I just finished about five hours of liveblogging for my other site as I annually cover the Big Three press conferences from the show every year. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo slug it out for supremacy, each claiming THEY have the new tech that’s going to revolutionize the industry.

So far, only Nintendo can really claim that crown. It’s motion control innovation in the Wii, followed by its massive sales year after year have turned the industry on its head, and has Microsoft and Sony both scrambling to catch up.

Now both companies are in full swing with their own variants of the tech. Sony’s Move is more or less a more accurate rendition of the Wiimote, with one to one arm tracking via a camera and a glowing ball on a button-filled stick. Microsoft is going one level past that by ditching the controller entirely, creating a tracking system called Kinect which allows players to communicate with their Xbox and its games and features wirelessly using their entire body.

I reached a breaking point with this tech quite early on, during Microsoft’s keynote. Two players were demonstrating the Kinect equivalent of Wii Sports, and two players were about to do a sprint race against each other. Now, an event like this one the Wii would have players furiously shaking their remotes up and down to get their characters to haul ass down the track, but not so with Kinect.

No, both players busted into a full-on sprint in place, furious pounding the stage and jumping decently high into the air whenever they ran into a hurdle. By the end, the guy beat the girl, but both looked utterly exhausted.

This begs the obvious question, if this is what games are becoming, why not just go outside and sprint against your friend down the pavement? The answer is because that is something that no one really wants to do, and therefore I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do the exact same thing in their living room.

But this opens up a broader question about the future of gaming. It’s clear that every console wants to move toward motion controls for even “legitimate” games (ones that don’t have little cartoon Avatars playing fake sports in them). This was demonstrated most notably with Nintendo’s new Zelda adventure, “Skyward Sword,” where players literally pretend their controller is Link’s sword and shield, and must swing and parry like they were actually in a real sword fight.

This trend is probably good for childhood obesity rates, but we have to think about what its impact will be on gaming itself. Surely, companies want people to be playing their titles as much as possible, but while I used to sink in fifty hours to a Zelda game barely even thinking about it, if I have to mime my way through the whole thing, I’m going to have to take a nap every hour or so to keep up.

I have to wonder about when this tech goes fully mainstream in the industry, when all games are controlled by a player’s entire body and 3D makes the experience even more immersive. Surely this is probably at least 5-10 years away when ALL games would follow this format, but I do see that day coming, for better or worse.

What will it do to, or for the industry? Will video games spearhead a physically fit transformation of our nation? Or will gamers get fed up, and turn to good old fashioned television and movies as a leisure activity where you’re still actually allowed to lie on the couch?

I’m not sure, and once this tech hits for all three consoles, I’ll be patiently waiting to see if there’s any sort of backlash associated with it. All the new systems are quite expensive, and all these demos have done nothing to convince me the tech is truly worth buying yet. Make real games, not merely “living room activities” and you might catch my interest. Otherwise, I’ll be on my couch.

Talented? Sure. An athlete? Far from it

There are a number of people in the gaming community that would argue that top pro players have tuned their bodies and reflexes to such a degree, they should be considered on par with actual athletes. With the amount of coordination and speed that goes into professional play, I can see how this claim might be made, unfortunately, when put to the test, it turns out it’s pretty far from true.

Dr Dominic Micklewright, from the University of Essex, put several ”elite cyber-sportsmen” through their paces to see how they compared to professional athletes.

The head of Sport, Performance, and Fatigue Research Unit also wanted to determine whether video gaming should be classed as a sport.

The cyber-sportsmen had mental sharpness and psychological traits comparable to ‘real’ athletes, and reacted to visual stimuli almost as fast as fighter jet pilots.
But their fitness levels were shockingly low and comparable to people either much younger or much older than their actual age.

One of the test subjects appeared to be a healthy and trim individual, but when put to the test, he had the lung function and fitness rankings of a smoker in his sixties. The reason for this should be pretty obvious. Though mental and hand dexterity are off the charts for pro gamers, there is nothing about gaming at all that is actually exercise for more than one or two parts of the body, unless you happen to be a professional Dance Dance Revolution champion.

The researchers agreed that high level gaming requires a great deal of physical and mental skill, like pro sports, but because of what’s actually demanded of the gamer’s body, there’s nothing that gets them anything remotely close to being in good shape, and because of their sedentary lifestyle, are actually far less healthy than an average active person their age.

The moral of the story? Buy a Wii.

Just kidding. Go outside.

[via Telegraph]

So the media would have you believe that the only thing video games are good for are teaching your kids how to effectively map out their next school shooting, but as it turns out, there are some valuable real world lessons to be learned from them that can actually save lives.

