Video Game Accessibility through Shared Control for People with Upper-Limb Impairments

TL;DR

This paper explores shared control methods, including human cooperation and automation, to improve video game accessibility for players with upper-limb impairments, supported by a new configurable framework.

Contribution

It introduces GamePals, a framework enabling both human and automated assistance in third-party video games, and investigates their effectiveness through a user study.

Findings

Participants successfully collaborated with both human and automated copilots.

Shared control methods improved game interaction for players with impairments.

The framework supports flexible configuration for different game and user needs.

Abstract

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.