Motion Sickness

Motion controls will never work properly. There, I said it. They’re great for fun little minigames, or for really physical things like dancing or workouts, but it will never work for hardcore gamers. I like motion controls, I really do, things like hands free and voice controls were the product of science fiction not too long ago, but now we have technology like the Kinect where we can have our motions interpreted as actions. We, as a species, are getting closer and closer to helping me realize my dream of being Iron Man.

However, as Microsoft forces everyone to own and use the new Kinect, with the idea that if everyone is guaranteed to have it, developers will actually start using it, it’s becoming more and more obvious that motion controls are not going to work for any level of advanced or competitive gameplay. The technology is getting better and better, but we haven’t seen a game yet that can make use of motion controls in a way that is engaging, accurate, and fun. The developers of Ryse, one of the Xbox One exclusives, have said in interviews that they couldn't find a way to make the Kinect gameplay“fun”, so they implemented a controller control scheme as well. This really says a lot about motion controls in general, but why couldn't they make it fun? The new Kinect is accurate enough to detect emotions and levels of stress, but they can’t make fun gameplay out of it? It’s almost like the technology doesn't really matter, which leads us to startling realization as to why motion controls will never be used for advanced gameplay; it’s not that the sensors aren't accurate enough,

It’s that humans aren't accurate enough.

Let’s try an experiment. Hold your arm out straight, parallel to the ground, not resting it on anything, and see how long you can hold that pose. Within 30 seconds you’ll start to feel some discomfort, and your arm will waver slightly. As a matter of fact I doubt that anyone could hold any pose perfectly for more than about 10 seconds. In literally any game that requires any level of skill, however, you have sequences of inputs that need to be entered precisely each time, in order to produce the same result. Take Street Fighter for example, everyone knows how to do a hadouken on a controller, and those exact actions will produce a hadouken every time, but imagine if they made a Kinect Street Fighter, and you had to do the DBZ hand motion in order to fire one. Could you do the motion one hundred times and have the motion be nearly exact every time? How about a thousand times? A million? You can’t, no one can. Even on a controller it can be difficult to enter precise commands under pressure, and that just involves the use of your fingers.

I’m going to get a lot of flak for this, but the one game that I consider to be the best example of this phenomenon, and also the single best motion control game to date, is Zelda: Skyward Sword. Many people complained about the motion controls, but they work near perfectly if you know how to use them. It should be as simple as “pretend to swing a sword” but it isn’t. The system would misinterpret wind-ups as swings, and cause sword swings in the wrong direction, which depending on the enemy could cause you to be damaged or worse. That’s right, the game that I consider to be the best adaptation of motion controls to AAA games still requires you to learn how to manipulate the system in order to succeed. When it comes right down to it nothing short of actual, matrix style, full consciousness virtual reality will be able to make motion gaming feel real, and yet we keep seeing attempts being made. There’s nothing wrong with motion controls as they stand now, people seem to love dancing games, but there is no reason why it should be required for the console to function.