American sign language

American Sign Language aka ASL is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of anglophone deaf communities in some areas of the world but is widely learned worldwide as a second language, serving as a lingua franca, and is integrated into Star Citizen.

Given the fact that Star Citizen is an MMO and places emphasis on emergent gameplay, it’s a particularly social space for players. To address that, many forms of representation exist in the game that help with immersion such as skin colour, gender, the range of professions as well as voice chat and a range of voice packs that let players command and interact with their ship by talking into a microphone. However those who are hard of hearing or deaf do not interact with the game the same way someone who hears noise does. They can meet people, socialise, and make friends, but can’t roleplay as themselves.

That’s why Cloud Imperium Games has worked to not only implement ASL into the game but to ensure it primarily feeds into social interaction, with the goal not necessarily being combat, but rather to create a larger feeling of community, with combat language as a bonus.

A deaf Kickstarter backer was a regular at CitizenCon bringing his brother every year to translate the presentation to him in American Sign Language, and eventually CIG worked with the backer’s brother to capture ASL phrases and emotes for the game, so that community members who are hearing impaired can actually interact and reploay in the world like they see fit and would want to be doing so.

Star Citizen is one of only a few videogames to support american sign language.

List of ASL emotes

Use to open the chat window, use or to initiate the command. You can add a number to the specific emote within the range provided, or execute it without the number to do a random emote. Ending commands with "1" is the nicer version of the sign, while ending it with "2" is the less nice one. The asl part of /asl emotes stands for american sign language.

• /asl_angry: I’m so angry!
• /asl_blah1: Blah, blah, blah
• /asl_blah2
• /asl_bored: I’m bored
• /asl_bullshit: Bullshit!
• /asl_canthear: I can’t hear you
• /asl_exhausted: I’m so exhausted
• /asl_goodbye: Goodbye!
• /asl_hello: Hello
• /asl_loveyou: I love you
• /asl_meetyou: Nice to meet you
• /asl_no1: No
• /asl_no2: NO!
• /asl_sad: I’m sad
• /asl_sitdown1: Have a seat
• /asl_sitdown2: Sit down right now!
• /asl_thanks1: Thank you!
• /asl_thanks2: Thanks
• /asl_upset: I’m so upset and lost!
• /asl_yes1: Yes
• /asl_yes2: Yes, please

Quote

“Ultimately, for me, we’re not making a game, we’re making a universe, which contains myriad different types of people with different backgrounds, experiences, and unique ways of experiencing and dealing with their world. We felt like this was an obvious step to make our community more inclusive, and this is one of the first steps we’re taking towards going in that direction.” -Steve Bender

External resources

• Lifeprint and the lifeprint youtube channel
• Sign Language 101
• Signschool
• Learn how to sign youtube channel

Source: StarCitizen.tools. Source content is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.