Quick Look: Beyond Eyes

i feel like making jokes about a blind girl getting hit by a car is a little distasteful

It is a matter of opinion, and therefore cannot be true or false. I have already stated mine. You are welcome to yours as well. Cheers!

Looks like it has 10 times more gameplay than Gone Home.

No one did that...

But here I can start. "Why did the blind girl cross the road?"

I was really hoping there would be more too this game, a more complex narrative or a bit more gameplay. Some of the stuff like how she perceives some objects as being completely different until you get closer to them sounds cool, and I wish they could have elaborated on stuff like that.

@onarum: He's awesome, right? I love the combination of Jeff's encyclopedic knowledge and Austin's academic knowledge on the site.

@richinjapan: I agree with your comment.Basically all games require suspension of disbelief. Not sure why this question of what would happen in reality comes up in this game. Though to be fair, I recall sort of similar complaints being raised by games like WatchDogs with respect to hacking peoples data, and I'm sure in some other more "real world" stories, I just can't think of more examples. In clear fantasy settings, the question of real world concerns just don't seem to arise. It's easier to just go with it, and suspend disbelief, when the story is set in space, Mordor,etc. As long as the fictional world has consistent rules, it's easy to accept them.

Although I'm fairly sure that the cutest game ever,Kirby's epic yarn, has to be real somewhere. I don't want to believe otherwise.

It seems like this game is what Unfinished Swan would have been if it hadn't evolved past its introduction. I think their points about this game pretty much say it all. Good work gents!

Vinny saying "Interesting take on chickens" made my day.

@finaldasa said:

Good job, you responded to the first sentence without addressing the actual content of my post. By your logic it would make sense to make "non-movies". Like let's make a 2 hour movie that shows an empty room. People like you would say, "It's experimental! It's artistic! It's avant-garde! It doesn't take anything away from enjoying other movies."

Ok, but is it a good film? Does it make good use of the medium's strengths? My point is, wouldn't it make more sense to show that same empty room as a painting or photograph? It's abundantly clear that this "game" should have remained the original short film it was based on, but please keep crusading for (and probably not buying) your precious non-games.

@alex, @vinny, and @austin_walker regards to letting blind children explore, in the States, there are lots of programs and schools that give children a way to learn to explore the world around them. Some programs, particularly the state-run ones, will sometimes teach children to rely on others to get around, but certain programs, particularly those run by the National Federation of the Blind, teach children to be independent in traveling by using canes first and foremost and then later with the aid of guide dogs.

In a way, letting a child - or an adult, for that matter - become too reliant on others to get around becomes far more damaging than teaching them from an early age that they can travel and get around. Those classes are often taught in the real world, because teaching them purely in a controlled environment wouldn't be reflective of a real world situation. They learn to gauge the way traffic moves, the times at which it's safe to cross streets without the aid of those annoyingly useless verbal cues at crosswalks, and how to feel with the tips of their canes the difference between surfaces, to help them learn where they are traveling and how to get there.

When I was about twenty three, I studied at an NFB Center for the Blind and learned a lot of these things in a trial by fire. I think this game is relatively interesting, but largely purposeless and not at all reflective of the life of a blind person. It doesn't have to be, but it doesn't exactly seem like an interesting narrative either, so I don't really see the point.

I think there's great potential in using VR to simulate being completely blind, particularly for parents who would want to learn something of what their child might go through - particularly in a rural environment where teaching a child how to navigate the world would be far different than experiences earned studying in a larger city. But it would never be a substitute for real experience. I'm curious what game developers could do with the experience with varying degrees of blindness, though - it would be fascinating running through the same scenarios being completely blind, having cataracts, being legally blind, or other eye problems like detached retinas or the like. The biggest problem with the NFB Centers is that they can only successfully teach a person how to navigate as though they were completely blind. They actually make all their students wear sleepshades to simulate complete blindness, worn every day for eight hours for six to nine months. It was pretty crazy.

