Sony's Move and Microsoft's Kinect have been on my mind since they were announced, and not for any good reasons. I wrote a very lengthy essay on the subject, so for the sake of space, I'll put it in spoiler tags.
Think back to 2006, when the Wii was first released, and we were all getting our first taste of motion controlled gaming. While you were playing those games, were you thinking, "This is so great, I bet Sony and Microsoft will release their own motion controllable games within five years!" as you haplessly swung your Wiimote attempting to hit a digital golf ball only to see your armless, legless grinning-like-he's-catatonic avatar flailing between half it's backswing and lining up the shot as if it was taught golf by Charles Barkley?
Yeah, me neither.
Besides the technical inabilities, it was just set up to be Nintendo's thing while Sony and Microsoft did their HD thing. But then Nintendo had to screw things up by making billions of dollars, so here we are, four years later, and we have been formally introduced to those very things, both with their respective names carefully crafted by the marketing departments of their respective companies, both with their respective visual similarities in form and in play, both with their respective questionable functionality. Sony will have the 'Move', and Microsoft the 'Kinect'.
Hold on, wait, wait. Look, before you stop reading, I'm not going to go on about 'casual gaming destroying the video game industry!' because I just don't feel that way. "Casual gaming" isn't something that can go away, and really, if it somehow did, gaming overall would be negatively affected. I have nothing against 'casual gamers' either ('casual' being a branding that I have come to hate, if you couldn't tell). I'm becoming much more of an infrequent player myself. The last game I bought was Final Fantasy XIII, which was a serious mistake, but also many months ago. I understand not being able to play games frequently, especially ones as long and difficult as most that are made today (which is a different subject). The reason I continue to play games, even if only occasionally, is that I have had great experiences through them. Maybe the story of a game intrigued me, maybe my friends and I teamed up to reach a great accomplishment, maybe I was dropped into a foreign, alien, nigh inexplicable world and left to simply explore, and, sometimes, maybe I just blew some shit up. These are experiences I want other people, including and especially those that have been branded 'casual gamers', to have. This is where my issues with the Kinect and the Move come about. When I see a commercial like the one shown for the Kinect before this past E3 for products like the games provided for it and the Move, I see hollow, soulless, pointless experiences, ones nearly identical to the majority of those provided on the Wii.
Naturally, this brings about the question, 'What is it about these games that makes them so hollow?' Answering that would require dissecting these video games, and that can be quite a mountain. To find an applicable mold to make that mountain into molehills as any good proverb following person would do, I will refer to "The Art of Game Design: A Book Of Lenses" written by Jesse Schell, a book I highly recommend to anyone interested in game design. In it, he says that games have four essential elements: Aesthetics, the sights and sounds of the game; Mechanics, all the gameplay; Story, the plot and characters; Technology, the inner workings. Pretty self explanatory. Going from the bottom up, each element is more visible to the player, with Mechanics and Story on about equal visibility, giving this layout.
Now we can change the question to something much more managable, specifically, 'What can be said about these four elements for any typical Wii shovelware game?' Easily the biggest factor is that these games have absolutely no Story. There are no characters (only ever avatars) and not even a hint of a plot. That is an entire quarter of the elements immediately eliminated. The Aesthetics are always extremely simple, with smooth modeling, usually bright colors with uniform lighting, and happy cheery avatars and the typical things to make the game seem appropriate for a party, with nothing even the slightest bit offensive. The aesthetics do their job, but are not important enough to have any real effort put into them or have a unique overall style. But hey, games are all about gameplay, right? Well, for these games, the mechanics all center around the player performing certain motions, and generally these games have fallen into two categories: "sports" or "party" games. If it's a sports game, you'll be throwing or swinging the controller in a manner kinda sorta similar to, what, cricket? Nobody understands cricket. No matter what sport it is, these motions won't get any more complex then they are initially, they won't build on themselves. That is more than can be said for it's sister category. What exactly entails a "party" game? It can mean any damn thing at all. Before you know it, you'll be flailing around like an idiot in a myriad of possible ways, and while they might build on themselves, there will rarely be any rule or rhyme to these motions. In both cases, there's never anything close to a puzzle and there are hardly ever any surprises.
These are games whose success defy explanation. They are void of any story; they have mechanics that grow stale and repetitive; they have uniform aesthetics that do nothing more than fill their quota. The entirety of their massive commercial consummation can be attributed to the only remaining element. The idea of a game console with technology able to 'detect your movements' was the determining factor in making these flash-in-the-pan games the commercial winners of this video game console generation, but only when combined with family-oriented marketing. It really is quite ingenious: the typical stereotypes that have been pigeonholed as the target audience for these games ("soccer moms", "grandma", etc.) won't ever play these games long enough to make the technological aspects of these games visible. They'll only play long enough for the mechanics to become visible, and commonly not every aspect of even them.
