Develop 2010: Famed UK studio says Kinect will reduce technophobia
Khe Kinect development director at Rare believes the industry’s principal control mechanism – the joypad – has grown too complex and complicated for the wider market.
Speaking at the fifth annual Develop Conference in Brighton, Nick Burton said Joypads "have become convoluted, they have raised the bar to entry too high."
As an example of his claim, Burton recounted a time when he was playing a videogame with his daughter.
"So my daughter was asking what all the buttons did, and I told her just two were used. She just couldn’t get her head around the fact that the other buttons were redundant."
Touching on the issue of technophobia, Burton said that people unfamiliar with gaming are frightened by pressing the wrong button – fearing that it will have disastrous consequences.
Advertisement
Speaking in the same spirit as many Nintendo executives, Burton said the solution to this is motion control. Not just because of its intuitiveness, but because there is no wrong way of running on the spot and no incorrect way of swinging a bat.
"It removes the layer of scariness that a controller has," he said. "There are so many opportunities that can arise from that".
Rare is currently in the final stages of developing Kinect Sports for Microsoft, designed in the same style as Wii Sports.
Rare has sold some 100 million games since the studio formed 25 years ago.
The games business is doing just fine with them, thank you.
If I want to sweat I'll go to the gym, if I want to wiggle around as skating or playing football I'll actually get involved on those activities.
If I want to play videogames I want a compact and precise way of interacting that also allows me to thoroughly enjoy my couch!
It's not one or the other though is it? The minute a new technology comes along people act like the present is just going to erode away tomorrow. Surely it's not black and white like that? We will probably continue to have both in one form or another.
if there's no right or wrong way to swing the bat, how can you be better or worse then the next person.
It sounds like his daughter was expecting the other buttons should do something not that there were too many button to understand.
I'm not sure anyone believes Kinnect can do hardcore, or twitch gaming with out buttons. A happy medium of both motion and controller would be best, but then you split the audience and if you built the game to have the motion turned on/off - then it wouldn't be intricate enough to the game. Plus it dilutes their message saying motion beats controllers. Must be tough for devs, I'm sure they can see the negs and positives of motion but also of controller over motion, so they can't come out strong for controller when also developing motion games.
Frankly, we haven't really had motion games yet, Wii doesn't count, if it wasn't 1:1 motion (and with a gameplay reason) then any motion is just the equivalent of a button press. So what was the point of that.
I'm excited for Kinnect, thinking of a kind of horror survival game where you only shoot occasionally and you have to duck and dodge out the way. Probably won't happen. I'm expecting to be disappointed. The other thing is how do you control movement of the character on screen just walking forward and back with out a controller? They've not really shown it as far as I've seen.
Although these new technologies are bringing new audiencies to games, the amount of control and comfort the latest PS3 and Xbox controllers bring to games like Modern Warfare is something that can't be replaced. In conclusion, both are great.