I'm not too familiar with the specifics of how children are taught specifically, particularly at state-run schools, but I've been thinking about writing a blog about my experiences with being legally blind. I've done some smaller blog mentions about it, but never gone into all that much detail here on GB. Don't know if there would be much interest in it.

If your argument is that it's a bad game or doesn't fit a more traditional/modern definition of video games, then sure I agree. But you can't say just claim something isn't a game because you feel it isn't.

Now if you wanna say this game is bad because of the lack of interaction or the lack of meaning that your interactions have in this virtual world I'd be leaning towards agreeing with you.

I don't think defining it as a game or not really solves anything.

It makes me sad that so-called video game aficionados, the people who should have the broadest minds on the subject, tend to enforce the narrowest scope of what video games can be (or, as they imply sometimes, are allowed to be).

This is completely separate from what your personal taste is. It's too bad some people can't divorce those concepts.

@gregalor said:

As expected you didn't address anything I said to you. Good job, that makes two! So I will ask you one more time:

Let's say someone creates what I would call a "non-comic". They put comic-book style panels to give the impression it's a comic, and use comic-book style fonts, but it doesn't have any illustrations. It's just be one big wall of text, page after page. But they sell it on the comic book stand next to other comics and claim that it has a legitimate place there.

Would you be defending that kind of creation as a "comic book", call people who derisively categorize it as a "non-comic" idiots, etc., or would you agree with the critics who would say such a thing would be better served as a book since it didn't rise to the standard of what we consider an actual comic book?

I think we don't give enough credit to kids in how they grasp games. I remember playing as a kid games like Command and Conquer: Red Alert, Commander Keen, and the Humongous Entertainment Adventure games. I probably wasn't great at them (I did beat Keen, but could never beat RA).

really?

It looks like it would drag on a bit too long for me, which is too bad although - as mentioned in the video - a Run button would make no sense. I'm still not sure what to make of the "blind experience" angle, to be honest.

When I saw the description I immediately thought of this game:

Real Sound: Kaze no Regret

Has anyone here played this?

Cats > dogs

I fixed it

I mean her parents let their (based on the picture) unsupervised child get close enough to a firework to get blinded in the first place, why should they bother supervising afterwards?

Also, I don't think this game would capture children much at all. Aside from the slow gameplay and almost zero interaction with anything, there's no story being told for about 90% of the time. There's a reason everyone says it's so hard to write for children, and this seems tonally confused (look at all the wonder! now we're in a real-ass hospital bed!), barebones on content, and it's all delivered in the most generic, flat tone you could have possibly written it in.

Still really love what this game is doing visually.

The whole premise of this is just full of logic holes and it seems very shallow, but the visuals are just so appealing to me that I'll still play it.

If he goes out of his way to remember and credit the author in full make it a double. If he tries but can't remember the author's name and agonises over it make a triple.

I think it looks great but I'm kinda bummed because I had this same idea a few years ago.

@plasticpals:

Sounds like you wouldn't enjoy John Cage's "4'33"", or Merzbow for that matter.

Minimalist use of the medium doesn't discount it from existing within the medium. It may affect your opinion of the piece itself, but that in itself does not disqualify it from something. Things like the aforementioned Cage piece, which on the front of it may seem antithetical to its medium, can challenge perceptions of the medium and its context. The " non-comic" as you describe it could theoretically encourage audience participation in the medium to develop their own creativity and diegetic worlds, represent a contrast to or reflection on the nature of density of information (not just speech bubbles, all information) in comics...

I think the key part in all you've said is this:

"Ok, but is it a good film? Does it make good use of the medium's strengths? My point is, wouldn't it make more sense to show that same empty room as a painting or photograph?"

It may not be a good film, but good film is subjective, its still a film, a film which deviates from the expected narrative form, but a film none-the-less. What would make more sense is irrelevant, because the way it is presented is as a film, not a photo, that it could be presented in a different way doesn't change what it actually is.

When it comes to Beyond Eyes, it seems to me that it has gameplay, its just not the kind of gameplay you want in a game, or not enough gameplay for you. Which is fine and all, but even though it doesn't meet the requirements you want, it doesn't make it not a game.

