When UpIsNotJump visited SpecialEffect
Saturday, February 24th, 2024
For GameBlast24, we were visited by a wonderful new friend of the charity, UpIsNotJump (Matt), his wife Emma and videographer Milo, to film a video all about SpecialEffect’s work into making gaming more accessible for physically disabled gamers.
An entire day’s filming full of accessible games, cake, ridiculously strong coffee and stories resulted in the fantastic video above!
Featured in the video are Paige, SpecialEffect’s Gaming Community Manager, Harry, the charity’s Technical Specialist in Assistive Technology, and Sachin, a member of the Specialist Occupational Therapy team. We caught up with Sachin, a self-admitted superfan of UpIsNotJump to get his thoughts on the day:
Hi Sachin! Can you tell us a bit about UpIsNotJump’s visit?
Matt visited the SpecialEffect office in January and we were able to show him round and take him and his team through an overview of what we do here. We took a closer look at different examples of gaming set ups that used various types of joysticks and switches to show how each set up can be adapted specifically for the individual playing their game.
We also showed how eye gaze trackers can be used to control different games and how this was used for people with severe physical disabilities to be able to play games again using just their eye movements to trigger different buttons on the screen.
And how did you feel about being involved with his video and the day itself?
Matt’s channel has lots of videos related to the Fallout video game series so the stars aligned for me to meet Matt and talk all things accessibility in video games and how Fallout 4- a first person perspective game could be made eye gaze accessible. I grew up watching Matt’s videos as a teenager, so it was crazy for me to see him in person and see how his chaos filled videos are made. I played it totally cool though and made sure to not stare in awe for too long. I even had a good excuse to be hovering around Matt like a Bloatfly – I was showing him an eye gaze accessible interface that I had made for one of our service users who was able to explore the world of Fallout 4. It’s great to see people playing the Fallout games again and the hype around the new Fallout TV showing coming later this year. When I was 15, UpIsNotJump was the reason why I started playing Fallout 4, so it was funny to see how things had come full circle. Matt has put in around 4000 hours into this game, but here I was showing him how to play it again, in a completely new way!
That’s awesome! So, what did you think of the final video?
It was great to see how Matt makes his videos and amazing to be able to contribute. I was also able to have a preview of the video before it was released, and it’s got all the flair and shenanigans you’ll see for any UpIsNotJump production while also being informative about the work that we do here at SpecialEffect. They say never to meet your heroes but UpIsNotJump Is NOT An Absolute Nightmare. Matt, Emma and Milo were all amazing people and it was great to be able to meet them to share how we help people to access their video games.
Thank you, Sachin!
UpIsNotJump will be live on Sunday 25th February at 5PM GMT on YouTube for a #GameBlast24 stream of Fallout 4. Tune in here: https://www.youtube.com/@UpIsNotJump/streams