Everybody and their mother wants motion control. With the raging success of the Wii, it's understandable. But is the slow move away from traditional gaming inputs for the best?
The tech demos so far have been relatively underwhelming:
The PlayStation Motion Controller was clearly pushed out of the gates a bit early, it's demo essentially being a sado-masochist's playground of different toys, paddles and whips to fiddle about with. The fact that the touted First Person Shooter mode was actually a phallus that spurts liquid from the centre of the screen says it all really.
The big push for Microsoft's full body motion control detector Natal came in the form of Lionhead's 'game,' Milo. Peter Molyneux described the project in an interview with eurogamer.com:
'Milo can recognise the emotions on your face and the emotions in your voice. He can recognise certain words you say... He can recognise what you're wearing. If he notices you've got dark bags under your eyes he will say, 'You look tired today.'
This may well be. But in the demo I saw, all he did was go fishing with his hands, and then stole a drawing for his homework. So assuming this is representative of the total game experience, alongside what Molyneux has described, Milo will insult me, laugh at me, plagiarize me, and then ask me to go fishing. At which point I would like to drown Milo.
Pot shots at the tech demos aside, the biggest reason I'm unwilling to embrace full body motion control is this: How the hell will you, or your character, gracefully walk from one room to another? Or even walk around? This is a question which seems to have been more or less ignored in the presentations by both Microsoft and Sony. Sure, they haven't been forthcoming with many details as it is, but the basic act of movement seems to be a pretty crucial one.
But in considering the issue, finding an elegant solution proves to be more difficult than you'd think.
Natal's Milo appears to be, for all intents and purposes, on rails. And while that will work fine for some titles, it won't be a fix all solution. Ditto for the Sony Motion Controller's FPS-mode.
I've had people suggest to me that adopting a pose like you're about to run, or are in mid movement, could work. Natal or the PlayStation Eye could recognize the position and have your character begin to move.
But everyone who exemplified this tableu vivant of movement just wound up looking like they were doing an impression of an Emergency Exit sign. I refuse to play games looking like I forgot what I was doing midway through my best impersonation of The Flash.
The solution that seems most frighteningly obvious to me is having gamers jog in place to get from point A to point B. I don't think I could keep a straight face playing a game in this fashion. Imagine the scene: You're playing an epic RPG. Your hero is standing in the door way of a dimly lit cathedral. A bright white dove floats across the rafters, becoming engulfed by the darkness of a ceiling spiraling high above you. The villain stands across from you on a gleaming pedestal. Flames roar out of the ground as wings sprout from his back and he begins to soar to the heavens, raining death and destruction all around. The hero steadies himself, and runs forward.
...Only he doesn't. He jogs forward. Maybe even half asses it a little: bobbing up and down in place while hoping no one is looking.
The whole mess can be summarized in three simple words: Saviours. Don't. Jog.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but neither do gamers. I'm not in any way trying to push the tired image of video game enthusiasts being overweight and lazy. What I'm concerned with is developers taking what's a largely cerebral experience and making it so that our main interaction with it is a physical one, which seems to me to be a really great way to lose a lot of business.
It all really comes down to that old question of whether gamers will be willing to exchange the highly passive role they've been taking in their favourite past time for a more active one. I don't want to sound supremely cynical in saying, 'I doubt it,' but until some of these core questions regarding interface are answered, I for one will have trouble getting totally behind it. After all, we have to learn to walk before we can run.
-Dashiell 'The Jogging Saviour' Asher
