You Mean You Have to Use Your Body? That's Like a Baby's Toy!

So, there's been a lot of confusion lately about who the Kinect is "for." So much confusion, in fact, that even Microsoft can't get their story straight. However, the general consensus seems to be that the Kinect will be focused on making games for "casual" players, which is generally code for simpler, more accessible games suitable for families. More specifically, it means MINIGAMES MINIGAMES MINIGAMES and very little depth.



The thing I don't understand about it is that there seems to be a sense that the Kinect's full-body motion controls couldn't be put into a more "hardcore" context. It seems to me that a game in which your every motion can be used as a command would be an excellent way to make games much more deep than the one's we're playing today.

Let's think about it this way. In the average game, discounting something like an RTS, you are controlling a person. The buttons and joysticks on your controller almost all serve as commands for this person. As a result, you could think of the controller as a kind of abstracted way of controlling your game protagonist's body. Now consider the Kinect. The Kinect, at least in theory, has been touted as having the ability to locate your "skeleton" and determine exactly how you're moving. It stands to reason, then, that this "skeleton" could be used as the "skeleton" of a game character. Imagine a game in which your motions correspond 1:1 with the motions of your game hero. You punch, they punch. You duck, they duck. No canned animations, no fudging hitboxes, it's all you.

Think of the possibilities of making a fighting game out of this. I'm picturing a game structured very much like your standard 2D fighting game, only the character you play is using your skeleton, so your movements translate directly to theirs. The designers would have to be clever about it, particularly in determining how the game recognizes things like "blocking" or whether there would be ways to implement super moves like fireballs. See? That's something that would be an actual game, and the depth is...kinda infinite in a way, because your options are limited only by your ability to move.

The potential for the Kinect to create things gamers would actually recognize as video games and not just diversions seems obvious to me, just with the skeleton mapping alone. So why do developers continue to limit themselves in exploring the hardware's capabilities. I think it could be one of three things.

The first possibility is that developers don't trust themselves. Taking full advantage of dropping a player's skeleton into a game would no doubt be hard. It's a completely different animal than canned animations and would require inventing not only new engines, but new languages in which to give feedback to the player. It would require, y'know, creativity. And of course, with creativity, comes the risk of screwing up and failing, and we all know how well that goes over at shareholder meetings.

The second possibility is that the developers don't trust the Kinect. It's been a point of concern just how "ready for primetime" the Kinect technology actually is. It's possible this "skeleton-mapping" I've been going on about doesn't work as well as Microsoft's marketing team would like you to believe. It's possible there are too many issues and hiccups with the technology to make anything deeper than light fluff. If that's the case it's particularly sad, because at least to my eyes the skeleton mapping abilities of the Kinect were all that was elevating it above being a glorified EyeToy.

The third possibility is that the developers don't trust gamers. Specifically, they worry that if they make a game that actually requires standing up and moving, they run the risk of alienating the 300-pound shut-ins whom they view as the ones buying "hardcore games." If this is what's going on, I think it's missing a key point. Hardcore gamers aren't the only people who can appreciate deep, "hardcore" game mechanics. A game can be deep while also being accessible, something that's always seemed to be at the core of Nintendo's design philosophy. Motion controls offer a fantastic opportunity to create a game that's deep but accessible, because the hurdles of memorizing buttons and getting used to joystick controls are put aside. Controls don't get much easier to grasp or deeper to master than "punch to punch."

Since apparently Microsoft hopes the Kinect will last for a good five years, at the very least developers are looking at a good long time to unlock the hardware's true potential. I just hope they take the time to investigate it, because I really want to play that skeleton-mapped fighting game I was talking about. I am not kidding, here. That's a day-one purchase.