Matteo Manzoni

Dragan Ahmetovic, Matteo Manzoni, Filippo Corti et al.

Interacting with video games is challenging for people with upper-limb impairments, especially when multiple hand-based inputs are required in rapid succession. Human cooperation, where another person assists the player, has been proposed as a solution, but it is limited by copilot availability and co-location. An alternative is partial automation, where the player is assisted by a software agent. We present a study with 13 participants with upper-limb impairments, investigating how they collaborate with a copilot in both human cooperation and partial automation. The experiment is supported by GamePals, a configurable framework we developed to enable both human cooperation and partial automation in existing third-party video games.

Dragan Ahmetovic, Matteo Manzoni, Filippo Corti et al.

Shared control is a form of video gaming accessibility support that allows players with disabilities to delegate inaccessible controls to another person. Through interviews involving 14 individuals with lived experience of accessible gaming in shared control, we explore the ways in which shared control technologies are adopted in practice, the accessibility challenges they address, and how the support currently provided in shared control can be automated to remove the need for a human assistant. Findings indicate that shared control is essential for enabling access to otherwise inaccessible games, but its reliance on human support is a key limitation. Participants welcomed the idea of automating the support with software agents, while also identifying limitations and design requirements. Accordingly, this work contributes insights into current practices and proposes guidelines for developing automated support systems.