Motion controls and immersion.

[bluestarultor]

For those of you who aren't clinically bored at night, Yahtzee, aside from videos, also writes a column at The Escapist. One of his recent ones was on motion control and immersion:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/arti...ayStation-Move

In a nutshell, he sees it as a hinderance to immersion.


Personally, I disagree. Give me a top-of-the-line shooter and a controller and I will suck royally, struggle with aiming for a while, put it down, and go make my own games. Give me Duck Hunt and a light gun, and I will remain entertained. The difference is a form of very loose motion control. I have something in my hand I need to aim at a target and fire. In this sense, Duck Hunt, for me, is more immersive than anything from modern times.

Yahtzee's opinion boils down to simple math:
Immersion = 1 / (delay between thought and game reaction)
(delay for button press) < (delay for motion control)

I find this fundamentally flawed. Isn't the very performance of the action a means in which immersion can be established? Look at older, archaic forms of immersion. In the DOS era, games were packaged with everything ranging from maps to fake newspaper clippings. The developers had so little to immerse the player that they brought objects from the game world directly to them. Arcade shooters have light guns for the same reason. By making the player move, not only do you physically involve him, but in many cases, you actually DO decrease the latency, such as with aiming.

I think why the Wii ended up lacking in both his and my opinion isn't because motion isn't a form of immersion so much as the hardware just sucks and there are very few examples of games that applied it well. The Wii-mote is a remote, and unless you have Motion Plus, it's not a good example of actual motion control as much as a fancy light gun. Not that light guns are a bad thing, but when you promised motion controls, you just plain lied. Aside from that, it likes to spaz out, so it's not a very GOOD light gun. But when it's used as a light gun is where it generally shines, and Yahtzee admits as much in a spot or two.

On the other hand, Move and Kinect offer calculations in real 3D space. Rather than just motion, you have position, which means that your every move is, in fact, registered. You can point and click to fire a gun. You can also swing a sword and slice a foe, then parry his counter in the same motion. You can draw, but then you can also form a 3D shape. I think there's a lot of power in that. By allowing the player to directly manipulate the world, you allow him a greater window into it. The more realistic that manipulation is, the greater the immersion.




What does everyone else think? I've said my piece, but I'm interested to know how everyone else feels.

[ZAKtheGeek]

I get what he's saying. It makes some sense. I think he overstates the case for buttons, though, or at least glosses over their own weaknesses. I would say that buttonry sometimes makes things too easy. Some actions aren't just "think it and then it's done;" sometimes there's a process. Like, if you want to swing a big mallet, it doesn't just happen; you don't just "do it." It actually takes a bit of time and effort, which isn't really accurately represented by a button press, especially when the exact same sort of button press maps to a simpler action like, I dunno, pulling a trigger.

So you press the button and then your character starts swinging. During this swing, you probably have ample opportunity to tap that button again, but it probably won't do anything. Is that immersive? Why can't you swing more? That's the swing button, isn't it? But the button press doesn't convey the weight of the action. You train yourself to account for this. Well, that's a lofty way to put it, but the point is, actions that are as simple as possible aren't necessarily the best expression of in-game actions, unless you have so many that you can express minute actions which add up to large actions. Which you generally don't, and it would be really complicated to learn, anyway.

By contrast, I've felt that motion control adds a sense of weight to the actions it maps to. That makes sense sometimes.

Also, this attitude of, "this isn't like the perfect technology I envision so fuck it?" It's a bit ridiculous. I mean, what if we don't ever end up jacking into a machine just to play a damn game? What if the ultimate future is that it just interfaces with the nanobots that are already in your skin and just senses your crap directly? Kind of like a super-Kinect. That direction we are slowly crawling towards. The problem you'd have is, you don't actually want to do all that crap you do in a video game. Not only is a lot of it impossible, it's also usually just too strenuous. Not that a few intentionally strenuous games wouldn't have their place... We have stuff like that now. But in general, even a direct mapping isn't always ideal. That's why gestures are okay! They work sometimes. (By "work" I don't mean "register.") The give that sense of weight, they sorta make you feel like you're kinda doin' the thing (whatever the thing is), and they provide some middle ground for when you're not really gonna do the thing because that's why you're playing a video game and not just doing your own damn thing. Well, that's sometimes true, anyway.

In closing, I very recently played some Super Mario Galaxy 2. I was doing some ball rolling. Then, suddenly, it was time to jump. It took me a second. "Oh, it's A? That's kinda... cheap." Because the ball felt a bit unwieldy. And it's supposed to be - running on top of a ball ain't easy. It's a massive sphere and it's not really that easy to control. But jumping is just a button tap? Even though it's Mario, it took a second to register (in my brain). The motion made sense; the button didn't. That doesn't really prove the superiority of one; if there was no motion at all I bet the button would make a lot more sense. I'm just... highlighting a difference. Or, no, I'm not really doing anything; I'm just relating an experience which may or may not be illustrative.