Ironically, one of our cats is very quickly going blind, she can still just about get around but bumps into things, she very much has narrowed her locations down to her sofa in the conservatory, my dads chair in the living room, her food bowl and the water fountain in the garden.
She's had a hard and long life so we know it's coming to an end, but the way she has given up exploring and only using safe known locations she can find, i find really interesting. You can tell how comforting our voices are to her now that she can't trust her senses as much.
Her name is Bobby.

Just to flip that around: wouldn't labeling all interactive media as video games also be a disservice?

And if he spends 20+ minutes dancing around just outright calling a game bad because it's an "art" "game", you get to down the whole bottle.

Instead of arguing about what a "real game" is, I'm just gonna post this video which does a pretty good job of discussing the issue.

Her parents need the best excuses in the world for letting her roam free like that, without training or cane. I cannot throw the thought of that away, but whoever reviewed it for Pro Xbox did giving it 9/10, while IGN gave it 5.5/10.

I expected a more proper blind experience out of it so this isn't my jam, what I want is likely a VR helmet and a stick for feedback being curios of what it may be like. Or just give me a controlled experiment in person down a safe stretch of city block. Seriously curious of life without one of the senses.

She should walk twice as fast over territory that has already been explored. It wouldn't matter much, since you rarely backtrack, but it would be at least something.

I think I can pretty easily guess the ending from this QL: the cat is actually female and she is in hiding somewhere giving birth to a litter of kittens. Calling the cat a male was a misdirection, since the girl would be unable to tell its gender without vision.

Is this a case of the bland leading the blind?

*nods head approvingly*

A disservice to what? Gamer Pride, or some such nonsense?

@davelinajolie: You've said everything I wanted to say on the issue, so nicely put! Also, I just wanted to say that the "is it a game?" discussions has always sounded like people wanting to dismiss something they don't like out of hand instead of discussing its merits. It's like Jeff talked about when he was younger and Myst was the biggest thing around for a time. At the time he was scared that Myst would become to future of games, so he decided to label it as "not a game" because of that. Of course that fear proved to be unfounded. Discuss games on their merits, don't just try to exclude them from the conversation by not calling them games. There's room for everything from Call of Duty to "walking simulators," and the medium is stronger for it.

My opinion on Beyond Eyes is that it to me looks like a pretty boring but beautiful game, but it's obviously still a game.

Vinny, you should check out a Korean animation named "Out of Sight", it's on youtube i think.

Pretty interesting.

Huh, between this and Submerged, there are a few recent very pretty games lacking depth around.

I might give this game a go. I have a feeling I'm a little more receptive to this sort of thing than Alex appears to be.

In my opinion one of the things that video games can express most distinctively from other media is exploration, and this is an experience that hinges entirely on exploration, so in that sense it's very closely tied to an awful lot of what video games are. From my perspective, anyway.

Anyway, as several others have stated, arguing over classifying things as games or not is pretty irrelevant and pointless. It really doesn't matter whether or not something is a game, when being a game carries no inherent value. Whether this thing has value is an entirely different question.

I'm not sure I could ever work my way through all of Merzbox, but his track Birds and Warhorse, which is on a compilation of experimental music I got ages ago, is pretty great.

@virgilleadsyou said:

What a beautiful little film. It brought a tear to my eye. Thanks for sharing.

Ah, to be ten years again. That strange part of your life where you can't travel further than a mile from your home, but when you're at home you're shooting people in the face and swearing at them over xbox live.

"Doesn't matter why, she never made it across!"

Now that, entireties, is distasteful. No one in the video made any jokes about her being hit by the car, only pointed out that maybe her parents shouldn't have let her just roll around the city without any kind of training on managing her disability? If you're referring to the joke at the end, they were implying that the cat had been hit by the car.

As someone that has been slowly going blind their entire life, this is definitely an interesting way to represent the experience of low-vision. I have Retinitis Pigmentosa; it manifests as a lack of low-light/night vision, tunnel vision (10-15 degrees remaining from the centre) and an early onset of cataracts (also right in the centre! How fun, lol).

