Games Changing this year
Is it any surprise the after years of more complex controllers and complex games that more simple motion control "joysticks" such as Wii and Guitar Hero are the real smash hits of the holiday season?
The Wii, Guitar Hero and Rock Band have found huge success, in part, by delivering new experiences with new devices for connecting to and controlling games. It would be tough to feel like Keith Richards while mashing buttons on a typical controller, but with a plastic Guitar Hero ax slung around your shoulder, you're there.
Portals - WSJ.com
Videogames Expand
A Popular New Phase
Of Full-Body Playing
By NICK WINGFIELD
December 26, 2007; Page B1
If you gave or got videogames as gifts yesterday, you may have noticed something very different about how some of the hottest ones are played these days.
The top-selling game console at the moment -- and one of this holiday season's toughest finds on store shelves -- is Nintendo's Wii, which comes with a motion-sensing controller that gamers swing around to play tennis or to dice up opponents with virtual swords. Guitar Hero III, the music game sensation, comes with a guitar-shaped controller for jamming along to the Rolling Stones, Guns N' Roses and other groups. Another music hit, Rock Band, goes even further with guitar, microphone and drum-kit controllers.
What these products have in common is that they reject the conventional wisdom about how people want to play games. For years, the business focused on dazzling users with ever-more-sophisticated eye candy, paying little heed to the fact that they were shutting out large numbers of potential customers with games that were just too hard to play.
The conventional game controller -- that boomerang-shaped gadget you hold -- is a symptom of the complexity. With more than a dozen buttons and two joysticks, they look like you need a pilot's license to operate one.
The Wii, Guitar Hero and Rock Band have found huge success, in part, by delivering new experiences with new devices for connecting to and controlling games. It would be tough to feel like Keith Richards while mashing buttons on a typical controller, but with a plastic Guitar Hero ax slung around your shoulder, you're there.
Game companies have experimented with unconventional controllers for years, but a lot of them were clunkers that didn't sell well like the Power Glove, a device introduced in 1989 that let users control Nintendo games with simple hand motions. It's only recently that the commercial success of the Wii and other products has helped foster a golden age for game interface development. Nintendo just released a product in Japan called the Wii Balance Board, a pressure-sensitive device that users stand on to perform yoga, aerobics and other exercises as the Wii critiques their balance and encourages them to get fit.
Richard Marks, a senior researcher at Sony's games division, spends much of his time imagining new ways for consumers to interact with games. Dr. Marks created the technology behind the EyeToy, a camera that plugged into Sony's PlayStation 2. The EyeToy inserts the moving image of a player into a game, letting them do fun stuff like give a karate chop to enemies.
These days, Dr. Marks's team at Sony has created a demonstration for the PlayStation 3 that allows players to sketch drawings with standard pen and paper, scan them with a camera and then "play" their drawings on screen.
Such technology could help games tap into the same creative energy at play on YouTube and other sites with user-made content, Dr. Marks says. "Our game industry is really good at making authored experiences, but there's a new area that hasn't been explored, where people want to make their own content," he adds.
One of Dr. Marks's dreams is to be able to use a camera for live-motion capture in peoples' living rooms. For example, he'd like to see his son suited up as Spider-Man on screen, shooting webs from his hands by performing the same hand gesture as his hero.
It may be some years before game consoles are up to such computing challenges, but part of the technology required for such feats, so-called 3D cameras, is getting ready to hit the market at consumer-friendly prices. Next year, an Israeli camera maker, 3DV Inc., plans to introduce a 3D camera for less than $100. It's a more-sophisticated version of the motion detection done today by the Wii, which gives users a wand-shaped controller to hold as they play games.
In the boxing game that comes with the Wii, the console does a so-so job of measuring when players use their fists to punch opponents. A boxing game using 3DV's camera focused on the players from atop a TV set, allows users to hit an opponent with far greater accuracy, and to duck a punch.
Zvika Klier, CEO of 3DV, says the camera also will be useful for controlling avatars in online games. In most online games today, for example, you make a character dance by hitting a button on a keyboard or controller. With a 3D camera, players could simply dance in their living rooms to make their avatars dance.
Even movement itself may one day be optional. San Francisco start-up, Emotiv Systems, has come up with a method of measuring the electrical activity of the brain through a helmet-like device so users can control action in games by just thinking "up," "down" and other simple actions. Emotiv says this system won't replace the precision and responsiveness of traditional controllers, but it could be a great way to augment the experience of, say, fantasy games where mind control is part of the picture.
So, players of a Star Wars game may some day be able to "lift" an object by telekinesis, instead of hitting a button on a controller.
The Force may be with us.
Posted by staff at December 26, 2007 01:40 PM