[Azisien]

Originally Posted by ZAKtheGeek

I get what he's saying. It makes some sense. I think he overstates the case for buttons, though, or at least glosses over their own weaknesses. I would say that buttonry sometimes makes things too easy. Some actions aren't just "think it and then it's done;" sometimes there's a process. Like, if you want to swing a big mallet, it doesn't just happen; you don't just "do it." It actually takes a bit of time and effort, which isn't really accurately represented by a button press, especially when the exact same sort of button press maps to a simpler action like, I dunno, pulling a trigger.

So you press the button and then your character starts swinging. During this swing, you probably have ample opportunity to tap that button again, but it probably won't do anything. Is that immersive? Why can't you swing more? That's the swing button, isn't it? But the button press doesn't convey the weight of the action.

I could say the same thing about any motion control I've used to date. If we're talking any game with a sword I can swing the Wiimote three, four, five times during a character's swing animation. Unless you're willing to buy a peripheral that's an actual mallet to play Giant Mallet Protagonist 2010, which I might add is kind of defeating the point of video games in my eyes, I don't see any huge difference in immersion between motion control and not. In the end it comes down to the fineness of the control on either end, and that comes down to the individual games for the most part. Though I will, forever*, argue that in terms of accuracy I'll always want a keyboard and my mouse with frickin' lazers to really enjoy fine control in games. You simply can't beat the sensitivity of a mouse with analog controllers, and I guess you could with motion controllers like the Wiimote but you would probably have to be a surgeon.

Humans are adaptation machines, and while there's some innate ability for this or that, none of us are really pre-ordained to use one control scheme over another, we adapt to whatever control scheme we use a lot. I will bitch up and down about the innate inaccuracies of analog controllers that force all first-person shooters on consoles to have some kind of aiming auto-assist, lest the game become nigh unplayable. Yet, around the time I had no PC, I played my 360 a lot and I became pretty accurate with the controller. I don't think I reached the accuracy that I have with the mouse, but I can pin that to a) hardware sensitivity differences and b) a roughly 10-year head start for me using mice.

Mice have been good at their job for a while, hell we're probably all using them right now to peruse this thread with AMAZING ACCURACY unlike those clunky laptop touchpads (unless, of course, you've used those for years now and find them comfy). I really don't feel motion control has the hardware to back up what it wants to do at this point. Maybe Move or Kinect will rock the boat a bit and surprise me but I doubt it. And I guess I don't count light guns in this category because they've been around since, you know, the 80s and seem to work fine. And not surprisingly, my favourite Wii games are ALL rail shooters (or games where I can disable the motion).

*barring some unforseen nanobot-based technologies

[bluestarultor]

Just a note on this, Azi, but I could direct you to some great vids on Kinect and Move. Mostly Move, honestly, because that's what's out there (there are some really great game developer interviews, as well as stuff with the Sony tech guys), but I did manage to dig up a couple of first look Kinect reviews from some game reviewers. Basically, while I think Kinect has some issues that need to be acknowledged, it's still pretty good in its own right, and the things I found on Move were pretty impressive. Really impressive, actually. Sony did a LOT of work with developers to make sure the device gave them all the information they needed to accurately track the thing in 3D space and the game tester feedback they got led them to also create the Navigation Controller, so it's less Sony made a new device and more Sony teamed up with the games industry as a whole to develop a device that was both easy to make great games for and easy to use to play them.

[Azisien]

Direct me away. No tech demos please, they are so, so misleading. E3 was a joke.

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Azisien

Direct me away. No tech demos please, they are so, so misleading. E3 was a joke.

I'll track down some actual play videos in a bit, but in the meantime, there's a series of 8 developer diaries for the Move, some more impressive than others. Please take note that these all seem to have been recorded during development/before the naming, not after the fact, so there's a lot of "motion controller" being tossed around.

#1 - the Sony guys. Just them blowing their own horns, touting features.
#2 - Zidangi. "We can't say it outright, but this is WAY better than the Wii and we love the tech. Having position makes it superior."
#3 - The Fight. "The tech allows full 1:1 and I love it so much I'mma wank my game."
#4 - Brunswick. "We love it! Hi-def casual games go! Also, it's great for everything."
#5 - Move Party. "We totally forgot about the EyeToy and think augmented reality is new, but we like it. Move makes you get involved."
#6 - EyePet. "We started out doing things like with EyeToy, but loved the controller so much we added it in."
#7 - TV Superstars. "Wii is a light gun. We also somehow think reality TV is a good idea."
#8 - The Shoot. "Move just works. It gives us all the info we want and need. There's no room for games to be designed around motion controls. Move is easily integrated."


Edit: Hands-on videos for the Move (side note, damn it's hard to find them in English):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ffl_k2PFUg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS-SCbOS-P0 (3 minutes in)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9WYkHzWdwM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYbpqdPyu5k