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Thought I'd make a thread about this after reading a really good article about it on Kotaku. At E3, Spielberg said Natal was not about reinventing the wheel, but having no wheel at all. Like that article says, the wheel is still required for cars to operationally function, and it's not broken, so why fix it?
Games need a controller, to an extent. Motion controls will be good, but only for certain types of games, mainly sports games or music games, along the lines of Rock Band or Guitar Hero, but if you get a more complex game with a complex control system, it will be difficult to get it right and it limits the potential for games in a way. Let me copy the article.
Lantz and a community of professors, veteran designers and authors like Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen have defined this principle as the "immersive fallacy" – it may seem like the logical next step toward immersion to make the controller first more like a real object, and then to make it disappear, but that progression actually restricts games, not expands them.
Maxis' Chris Hecker agrees with the immersive fallacy principle –a game controller as "abstract interface" can act as a proxy for almost any kind of action. "Our brains do an amazing job of mapping the abstract degrees of freedom of the controller to the verbs in the game," Hecker says. "By contrast, if you make a plastic guitar controller, it will only ever be used for guitar games." (Note: Although it is true that non-music applications for guitar peripherals are rare, an exception is 2008 IGF finalist Fret Nice, which was recently picked up for XBLA and PSN by Tecmo and is a 2D platformer playable with a guitar controller.)
With no controller at all, the game designer has two choices: simulate the exact actions, or represent complex verbs through short-cut, symbolic motions that will by nature become complex enough a language that it would have been simpler to use a controller to begin with, says Hecker.
"Would ICO be better if you had to stand up and yell and hold out your arm all the time?" he asks. "Going the other direction… is raise-your-left-hand-and-shake-it any more meaningful or accessible than push-the-triangle-button?"
Maxis' Chris Hecker agrees with the immersive fallacy principle –a game controller as "abstract interface" can act as a proxy for almost any kind of action. "Our brains do an amazing job of mapping the abstract degrees of freedom of the controller to the verbs in the game," Hecker says. "By contrast, if you make a plastic guitar controller, it will only ever be used for guitar games." (Note: Although it is true that non-music applications for guitar peripherals are rare, an exception is 2008 IGF finalist Fret Nice, which was recently picked up for XBLA and PSN by Tecmo and is a 2D platformer playable with a guitar controller.)
With no controller at all, the game designer has two choices: simulate the exact actions, or represent complex verbs through short-cut, symbolic motions that will by nature become complex enough a language that it would have been simpler to use a controller to begin with, says Hecker.
"Would ICO be better if you had to stand up and yell and hold out your arm all the time?" he asks. "Going the other direction… is raise-your-left-hand-and-shake-it any more meaningful or accessible than push-the-triangle-button?"
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