Video Game Accessibility through Shared Control for People with Upper-Limb Impairments
This work addresses the challenge of making video games accessible to people with upper-limb impairments by comparing two assistive approaches.
The paper investigates how people with upper-limb impairments collaborate with a copilot in human cooperation versus partial automation, using a configurable framework called GamePals. The study with 13 participants found that both approaches are viable, with partial automation offering independence and human cooperation providing social benefits.
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.