Thursday, March 9, 2017

Subtitles Are More Important Than You Think


Captioning and/or subtitling should not be excluded especially for today's games which can be much more complicated than the classic Mario & Luigi game. It's very important to caption games and even game trailers. It's often neglected and deemed not important to add. I have noticed many complaints from the deaf community, lamenting that their favorite game didn't even put captions for a certain game and/or trailer. This causes the companies to lose customers. They might think, oh well, it's just a few people. That's such a wrong response to have. It's about including a group of the community who otherwise would not be able to understand and play.


Because of this problem, TeamCaptionThis was created by a deaf gamer, DeafGamersTV, to caption gaming trailers. I think this is horrible. Why should they have to caption those videos for the game companies and for themselves? The game companies should already be doing this. They should be working on making sure that everyone can understand their game or trailer. This goes to show you how serious this problem is within the gaming community. This is a need that should not be ignored. Heck, if you put your trailers on YouTube, you can even pay Youtube to manual caption your videos for you.



But on the bright side, Complusion Games had something great to say on this topic.


"Subtitles might not seem like a glamorous topic, but they are essential in a game." - Compulsion Games


As a Deaf person, I agree! But subtitles helps everyone really. Not just the deaf. The hard of hearing. Or even hearing people who cannot understand what the heck is going on. Or older people who cannot keep up with the conversation. Or people who just need to keep their sound down because they're in a library.


Thankfully there are companies like Compulsion Games or EA who are willing to listen and add subtitles or equal accessibility. We need more companies like them.


Here's a video from Compulsion Games explaining why they needed to have subtitles in their brand new game, We Happy Few. Enjoy!



I also have to say that as a Kickstarter backer, I am very happy at this point that I backed this game. I think that it is very important for us to support game companies that are willing to use subtitles in their games. We also should support companies like EA who are willing to listen to your needs. We need equal accessibility for everyone. Games should be inclusive to everyone. EVERYONE. Period. End of discussion.

I would love to see more articles and more awareness on this topic on gaming news sites. I notice that it's not really talked about because well, it's probably not a friendly topic or because it doesn't "fit their site." I strongly encourage all game news sites to open a discussion and help people understand that this is a topic that shouldn't be swept under the rug. Please help us have a voice. But I have to say, thank you Massively for mentioning my past post about the importance of captioning game trailers. I never forgot that. It really touched me since it was such an important issue. Thank you. Really, thank you.

For the awesome people mentioned in this article...

Thank you Compulsion Games for creating this video and just for being an awesome game company! Also big thanks to EA for at least listening and being willing to take on suggestions to improve their games for everyone. Also thank you DeafGamersTV for working on bringing awareness to this topic.




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