Game Accessibility Through Shared Control for People With Upper-Limb Impairments

TL;DR

This work presents a study with 13 participants with upper-limb impairments, comparatively evaluating how participants collaborate with their copilot in human cooperation and partial automation on existing third-party video games.

Abstract

Accessing video games is challenging for people with upper-limb impairments, especially when multiple inputs are required in rapid succession. Human cooperation, where a copilot assists the main player, has been proposed as a solution, but relying on a human assistant poses limitations in terms of availability and co-location. An alternative solution is to use partial automation, where the player is assisted by a software agent. In this work, we present a study with 13 participants with upper-limb impairments, comparatively evaluating how participants collaborate with their copilot in human cooperation and partial automation. The experiment is supported by GamePals, a modular framework that enables both human cooperation and partial automation on existing third-party video games.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: GamePals framework's data flow
• Figure 2: In-game screenshot from Rocket League
• Figure 3: Screenshot of the augmented video used for the analysis of P2's human cooperation session.
• Figure 4: Default Rocket League mapping of input commands to game actions
• Figure 5: An example of Confusion due to unexpected actions in P10's partial automation gameplay.