For most people that have any sort of experience with or knowledge of video games, this combination is also exactly where the problem lies. This was a technology so new that these games had to be tech demos, and tech demos are thoroughly inadequate for introducing people brought in by that implemented marketing technique. They come in bright eyed and curious about a strange new medium of expression and capability, and are given these shallow tech demos. These first few games they were to play are some of the most important, and instead of having simple to play games that give a sense of growth, learning, and accomplishment with a clear, achievable goal, and with stories that give backbone and meaning, and aesthetics that assist immersion or at least are nice to look at, these games had you just swing tennis rackets and golf clubs. Now comes the Kinect and the Move, and they just have you flail around to Gwen God-Damn Stefani. There is no evolution in the Move or the Kinect. They don't do anything the Wii hasn't done already, despite four years having passed. Just because these are new physical interfaces (and yet simultaneously not new) doesn't mean these aren't motion controlled games that introductions aren't needed for, especially considering how similar they play.
Despite all this, I'm not blind. I know they saw Nintendo printing money and got all jealous. Even from a marketing standpoint, these devices make no sense. Everything they're trying to do to sell units won't hold up. Sony wants to attract 'hardcore g--' ...the traditional audience by offering games like Killzone 3 and SOCOM 4, yet, the majority of the traditional audience, believe it or not, aren't stupid gun-dorks who pop for any FPS thrown at them. While the Move may have Killzone 3 and SOCOM 4, every other game for the damn thing is virtually identical to games that are on the Wii, games that the traditional audience has already rejected. Microsoft wants to attract a whole new audience, one never previously interested in motion controlled gaming, by offering the Kinect's unique physical interface... one that has been shown to be very picky, having trouble detecting some motions and being nearly inoperable when a player is wearing dark clothing. That isn't something that will fly under the radar. They both appear to be targeting people interested in the Wii that never got one by offering sports and fitness games. For one, is there anyone that still fits that description? Regardless, the majority of the people that wanted a Wii but never got one were probably deterred by the price, and both of these new options are add-ons to expensive HD-focused consoles not meant to do motion gaming. If $270 was too much to spend before (the approximate price for a Wii and one extra Wiimote with a MotionPlus and one extra Nunchuk), there's no way this ethereal group of people will pay the $400 needed for a PS3 and the Move bundle. Microsoft says they make it easier because you'd only need one Kinect, but that still brings the minimum price to around $300, which is, in fact, greater than $270.
It's as if Sony and Microsoft are taking the Wii's codename as clairvoyance, as if the Wii was some kind of gift from the heavens, the Wiimote a modern Excalibur of commercial sales. The primary reason Nintendo is kicking monetary ass is primarily from multiple pieces of hardware. The Wii did actually suffer from low stock in 2006, and alone didn't sell too much. When the Balance Board was released in 2007, only one year later, requiring purchase of the Wii, Nintendo really hit the big bucks. Eventually, it did wane from the public's eyes, and in 2009 the MotionPlus was released, finally providing what we thought the Wii was going to be from the beginning while rejuvenating sales. This created something of a hills-and-valleys map of Nintendo's hardware sales, with extraordinarily high hills and not too low of valleys. Well, to put all the hardware on the graph, there would be hills and valleys, and one straight line above the highest hill, representing the juggernaut that is the DS, a console without any actual competition that has continually sold millions around the globe. I hope Microsoft and Sony don't expect their single pieces of cash-in rip-off hardware to bring them the same success, because it just won't.
Sony and Microsoft, here's a thought from the small part of my brain that can think in marketing terms: what if the games you published for your new tech were designed to make these previous infrequent or even one-time customers into repeat customers? We all know the Wii sold five hundred billion units -- the great majority of which were thrown in the old broom closet after three months never to be touched again. Wouldn't it actually be more profitable for developers, for retailers, and maybe, just maybe for you publishers too, to make these games of just the slightest higher quality in order to try to get people to say, "Ya know, we should try another a these vidja game thingers, cause this one was so much fun!"?
That's what's missing in these games. The fun. Fun is so far down on the list of priorities for these games that 'options for stupid worthless plastic clip-on accessories' and 'possible increase in popularity of Gwen Sta-fuckin-fani' are measured, analyzed, and profitized twenty spots before the most important question: "Is this game fun?" Ultimately, these are games aren't fun, they're technologically notable. They are complicated toys, and nothing more, and that doesn't lead to good games.
