Having initially trained as a composer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Alexander received a BAFTA New Talent nomination for the short film ‘Room 9’ in 2011 and graduated from the BMus (Hons) Composition programme in 2013. At the Glasgow School of Art, he graduated from the MDes Sound for the Moving Image programme in 2015 and the MSc Serious Games and Virtual Reality programme in 2016, and successfully defended his PhD in Game Development in 2022.
Alexander’s latest book chapter, Accessibility by Numbers: A Critical Review of Game Accessibility Guidelines, explores accessible game design and is published in Disability and Video Games under Palgrave Macmillan. His PhD work is set to be published as a standalone book in 2024.
EDUCATION
PhD Game Development: Glasgow School of Art
Thesis: SoundTown: Building Accessible Music-Making Experiences using Videogame Technologies
Doctoral research in game development, specifically in accessible UX design for music games. Projects included developing music-game experiences for young children with complex physical and cognitive disabilities using Unity, Wwise, and the new Xbox Adaptive Controller, and carrying out critical reviews on existing game accessibility guideline documents.
MSc Serious Games and Virtual Reality: Glasgow School of Art
Thesis: Developing Serious Games for Accessible Music Making
Game programming and design course with a focus on VR and games for education, simulation, and training. Included 3D engine development (C# Monogame), Unity development, FMOD, Wwise, interactive visualisation, simulation, haptics, MOCAP, HMDs, LeapMotion, PhantomOmni, 3D mice, and Kinect.
MDes Sound for the Moving Image: Glasgow School of Art
Thesis: Non-Diegetic Music in First Person Virtual Environments
Technical audio programme taught to BBC broadcast engineering standards. Included sound design for linear and non-linear media, dubbing mixing in stereo and 5.1 surround, FMOD, Wwise, recording, decoding, and mixing in 16-channel ambisonics, foley recording, dialogue editing, ADR, and VO recording.
BMus (Hons) Composition: Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
Major Work: Toi Toi Toi (60-minute opera)
Classical training in concert hall composition under the tutelage of Head of Composition, Dr Gordon McPherson. Included writing over twenty works for a variety of instrumental forces. Training included composition and orchestration, electroacoustic composition in Pro Tools, and patch development in MaxMSP.
PUBLICATIONS
Accessibility by Numbers: A Critical Review of Game Accessibility Guidelines
(2023) Book Chapter. In Spöhrer, M. and Ochsner, B. (eds.) Disability and Video Games. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Abstract
As official regulations and unofficial recommendations on designing accessible video games have continued to grow, several organisations have developed guidelines to make the endeavour easier for developers. This chapter discusses a variety of these guidelines, tests how well these documents delineate areas for improvement in commercial video games and attempts to apply accessibility checklists based on these documents against titles with which are considered applicable. Horowitz’s findings demonstrate each of the documents’ strengths and weaknesses, concluding that while more recent publications are thorough, they also feature highly inapplicable areas that could disproportionately cost developers time and effort. However, in conducting this evaluation, he is also able to conclude by indicating some important areas of accessible game design that developers appear to almost universally neglect.