There is no unmute button!

There is a lot of people in the world. There is also a lot of people on the internet. A lot of those internet people are gamers, and many gamers also watch machinima or videos related to the games they like (Frag, PvP, PvE, exploit movies and so on...). But what people don't think about is that there are gamers in the world who do not have the advantage of hearing or seeing stuff as they should. I'm talking about disabilities that affect certain gamers and machinima viewers.

Todays topic is one of the more difficult ones. Before I continue I want to assure you that I do not want to insult anyone. Theres a lot of talk about being 'politically correct' but to be honest I do not really understand that democracy crap... And English is not my first language either.

But I will still try and present you the issue in a more 'entertaining' way... I doubt you're here for serious stuff and charts.


Silence of the Lambs

The first disability that is of interest to machinmators is obviously hearing impairment or deafness. Let's refresh our mind and remember that machinima uses already present resources from games. In our case, we use the same emotions all the time. Characters cannot lip sync with the text, unless we use Crazytalk or any other puppeteering software to move lips. Because of this deaf people cannot hear the conversations and audio events (mr. obvious...), nor can they read from the characters lips.

To research the issue a bit more, I've managed to find a few deaf person who watch machinima and had a little chat with him. What they noticed the most is the decrease of subtitles during the past few years. While the visual and audio look of machinima advances, the subtitles disappeared, possibly since they affected the overall video quality of the film.

When asked about body language it was pointed out that even though the emotions repeat themself, the mahinimators still manage to capture feelings in certain cases. Of course they also say that it can sometimes be really difficult to understand some emotions since the emotion might have been triggered by an audio event. An issue are also characters who talk with their backs pointed towards the viewer, making it even harder to connect the subtitles with a character.

Overall the WoW machinima comminuty is not such a bad place for hearing impaired. There are quite a few really good silent machinima and some machinimators even provide scripts and subtitled versions just for them.

However theres still quite a few things that can be done. For the start, many more machinimators could release their 'voice acting scripts' or perhaps even release a subtitle file together with the release of the movie. Another thing that can be done in the subtitles themself is connecting the text with the character (example:  Orc: -I think we have a problem. Troll: -Oh really...? ) or even pointing out audio events ( *A big explosion is heard in the distance*).

Or we could just add Gnomes who do sign language in one of the corners.




Every movie is a Noir movie

Another disability that is present in our viewership is colourblindness. While generally not a big issue (except that there are colours missing), being colourblind does not interfere with machinima that much.

Until we reach the abstract machinima and colour filters. The use of extreme colour changes and/or the colour aspect of the visual just screwing up with you can sometimes cuase trouble to colourblind people. Too dark or too bright colour schemes can also sometimes be a problem.

However I was assured that WoW machinima in particular doesn't has any big issues since the style that the game itself uses is quite friendly to colourblindness. So in the end, there are no real problems regarding this...


Space for improvement

Back to hearing impairment. The biggest issue currently is the lack of subtitles. But this is one of the easiest things that we could master.

Not only that we can make machinima more attractive to deaf people, we can also create subtitles for the non-English audience with ease. Sites like WarcraftMovies, Machinima.com or perhaps even Myndflame could add a subtitle archive open to contributions and additions like real movies have. People could easily access or add subtitles for various languages (why only have English subtitles if fans would be eager to add Danish, German, Russian, Chinese... ). Then a viewer would just need to download the subtitles he wishes to have and open it together with the movie in RealPlayer or VLC Player. Perhaps the streaming sites could even add youtubes annotation system, but to use it for subtitles.

Yes, theres not a lot of talk about such disabilities in this community... which doesn't mean they do not exsist.


Thanks to Bigglesworth Production, JustMK, Beegless, Peter and Miky for helping me with the article!