.5% and compare that to the roughly 14 - 15% of the population as a whole
and say, "yeah that makes sense people
who have disabilities are probably more inclined to play these games than the
average consumer. And they're going to
play them somewhat differently, and there is going to be a higher percentage of
people with disabilities that gravitate to these games than non-disabled people"
Michelle: when you are
talking about that. I'm a professor at
the University of Illinois, and my doctoral thesis was on the positive
psychology of games that people with disabilities. So what you just said, rang 100% true, because that's what I've been
trying to get more anecdotally, as I've described. The fact that you have this quantitative
data, makes me very interested in wanting to join your team with ECU, because
the position I have affords me some extra stories like disabled veterans, a
number of parents that call me and I think that we can put out something pretty
amazing. Like an article or something
like that they would say, "hey were on the something." The industry is not looking at that. So keep that in the back of your mind, that
is actually my personal interest and my researches on that. So I was like "oh my God, somebody gets it
YAHHHH."
Garth: I think that's very good information, and to your
point. First, I would say, we have this
next step with this study with East Carolina University that we will be looking
at the effects of these games on people who are clinically depressed. But the professor who's doing that stuff is
tied into the NIH, tied in the Department of Defense, he is actively putting
our games into their studies and research that is going on, One of which is Wounded Warriors. So veterans coming back from Afghanistan and
Iraq with severed head trauma. How do
you rehabilitate these soldiers with things that will engage them, you can
certainly present them with a shooter game, and they would probably like, they
are type A personalities, They got in
the military for a reason. But what we
try to do is to get them. Over time to
learn to, for instance, control their impulses and other things like that. You certainly cannot just give them a
hard-core game. You have to find other
things, and when you're looking casual
games then you have to consider that these folks are type A personalities, what
kind of games do you give  then that involves enough of the risk-taking
mentality and other sensibilities that this audience has, so that is one of the
things were exploring with him. Another thing he's looking at is people with Sickle
Cell disease, because sickle cell apparently is very much affected by stress
levels. So they have a study where they are looking at alternative therapies
for people with sickle cell, and one of the three alternative therapies is
likely to be playing casual games for 15 or 30 minutes at a sitting. So we are very interested in that side of
things in a lot of ways. As Mark and I
discussed a little bit a day or two ago, this method of finding problems for
which the games already offers a solution. There are two paths here really, one
is; let's build a game that accomplishes this objective, people recovering from
cancer, or people with multiple sclerosis, or whatever the infirmity might
be. Let's make a game for those people,
that is one path. I think is a very
tenuous path, I think is a dangerous path, I think it's fraught with problems. Most importantly, or most glaringly, is the
problem... if you sit down to make a game
and your objective is not to make the game... your primary objective is not, "I
want to make a game as fun as it could possibly be." If other stuff is factored into that you will
go astray in that process.
Michelle: I definitely
agree. We want games to be fun for
everyone and not just fun for this one guy.
Garth: We're
talking about when you look at the survey, when you look at this study, when
you look at these other things that the folks at ECU you are talking about doing
with the games. What you're finding is, there are who knows how many thousands
of casual and independent games out there and then there are of course thousands
more commercial games now, at this point in time, for just about anyone over
the age of four, and even games for just about any type of physical and mental
or developmental disability in terms of accessibility and playability and fun
factor and those things still work, there are games are still viable. It's more a function of finding the right peg
to fit in that round or square or diamond shaped hole that you see and building
a new peg to fit in that hole . With
accommodation of these things, but from where we see it right now at least it's
still an exercise of, "that's interesting, Peggles has these effects, so what
might it do for these respective audience" so than rather than build games with
a particular objective other than "let's have fun". We're looking at it as its quite possible
that all, or most, of the games that one might ever want for various effects on
people of all stripes already exist. It's
just a function of drilling down and identifying that.
Michelle: write what is
it they can't access it may be a control or it may be as simple as adding a
controller to their computer to play a game.
Garth: we were
somewhat surprised at face value when we looked at the 20.5%, but working those
numbers and thinking about the more we... we weren't blown away or dumbfounded by
them. We weren't dubious to their
accuracy. In terms of other things that
surprised us, the percentage of people who responded saying, we were severely
disabled was somewhat higher than we expected.
It was more than three quarters of all respondents. To some extent, we were... it's kind of tricky
to say, what surprised us because on the one hand, I can say with a straight
face, we were surprised that the percentage of disabled gamers who said that
they derived benefits above and beyond those of non-disabled gamers from
playing these games. So in a way that's
true, it did surprise us a little bit. I
think it was a little...
Michelle: ... a way back to wanting to learn how to live,
because if you consider coming back from a situation where you're terribly
injured. You know, you can think - I don't
want to do any rehab. But if you had a
game that was interested in playing in an alternative way than they would be
more interested in learning how to do other things in other ways.
Garth:
absolutely, my other point was going to be we probably communicate with our
customer base more often, and more actively than probably any other video game
company, so we weren't totally blindsided.
We had enough anecdotal... just e-mails that come in over the transom and
phone calls. My e-mail and phone number
are the only ones listed on the Popcap site, so I get everything. I get every customer concern, every think
you, I get everything. The bottom line
is, I take every one of those opportunities to drill down, who are you where
you live, who do you play the games with, and so forth. So we were... I personally, when we built out
these questions, I look at some of these questions and I knew are going to get
some interesting responses here, I don't know how big the numbers will be or
how overwhelming. But I know it's going
to be good. I know it's good to be stuff
that's going to open people's eyes. So
it's hard for me to say we were shocked by this because we, knew we had a
sense. One of the things that was kind
of surprising to us, and again was the kind of thing that we looked at and
said, this is somewhat surprising to us we think it's can be really surprising
to others is, to your point Michelle, this idea that beyond any tangible
benefits that you can identify. There is
these intangibles that has to do with a sense of accomplishment, a sense of
belonging, the sense of getting back to mental space that you want to get back
to, me when we when we that you recall fondly.
All of those things were bigger in terms of the percentages of people
they're saying; "yes" that is a significant and specific benefit it's not the
kind of thing...
Michelle: That's the
stuff that gets you in the gut
Garth: it's also the kind of stuff you don't hear
from nondisabled people. They don't
think of these games that way. They
think of these games as 15 minute me time or relaxation opportunity but beyond
that, I think that the benefits they are deriving to the extent that the
knowledge them. It's worn kind of the
subconscious I don't know why a big grin spreads over my face when I play
Peggles, but it does, and I want to get back to it. We're disabled customers. I think are much more introspective, a bit
more in tune perhaps with their minds and bodies and their needs of the same,
and have a better sense of what these games can do for them and are just... and
more in touch with various aspects of existing than the average non-disabled
person does. And we start to think about
things from the perspective; you're looking at things more clearly perhaps, or
more in tune with how these games affect them.
Recommend this article... Last update: 07-07-2008 18:05
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