by [name redacted]
Part eleven of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.
About a year ago NextGen published an article in which I groused about the early speculation about the Wii. The point, I said, wasn’t that we could now have real-time lightsaber duels; it was the extra layer of nuance that the Wiimote added on top of our familiar grammar – kind of the way analog control made 3D movement a hair less awkward. The point of motion control, I said, wasn’t to replace current control systems; it was to augment them, thereby to make them more flexible. A little more powerful, a little more intuitive.
Well, I was half right. In short: there’s nothing wrong with light sabers. Indeed, that’s just as viable a path as augmenting traditional controls. The problem comes when developers opt for neither the revolutionary nor the evolutionary path, and wind up in a weird limbo between the two – one that not only doesn’t take advantage of the system; it sort of misrepresents its potential, making motion control seem like more of a gimmick than it is.
Take Red Steel, for instance. It’s a first-person game involving shooting and sword fighting. The player has a motion-control interface. No-brainer, right? So what went so wrong as to put NoA president Reggie Fils-Aime on the defensive? Mainly, the substitution of gestures and “virtual buttons” for true motion control in a situation pretty much defined by the potential of direct player interaction.
As evidenced by Wii Boxing and Wii Baseball, the system is capable of roughly accurate spatial detection – so why is all of the sword fighting comprised of canned animations, that you trigger by making appropriate gestures with the controller? Why does the player gain “skill” by earning new gestures, that trigger more sophisticated moves? Why does shooting consist of moving a cursor around the screen and maybe turning your gun sideways? If the player has a controller in each hand, why can he only use the sword and gun separately, at predefined moments?
The obvious design, from a player’s standpoint, is simply to detect every motion he makes. When gunfighting, detect when the player is leaning or crouching. Get rid of the slowdown and screen-freezing gimmicks, and replace it with real, intuitive body language. The kind of thing the player might not even notice he’s doing. Put the player in the situation, instead of alienating him with a layer of pointless abstraction.
As for the sword, good grief. Just let the player swing it any old way. At the beginning he won’t have a clue how to use it properly; that shouldn’t stop him from twirling it around like an idiot, and experimenting. As the game progresses, mete out advice to the player. Teach technique and timing and style. Give the player (very loose) goals for practice.
Red Steel‘s concept of skill advancement – magically giving you new abilities as you progress – is meant to represent an increase of mastery on your part. This design trope – dating way back to Dungeons & Dragons – exists solely due to interface limitations. There’s only so much you can do with a D20, and there’s only so much you can map to a few buttons and an analog stick. With the Wii, interface issues are – if not eliminated – minimized to a degree that (as far as I can see) there is no longer an excuse for skill advancement remaining a design element instead of an interface one.
What Red Steel does now, you could easily reproduce on a Dual Shock. The reason the game is a failure is we’re still just pushing buttons. All it does is transpose the existing notes to a new instrument – whereas in its most obvious application, it might have served as a demonstration for everything the Wii serves to suggest about game design: uprooting twenty years of abstractions that have built up on the game end – in menus and upgrades and systems and experience – and dumping as many as reasonable in the player’s hands.
Imagine, if you will, a fighting or exercise trainer for the Wii, produced in the vein of Brain Age. In place of the Wiimote, a sensor strap is Velcroed to each of the player’s wrists and shins. Perhaps there’s a belt, to provide a center reference point and possibly force feedback to the abdomen. Over time, the game will mete out concepts to the player – not just suggestions on technique or instruction on new maneuvers; also general mind-body advice and subtle mental exercises, so as to place the player in the correct spirit to contextualize everything being taught. It could to some extent teach the art of fighting as well as the science — or at least a reasonable enough facsimile for verisimilitude.
Likewise, completely new skill sets with no real-world parallel could be devised for the player — so long as they were conceived and could be reproduced in a believable and nuanced way. Again, instead of the player’s avatar developing and learning new things as an abstraction of progress, and instead of learning complex and arbitrary commands (like moves in a fighting game), the player himself or herself physically learns how to produce difficult, subtle actions that have a tangible result in the gameworld to whatever degree of skill the player possesses.
Games that involve physical concepts can use the Wiimote physically, as above; games that involve more abstract or intellectual ones would use it more abstractly – closer to how we normally think about playing videogames, except with an added layer of capability. Press forward to walk; tilt the controller subtly forward to jog or run forward; tilt it subtly back to creep; tilt it left or right (while still holding forward) to sway or dodge in those directions. Ideally, the player shouldn’t be asked to physically, consciously tilt the controller so much as the game should respond to slight changes in the player’s posture — those little subvoluntary movements that we make when we want our characters to behave in a certain way – go faster, hold back, watch out! Excite Truck sort of tries to do this, though it doesn’t seem to be executed as well as it could be.
Likewise, a whole range of related motions could easily be mapped to a single button – much like the state-shifting afforded by shoulder buttons, except intrinsically analog. Press the button to execute a punch; when pressing the button, move or position the Wiimote this or the other way way to punch in different ways for a subtly different effect. Flick the tip up for an uppercut, say. Imagine the way a Silent Hill 2 or a Metal Gear Solid could take advantage of this subtlety and flexibility – the way it could read into the player’s body language and movement patterns and extrapolate a certain level of psychology from them, to make unseen behind-the-scenes decisions.
As I recently said in another article, what game consoles have to offer over other classes of hardware – PCs, handhelds – is physicality. A visceral quality, where performance becomes as much a part of the experience as objects bleeping across the screen. It’s our natural inclination to move in sympathy with our in-game actions; just look at the way kids play games. Though it looks ridiculous to us, there’s a reason why anyone playing videogames in a movie, or in a TV show or commercial, is writhing all over the place and screaming. They’re compensating for something that’s missing from the experience. Now all of that pent-up energy has an outlet. PCs and handhelds have the introverted, mental experience covered; anything that takes place on a big screen in a common room has by nature got to be more open.
And that’s great. It’s everything videogames should be doing, in terms of becoming more involving, in terms of offering more sophisticated considerations for design, and in terms of rehabilitating their popular image as an exclusive, arbitrary, and unhealthy time sink. The problem is, game developers have to actually take advantage of this new framework. If you give the player a sword or racquet to swing, he’s going to expect to swing it however he damned well pleases (within given context). Now you’ve got the power to give him that power – so anything less is going to reflect poorly on the experience. Nobody likes invisible walls; they’re not just lazy, they’re a missed opportunity. And the opportunity provided by this generation would be criminal to squander.