Game Over is a game designed to illustrate all kinds of accessibility guidelines by deliberately breaking them, thus making the game unwinnable. The game is “a reversal of the stereotypical Space Invaders scenario”--the player is the alien flying the spaceship. With a total of 21 levels, each illustrates the breaking of an accessibility guideline in spectacular fashion. For example, Level 2 breaks the guideline of avoiding simultaneous button pressing for motor-impaired users, by requiring three simultaneous key presses to control the spaceship.

For the formal evaluation study, 49 people answered a short questionnaire on the Web. Figure 6 shows that the majority of respondents felt that the game was fun to play. Figure 7 shows that over 80 percent of the respondents thought that the game would be useful as an educational tool. Figure 8 shows that over 70 percent of the respondents definitely recommend that other game designers and developers play the game. “With the exception of maybe just a couple of personal blogs,” informal feedback about the game was very positive.

In the paper’s conclusion, one individual is reported as having found tricky ways to obtain a positive score on several of the levels of Game Over. Frustratingly, this matter was not investigated; Grammenos ignored an opportunity to reveal an important insight into the very nature of gameplay.

I recommend this paper to both the academic and commercial gaming sectors. Furthermore, I strongly recommend Game Over to every computer scientist.