The Great Divide

Why the Future of Gaming is Split in Half

Now that E3 has wrapped and the dust has settled, we can finally pull back and see just how much different the landscape of the video game industry is, even since one console generation ago. The advent of motion control has changed everything, and most importantly has split the industry almost cleanly in two.

The opposing sides of the new video game era are casual games vs. traditional games, casual games being everything from Wii Sports to Brain Age to Petz whereas traditional games are Halo, Metal Gear and Final Fantasy. Up until now the two sides would be populated by Nintendo on the casual side and Microsoft and Sony across the way with hardcore, traditional games, but since Nintendo has sold enough DS units and Wiis to build a bridge to the moon, the other two companies are now falling in line to develop new ease-of-use motion tech to reach out to non-gamers.

For each company, this has taken a different form. Sony debuted their nameless “Motion Controller Technology” where two controllers attached to glowing balls are tracked by a camera, mimicking the player’s hand movements on screen in near 1:1 fashion. With Project Natal, Microsoft decided to skip the controller altogether, and developed a system where a sensor tracks a player’s body, and translates their movements directly into the game with no pieces of plastic involved at all.

Both pieces of tech are a step in the right direction for the industry, as we’ve all dreamed of a future that involves fully immersive games, but until the technology progresses, there are going to be two stark sides to the gaming industry: motion and non-motion.

Nearly all of the current implications for motion sensing tech are currently relegated to minigame format. Whether it’s ten minute rounds of Wii bowling, or canvas painting on the Natal, or one-on-one skeleton arena duels with PS Motion, all aren’t really true video games, which is great for casual players, but frustrating for those of us who have been growing up clutching a controller our whole lives.

[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oACt9R9z37U]

Ultimately, the goal is clearly to get the tech to cross over to mainstream games effectively. The closest thing we’ve seen to that so far would be a demo of Burnout using Natal, which senses your hand in steering wheel position, your feet on the gas and brake and your shifting arm when you want to use a power boost. But while current motion systems lend themselves to basic versions of more complex games, what happens when you try to upgrade from Wii Sports to Madden or Punch Out to Street Fighter? There are some moves that motion controllers or sensors simply cannot emulate. Can you imagine trying to execute Guile’s T-kick in your living room in front of Natal? I hope you have good insurance.

In the future, are players going to have to be professional athletes to excel at sports games or blackbelts to master fighting games? While that would certainly bode well for our country’s collective BMI, I think we’re missing the point of why we play video games in the first place, because it’s a leisure activity.

But the fact remains, that for the time being, the tech isn’t there to make motion control the industry standard. How exactly does one play Gears of War or Metal Gear Solid using only their body? I can see how aiming a gun and throwing a grenade might work, but forward rolls, duck and cover, speed reloading, uh, jumping? How exactly do we act all that stuff out while not wrecking our entire living room?

We will see two parallel tracks running alongside each other for at least the next five years in the video game industry. On one side will be constantly improving, technically impressive games using motion control or capture, and on the other will be our traditional stable of classic titles where all you need is your couch and controller. Eventually, the motion side will eclipse the other, and controllers will become a kind of quaint option for the industry to placate old-timers (like myself), but the generation below us will grow up mastering T-kicks in their living room, mark my words.