Sony and Microsoft are once again proving themselves to only ever be reactors in this industry, following the beat of a drum held by a plumber in a red shirt and blue overalls. Their devices, thus far, provide nothing new and their success is questionable. They had a chance elaborate on what Nintendo set up, but chose only to imitate. Motion gaming could be a realm of whole new possibilities for video games, but this potentially premature proliferation may stagnant development of these kinds of games. Whether that's good or bad, I will leave to you. Thank you for reading.
Yeah, me neither.
Besides the technical inabilities, it was just set up to be Nintendo's thing while Sony and Microsoft did their HD thing. But then Nintendo had to screw things up by making billions of dollars, so here we are, four years later, and we have been formally introduced to those very things, both with their respective names carefully crafted by the marketing departments of their respective companies, both with their respective visual similarities in form and in play, both with their respective questionable functionality. Sony will have the 'Move', and Microsoft the 'Kinect'.
Hold on, wait, wait. Look, before you stop reading, I'm not going to go on about 'casual gaming destroying the video game industry!' because I just don't feel that way. "Casual gaming" isn't something that can go away, and really, if it somehow did, gaming overall would be negatively affected. I have nothing against 'casual gamers' either ('casual' being a branding that I have come to hate, if you couldn't tell). I'm becoming much more of an infrequent player myself. The last game I bought was Final Fantasy XIII, which was a serious mistake, but also many months ago. I understand not being able to play games frequently, especially ones as long and difficult as most that are made today (which is a different subject). The reason I continue to play games, even if only occasionally, is that I have had great experiences through them. Maybe the story of a game intrigued me, maybe my friends and I teamed up to reach a great accomplishment, maybe I was dropped into a foreign, alien, nigh inexplicable world and left to simply explore, and, sometimes, maybe I just blew some shit up. These are experiences I want other people, including and especially those that have been branded 'casual gamers', to have. This is where my issues with the Kinect and the Move come about. When I see a commercial like the one shown for the Kinect before this past E3 for products like the games provided for it and the Move, I see hollow, soulless, pointless experiences, ones nearly identical to the majority of those provided on the Wii.
Naturally, this brings about the question, 'What is it about these games that makes them so hollow?' Answering that would require dissecting these video games, and that can be quite a mountain. To find an applicable mold to make that mountain into molehills as any good proverb following person would do, I will refer to "The Art of Game Design: A Book Of Lenses" written by Jesse Schell, a book I highly recommend to anyone interested in game design. In it, he says that games have four essential elements: Aesthetics, the sights and sounds of the game; Mechanics, all the gameplay; Story, the plot and characters; Technology, the inner workings. Pretty self explanatory. Going from the bottom up, each element is more visible to the player, with Mechanics and Story on about equal visibility, giving this layout.
Now we can change the question to something much more managable, specifically, 'What can be said about these four elements for any typical Wii shovelware game?' Easily the biggest factor is that these games have absolutely no Story. There are no characters (only ever avatars) and not even a hint of a plot. That is an entire quarter of the elements immediately eliminated. The Aesthetics are always extremely simple, with smooth modeling, usually bright colors with uniform lighting, and happy cheery avatars and the typical things to make the game seem appropriate for a party, with nothing even the slightest bit offensive. The aesthetics do their job, but are not important enough to have any real effort put into them or have a unique overall style. But hey, games are all about gameplay, right? Well, for these games, the mechanics all center around the player performing certain motions, and generally these games have fallen into two categories: "sports" or "party" games. If it's a sports game, you'll be throwing or swinging the controller in a manner kinda sorta similar to, what, cricket? Nobody understands cricket. No matter what sport it is, these motions won't get any more complex then they are initially, they won't build on themselves. That is more than can be said for it's sister category. What exactly entails a "party" game? It can mean any damn thing at all. Before you know it, you'll be flailing around like an idiot in a myriad of possible ways, and while they might build on themselves, there will rarely be any rule or rhyme to these motions. In both cases, there's never anything close to a puzzle and there are hardly ever any surprises.
These are games whose success defy explanation. They are void of any story; they have mechanics that grow stale and repetitive; they have uniform aesthetics that do nothing more than fill their quota. The entirety of their massive commercial consummation can be attributed to the only remaining element. The idea of a game console with technology able to 'detect your movements' was the determining factor in making these flash-in-the-pan games the commercial winners of this video game console generation, but only when combined with family-oriented marketing. It really is quite ingenious: the typical stereotypes that have been pigeonholed as the target audience for these games ("soccer moms", "grandma", etc.) won't ever play these games long enough to make the technological aspects of these games visible. They'll only play long enough for the mechanics to become visible, and commonly not every aspect of even them.
