Comparing what Counts: Motion Madness

I’m sure by now you’ve seen those charts from Microsoft and Sony, comparing their new motion controls against one another, and against the Wii.  While what they contain isn’t as interesting as what they lack, the charts do epitomize the strategies each company is taking in their attempt to challenge Nintendo’s motion control ascendancy.  Microsoft frames the comparison in terms of investment (I can see Malstrom’s ears perk up at this!  He does love his finances so!)  If Microsoft were to compare the systems by what price current and future console owners would have to pay for an equivalent interface, where would Microsoft rank themselves?

While the inclusion of accessories for Wii and Move initially looks like cheating, they are talking about an “equivalent interface”.  For the Wii to sense if you are shifting your weight to one foot or the other, you need a balance board (I might have gone a step further and included the price of an additional Motion+).  Move may be able to infer such information from a combination of the 3D positional information and the raw camera data, but who knows.  The important thing here is the fact that Microsoft is aiming to match the Wii in the surface details of their software, the novelty aspect of the interface, and the price difference.  It’s an attack on several fronts, but does little to differentiate itself from the physically active yet brain-dead games of the competition.  Games for children and families used to deal with logic and reasoning, math and reading, history or historical fiction, creative writing, and the best of them excited the imagination with fun and unique stories.  I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating.  Endless minigames are not the only route to family-friendly game design.

Now for Sony’s chart.  Sony continues their technology-focused approach to competition with the Wii.  They don’t compare the systems by price, but by the features the new hardware supports.

Sony realized too late the sixaxis accelerometer was far too weak of a token gesture at incorporating motion control into their system.  They were outclassed by Nintendo’s interface hardware, which supported indirect IR pointing and two-handed accelerometer input.  With the arrival of Motion+, they felt compelled to develop a superior interface: one that supported not merely the acceleration of the wiimote, or the rotation orientation of the Motion+, but full 3D location input.  The chart does a rather poor job of comparing the methods of motion detection with Kinect.  It’s difficult to compare them because they are so fundamentally different.  They would have done better to stress the lack of fine motor skill inputs that the complete lack of any analog sticks causes (much as the “catching a big red ball” Kevin Butler quote does).

Why hasn’t Nintendo created a comparison chart of their own?  While some may think the reason is Nintendo’s belief that they have no rivals, it seems more likely that they realize their chart would not paint a favorable picture.  Remember, the Motion+ has been out for over a year now.  I imagine their chart would look something like this:

(Sources available here, here, and here.)

Look at those pitiful numbers.  By Christmas, there will be a miserable 16 games available in the American marketplace that use the Motion+.  The Motion+ will have been out for nearly two years at that point, and it still won’t have as many games using it as Sony’s or Microsoft’s add-ons will at launch! They won’t even have a single Nintendo-character-franchise game using it until the following year!  This is the story of the tortoise and the hare.  This is how you waste your advantage.

Yet all of this ignores the elephant in the room: motion control itself.  The problem with motion control so far is that it has been a step backwards in interface design.  Fine motor skill has been exchanged for gross motor skill; we have regressed to the whole-arm interface of the joystick, and gained no expansion in the problem space of games.  As the ports of “No More Heroes” and games with “classic controller support” have shown, there has yet to be a motion control game developed that would not play better when mapped back to standard controls.  Perhaps the Wii Sports series, with all of its smoke and mirrors masking and smoothing the raw accelerometer/gyroscope data, might lose some novelty if mapped to more precise controls.  But realize that the “bowling swing” of the Wiimote serves the same purpose as the traditional bowling game’s oscillating pointer.  It takes control away from the player; it does not grant them more.

People need to drop this “accessibility” misunderstanding of motion controls.  All motion control does is transplant challenge out of the software design, and into the hardware design.  To accommodate for this increased physical difficulty, design for motion control games has trended towards simpler interactions, hoping that such rudimentary games as pong will appear more compelling if the return of the ball is triggered by accelerometers detecting the peak velocity of a swing.  “Waggle” has not simplified an interface by removing the buttons, it has just made it harder to press them.

What was the first motion control gaming interface?  It is the one that has been so successful that it is still in use today, over 40 years since its invention.  I am, of course, talking about the mouse.  A direct 1:1 pointing device, designed to function with both fine and gross motor skills simultaneously.  High-speed movements are done with the arm, mid-range with the wrist, precision with the fingers.  Analog sticks only allow for the precise end of the spectrum; mapping high-speed movement to time-delay acceleration has always been its Achilles heel.  The motion control of Nintendo and Sony is limited to the coarser precision of the arm and wrist, while Microsoft only adds more limbs limited to the most imprecise control interface possible.  No one is heeding the results of their own research.

The Tony Hawk skateboarding series was a delight in its first iterations, but with the introduction of the Ride skateboard controller, the game became an unplayable mess.  Here, the interaction complexity of a game with precise controls was made intolerable by the introduction of a motion interface of imprecise (and therefore more difficult/challenging) controls.  This is the reason motion control games have not been able to advance.  Increasing the reaction-time complexity of motion control games to the standards of traditional action gaming has been blocked by this insolvable impasse.  But the real solution lies in a completely different direction.

The way forward is not to chase after the reaction-time problem space of traditional action games, but to combine the greater physical difficulty of motion controls with an increased mental difficulty.  Games about carful decisions, games about learning, games about resolving social situations; this is the territory motion control should expand into.  If only publishers had recognized the power of Cercropia’s unique use of motion control in their smaller test projects, or their larger failed project, The Act.  Cercropia’s mistake was one of timing.  Developing a game that required a wide-range analog input (that is to say, motion control) lead them to build their game as an arcade cabinet with a dial controller.  If they had only started the project even one year later, they would have most likely developed the game for the Wii.  Sadly, there were simply too many established expectations for the atmosphere of (western) arcades.  A game about balancing emotions in a social simulation simply can’t survive in that environment.  (Similarly, a game about yoga and health would never work in that context either.)  This new space of living room motion control should be utilized to explore these new possibilities.  Modern motion control is better suited to advancing the psychological possibility space of games, instead of the reactional.  Games can be more than pretty Jensen Boxes, especially if we learn to map these new multiaxial inputs to concepts as complex as our hardware.