There's a lot of blindness types, with many people still seeing something, it's rare to find people completely blind; 'painting' the vision outwards from the character to a limited distance as well as including the other senses to fill-in details is a really cool idea.

If the game were about me, the best way to show it would be to narrow the vision 'brush' to a small beam. Then as you draw the landscape, random elements would start to disappear. It's incredibly stressful and taxing on my mind to navigate an environment and keep track of the key elements. I try to prioritize walls and solid objects first, they obviously hurt if you smack them at a normal speed. Second I usually look out for people since they get quite irate if you bump into them -- the only way to avoid their anger is if you have a cane or a seeing-eye dog, otherwise they are pissed.

It's a strange experience to know I'll get closer to completely blind as I get older. Even at 34 I feel fortunate to see what I can. Playing first-person games is almost impossible now, but thank goodness for the renewed interest in turn-based and active-pause games.

While I appreciate the approach the developers did with this I feel like they missed out on recreating the experience of traumatic blindness. From hearing stories from my grandma, who was attacked by an ex-boyfriend with battery acid splashed in her face, the initial experiences of blindness should be equated to something more horror-esque as opposed to something whimsical. They could have progressed the story and let things slowly get more beautiful as the girl adapts to her blindness, but they could have started doing things like exaggerating what she thinks is outside of what she is experiencing. Having fears like people watching you who aren't really there, traffic being a terrifying aspect and envisioning thousands of cars passing by when in reality it's only a few... I just think trying to convey that aspect should be something VERY important, considering the trauma the girl supposedly went through,

Just my two cents.

Pedestrian crosswalks that trigger automatically do exist. It makes traveling downtown in some cities a lot of fun...

As a legally blind gamer myself, I found both the Quick Look video and comments so far, quite interesting. Well done on the Quick Look. I especially liked the discussion on how to add to the game by also playing as the parent, and how each person perceives the world. Great discussion.

As for realism, the first couple things I wondered was:

Where are the parents?

Why doesn't she have a cane to navigate outside her back yard? Blind people can navigate familiar areas with little to no problem without a cane or guide dog, but someone really shouldn't do this while walking around town alone.

for the commenter who said living with blindness might be difficult and mundane, I disagree. Can some things be difficult? Absolutely, but you learn to live with it. I wouldn't call it mundane by any means though. Just like everyone else, life is what you make of it. Blind and visually impaired people do pretty much everything everyone else does. Technology has also HUGELY leveled the playing field, both computer technology, and portable technology, like smart phones and apps.

Between Beyond Eyes, and the upcoming Perception, it will be interesting to see more games having blind main characters. Also, for a true audio game experience, try these games on IOS:

Papa Sangre 1 and 2

The Nightjar

Audio Defense Zombie Arena

Codename Cygnus

Blindside

Blindscape

Beyond Eyes is an interesting idea, but the gameplay is too slow and repetitive. This will definitely be something I'd like to cover on my YouTube site from an actual visually impaired perspective.

I hate this line of thinking so much. Just because this game isn't particularly successful in what it does, does not mean that games should be limited to a handful of genres.

The crime rate in the USA is now at 1970s levels and declining precipitously, while the amount of reports of crime is seemingly rising. So the crime rate will be a an all time low very soon. The % of crime being reported is up (so LESS under reporting), yet the actual amount is going down. OUR CITIES AND SUBURBS HAVE NEVER BEEN SAFER.

Our cities will be even safer if we can change the loss of jobs and increase education and opportunities. Believe it or not the WORLD has never been safer either...violence is down worldwide despite what we think of wars/terrorism happening now. Cooperation, egalitarianism, liberalism, social programs ARE working and making peoples lives all over the globe better.

Time to event horizon reference 19 seconds. Fun drinking game with any Alex content is to see how long he can go without say 'where we're going we won't need eyes to see'.

At no point in my niece's 6 years on this earth would she have had the patients for more than 5-10 minutes of this.