For most people that have any sort of experience with or knowledge of video games, this combination is also exactly where the problem lies. This was a technology so new that these games had to be tech demos, and tech demos are thoroughly inadequate for introducing people brought in by that implemented marketing technique. They come in bright eyed and curious about a strange new medium of expression and capability, and are given these shallow tech demos. These first few games they were to play are some of the most important, and instead of having simple to play games that give a sense of growth, learning, and accomplishment with a clear, achievable goal, and with stories that give backbone and meaning, and aesthetics that assist immersion or at least are nice to look at, these games had you just swing tennis rackets and golf clubs. Now comes the Kinect and the Move, and they just have you flail around to Gwen God-Damn Stefani. There is no evolution in the Move or the Kinect. They don't do anything the Wii hasn't done already, despite four years having passed. Just because these are new physical interfaces (and yet simultaneously not new) doesn't mean these aren't motion controlled games that introductions aren't needed for, especially considering how similar they play.
Despite all this, I'm not blind. I know they saw Nintendo printing money and got all jealous. Even from a marketing standpoint, these devices make no sense. Everything they're trying to do to sell units won't hold up. Sony wants to attract 'hardcore g--' ...the traditional audience by offering games like Killzone 3 and SOCOM 4, yet, the majority of the traditional audience, believe it or not, aren't stupid gun-dorks who pop for any FPS thrown at them. While the Move may have Killzone 3 and SOCOM 4, every other game for the damn thing is virtually identical to games that are on the Wii, games that the traditional audience has already rejected. Microsoft wants to attract a whole new audience, one never previously interested in motion controlled gaming, by offering the Kinect's unique physical interface... one that has been shown to be very picky, having trouble detecting some motions and being nearly inoperable when a player is wearing dark clothing. That isn't something that will fly under the radar. They both appear to be targeting people interested in the Wii that never got one by offering sports and fitness games. For one, is there anyone that still fits that description? Regardless, the majority of the people that wanted a Wii but never got one were probably deterred by the price, and both of these new options are add-ons to expensive HD-focused consoles not meant to do motion gaming. If $270 was too much to spend before (the approximate price for a Wii and one extra Wiimote with a MotionPlus and one extra Nunchuk), there's no way this ethereal group of people will pay the $400 needed for a PS3 and the Move bundle. Microsoft says they make it easier because you'd only need one Kinect, but that still brings the minimum price to around $300, which is, in fact, greater than $270.
It's as if Sony and Microsoft are taking the Wii's codename as clairvoyance, as if the Wii was some kind of gift from the heavens, the Wiimote a modern Excalibur of commercial sales. The primary reason Nintendo is kicking monetary ass is primarily from multiple pieces of hardware. The Wii did actually suffer from low stock in 2006, and alone didn't sell too much. When the Balance Board was released in 2007, only one year later, requiring purchase of the Wii, Nintendo really hit the big bucks. Eventually, it did wane from the public's eyes, and in 2009 the MotionPlus was released, finally providing what we thought the Wii was going to be from the beginning while rejuvenating sales. This created something of a hills-and-valleys map of Nintendo's hardware sales, with extraordinarily high hills and not too low of valleys. Well, to put all the hardware on the graph, there would be hills and valleys, and one straight line above the highest hill, representing the juggernaut that is the DS, a console without any actual competition that has continually sold millions around the globe. I hope Microsoft and Sony don't expect their single pieces of cash-in rip-off hardware to bring them the same success, because it just won't.
Sony and Microsoft, here's a thought from the small part of my brain that can think in marketing terms: what if the games you published for your new tech were designed to make these previous infrequent or even one-time customers into repeat customers? We all know the Wii sold five hundred billion units -- the great majority of which were thrown in the old broom closet after three months never to be touched again. Wouldn't it actually be more profitable for developers, for retailers, and maybe, just maybe for you publishers too, to make these games of just the slightest higher quality in order to try to get people to say, "Ya know, we should try another a these vidja game thingers, cause this one was so much fun!"?
That's what's missing in these games. The fun. Fun is so far down on the list of priorities for these games that 'options for stupid worthless plastic clip-on accessories' and 'possible increase in popularity of Gwen Sta-fuckin-fani' are measured, analyzed, and profitized twenty spots before the most important question: "Is this game fun?" Ultimately, these are games aren't fun, they're technologically notable. They are complicated toys, and nothing more, and that doesn't lead to good games.
Sony and Microsoft are once again proving themselves to only ever be reactors in this industry, following the beat of a drum held by a plumber in a red shirt and blue overalls. Their devices, thus far, provide nothing new and their success is questionable. They had a chance elaborate on what Nintendo set up, but chose only to imitate. Motion gaming could be a realm of whole new possibilities for video games, but this potentially premature proliferation may stagnant development of these kinds of games. Whether that's good or bad, I will leave to you. Thank you for reading.
-- to put Aesthetics above Mechanics. Whether Mechanics and Story are on equal levels, that could be argued. But it's just a general form. 