Almost Blue: the Design of a Cooperative Game by Integrating Accessible Interaction

Currently on-line entertainment is an important quality of life issue and represents a cornerstone of human culture and communication. With the growingly significant diffusion of mobile and multimodal devices, on-line entertainment is increasingly considered in an anytime, anywhere, anyone dimension. In this context new forms of on-line entertainment are offered to users, combining networked gaming, story telling and high interactivity in mixed reality contexts. This paper presents design issues related to the development of an accessible game where users cooperate to catch a serial killer. The application has been designed taking into account accessibility and offers multimodal access to sustain users with disabilities in being completely involved in the game scenario. The game, that supports edutainment issues, is built on an agent based simulation system.