The Problem with Kinect and Motion Controls
As I was waiting on the hour and a half line that preceded my Kinect experience, I jotted down all kinds of notes and phrases to use in a vicious and vindictive article saying how much it sucked. I desperately wanted it to be broken and buggy, to have something that I could mercilessly make fun of, and this was even before I knew how much it was going to cost. A dirty secret of game writing is that it’s much more fun and much easier to write about something bad than something good.
Even though Microsoft went out of their way to show Kinect working with children, black people, people with speech impediments, weirdos who wear sunglasses indoors, backup dancers, video game executives, Asians, and synthpop artists, I was still praying for it to be some sort of hollow lie. What I realized after leaving my demo booth is that like the Wii and Playstation Move, it’s nearly impossible to actively hate these motion control things. They do what they are meant to do adequately, though not spectacularly. I wanted crap, but instead I got mediocrity, which is even harder to write about than something good. That would explain the week I took to mull this stuff over.
On one hand I can’t help but admire that these big companies are still taking a crack at this virtual reality stuff that’s supposed to have been the future of gaming since Tron came out. We still can’t help but dream of a day when we can step into our games and interact with them on a deeper level than we can with our thumbs. On the other hand, half of these games aren’t even interested in anything close to a virtual reality experience; they just want to turn your body into another controller. Frankly, I think that’s lazy use of this technology.
When I say “use your body as a controller,” Im referring to how they try and turn one specific body movement into a specific output. You have to perform that movement in a way the system expects, there is no wiggle room. The reason we have controllers in the first place is to have clearly designated inputs for a player to use to trigger an output. There is no ambiguity in “press A”, you are told what you have to do to trigger an action in the game and you do it. The game has said exactly what it expects from you and there can be no confusion in that respect. It is therefore the system that is generally the best suited for games and for human/computer interaction in general.
What these motion controls ask for is vaguer. Now you have to account for a user’s expectations and style of movement. Not everyone waves their arms the same way, and if you’re trying to recreate something people do in real life (like, drive a car), you have to tell them to move their arms like they’re holding a steering wheel. Well, some people drive 10 and 2, some people do 11 and 1, some people hold at 7 and 5, some people have one arm out the window flicking a cigarette, and some lucky people have generous significant others who give them road head and they never really pay attention to where their hands are.
This may not be the best example but the truth is not everyone moves the same, and there is a much room for interpretation in the movements a given game will expect you to perform to get it to do what you want. This is an inherent problem that arises when designers aren’t creative enough or don’t try hard enough with these motion controls to make them intuitive. It’s not like these problems can’t be overcome when creative people gain experience with new hardware, but it generally takes a bit of time.
It’s not like these games are inherently shitty because of what Kinect inherently is (bad design is bad design no matter the hardware). It took a while for designers to figure out the DS and people are only now really getting a handle on the Wii. Who knows how long it will take for us to get well-designed games out of Kinect’s controller less interface. We may never get fully formed games on Kinect like we have with traditional controllers, but something like Dance Central shows that Kinect can at least work well for what it is unlike say Kinect Adventures.
The truth at this point is that a chunk of the video game industry has been ceded to the casual market; they spend money on this sort of thing and are generally easier to please. For all intents and purposes this is progress: the result of the hard-fought mainstream acceptance the hardcore community only really wanted so their parents would stop giving them sideways looks. It’s that same hardcore crowd that shouldn’t be putting much faith in these motion control doohickeys. Though they may be shoved in our faces at trade shows they are ultimately not for us unless we can alter our expectations.
As it stands, Kinect is a series of mini-games that sort of work. If you want nothing more than to have friends over, make an ass of yourself, and giggle about it later Kinect can certainly do that. I’m sure that’s worth $150 to someone, just not anyone I know. The goal as I see it for designers is to figure out the system to the point where they can manage a real competitive experience. That’s where the blurring between casual and hardcore occurs: in competitive and cooperative games. For now I’m making no plans to run out and get Kinect, but I’d rather hope for it to reach a point where it can lure me than just hate it unconditionally or write it off as useless.
And that’s why I stood in a one and a half hour line at E3.
**Silence Please by Zack “The Staff Contrarian” Rovinsky is updated every Wednesday (or at least he tries). To offer feedback, or just to yell at Zack, e-mail him at zack@damnlag.com. Bring your A-game.***
About the Author
Zack Rovinsky
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