I read similar defenses for the Sixaxis controls in Lair.
Lair wasn't targeting padless gaming and novice gamers though. It was a clumsy retrofit with nothing to redeem it's input choices.
Kinect Sport is far more ambitious and offers far more in exchange for learning how to control the game. It's not a pad game, just as Wii Sports wasn't.
Ultimately you can't blame the consumer. If something isn't natural or fun, then it is up to the engineers and developers to solve the issues. People know what bowling and tennis looks and feels like and if Rare and a new sensor can't pull it off, it is not the fault of the player.
Most people are shit at tennis, and shit at bowling too. If Kinect Sports did 1:1 mapping people would need years of coaching to be able to approach the game. So you make adjustments and limit ranges and make the game absorb certain errors. Then some lazy and physically wretched reviewer / critic / hater complains because, like, it's totally not recognising their skills and not letting rewarding them for moving naturally.
Many reviewers don't actually understand that rule based systems need parameters to be met and input within ranges, and that pads do this a a pretty extreme way. Pads work well by being
incredibly limited with what they allow as input.
That's not entirely true. Most people have a hard time hitting a tennis ball at first, but acquire the skill by social encouragement and practice. Twin stick shooters took as much getting used to for me as any other gamer new to the experience. Any skill based activity requires practice to get good.
Yep!
Ideally a new experience needs to be fun/interesting to learn enough to keep people engaged long enough to get good. Some experiences are going to have a steeper learning curve that scare people off. I'm not convinced devs should only target the easy wins though, spoon feeding consumers with stuff that they are already used to. It all depends on the implementation.
Yes, and this is an important point.
If the bar is set so low that any gesture it recognised as Super Awesome Move it limits the scope of skill levels and particular inputs that the game can reward. And if the range of motions a game treats as inputs doesn't change and feeback to them remains the same then there's no point in having more than one game.
No doubt developers can mess up, of course, and there is learning curve for developers just as there is for gamers and - unfortunately - "Pro-Gamer-Reviewers", but there needs to be a consideration of the demands on the gamer by the gamer, too.
The ideal behind motion controls was interfaces that follow people's prior experiences and existing skillsets, making games accessible for those who haven't developed the motor skills specific to core gamers. To date, few applications have provided that AFAIK. eg. WiiTennis was a great success because of its natural interface, although people soon learnt that they could just flick the wrist to get a hit back. So although it broke down the barriers to entry, it did so by being remarkably simple with a gazillion player assists and effectively undermined the game element.
Indeed. By allowing natural and known movements as a starting point, you can get a leg up on pad input. It's also worth considering that movement can also affect the way people feel in a way static pad input cannot, and using that to enhance the experience has been part of the desire to develop motion control too.
And the example about Wii Tennis is a great one. They set the bar low by limiting what they took as input and limiting how the inputs they took were applied to the simulation. A more accurate representation of the players movement would result in people complaining because the game made it clear how bad at tennis and they actually are, and how little fun they were going to have.
Given restraints of technology, devs may find they have to have a 'do it our way, not your way' interface to provide a decent game.
Absolutely. There will have to be an element of this is all motion control games, and people have to prepared to consider this or we'll just end up staying with what we have.
To put it another way why would I invest time to learn a new way of controlling my player in a video game if the interface is going have a higher latency, prone to error and limit the range of control?
Because you might have types of fun that you otherwise wouldn't?