One such example would be that of a young Norwegian boy, who saved his sister’s life during a wild animal attack using skills he learned in World of Warcraft.

Hans and his sister got into trouble after they had trespassed the territory of the moose during a walk in the forest near their home. When the moose attacked them, Hans knew the first thing he had to do was ‘taunt’ and provoke the animal so that it would leave his sister alone and she could run to safety. ‘Taunting’ is a move one uses in World of Warcraft to get monsters off of the less-well-armored team members.

Once Hans was a target, he remembered another skill he had picked up at level 30 in ‘World of Warcraft’ – he feigned death. The moose lost interest in the inanimate boy and wandered off into the woods. When he was safely alone Hans ran back home to share his tale of video game-inspired survival.

Granted, both taunting and playing dead would probably be taught to him in the Boy Scouts, but hey, it’s nice to know that some skills transcend both the real world and the virtual one.

Sadly, the next time he was out in the woods, and Hans tried to summon a fireball to blast away a bear, he was tragically eaten and dropped no loot.

[via NextNature]

It was yesterday that I found myself running around in circles in a backlot in Rundown during a game of Modern Warfare 2. I stopped, and then asked myself, “what the hell am I doing?”

What was I doing? I was trying to crank out the last few miles of the “Lightweight” perk, which mandates that players sprint for 250 miles in order to unlock a little callsign logo that lets everyone know that they ran for 250 miles. I thought doing this in regular games was taking too long, so I just thought I’d bust out the last few miles by just sprint around in the middle of nowhere. Yes, it’s completely ridiculous.

But this is when I realized, are achievements ruining gaming?

There’s no better example of this than in Modern Warfare 2. The game is laid out with pages upon pages of achievements to complete with different guns, different killstreaks and even once in a lifetime scenarios are listed as things you’re supposed to “accomplish.” You could spend your entire life trying to drop a care package crate on someone for the game winning killcam, but you’re probably more likely to get struck by lightning or win the lottery first.

It just seems like people play games less now for fun and more so about what they can accomplish. And this extends far beyond Call of Duty. Grand Theft Auto has secret packages, Assassin’s Creed has hidden flags and the king of them all, Just Cause 2 has an absolutely insane amount of shit to find and/or destroy in the death march toward 100% completion and a few hundred gamerscore points.

I think that Xbox 360s achievement system was the harbinger of all this, as it’s now spawned the similar PS3 trophy system. Before if you did achieved some spectacular feat in a game, that was it. You beat the game on insane, you found all the hidden whatevers, and you felt good for doing it and maybe a few of your friends were impressed.

But now, by making it public record for EVERYONE to see, gamers are now pushed harder than ever to complete menial tasks to receive menial rewards, be they meaningless points or new titles or logos they can use to brag to other internet randoms about how good they are.

"I could shoot him now, or I could crouch behind this table and shoot him through it so I get an FMJ kill which I need to unlock that title! Oh shit I'm dead."

Far too often in Modern Warfare, I find myself yelling, “Ughhh, this gun BLOWS.” The obvious question would be, why are you using it? Well because I need two hundred more kills to get a little banner that shows everyone else how much I use this gun. Which I hate.

Why? Why am I doing these things? I’ve long since felt like I was avoiding the grind of games like World of Warcraft, where people play for days on end to get virtual items that have no real value, but alas, the grind has worked its way into nearly ALL mainstream games, and try as I might, I can’t avoid it, as the philosophy of “grind toward reward” is a psychological concept that it’s nearly impossible to escape from.

I flash back to the days of playing endless hours of Super Smash Bros. or Goldeneye with my friends in my basement. There was nothing to be gained. After the first fifty hours, nearly everything had been unlocked, and there was no “reward” motivation to keep playing. But we poured thousands of hours into those titles, and received something better than callsigns or gamerscore points. Enjoyment. We didn’t worry about getting 500 homerun kills with Jigglypuff or getting 250 headshots with the Golden Gun. We would just play to kick each other’s asses, and have fun while doing it.

Some games still posses that kind of fun, but the last one I can really remember is Halo 3. Sure, there are achievements, but they’re nothing compared to the “job” Call of Duty has become. Team Fortress 2 is similar for online multiplayer and even the Wii, for all its faults, doesn’t have this kind of reward system for most of its games. At least not yet.

You know what the worst part is? No one is making us do these things. I could easily just pick my favorite gun, and play till kingdom come not worry about any of these other achievements and titles I’m not earning.

But I can’t. For reasons seemingly beyond my control, I can’t escape from the fact that I WANT to keep earning these unlockables, and pouring in the hundreds of hours it takes to get to 10th Prestige. But when I get there, will it be because I had so much fun playing the game, or because it was just a goal that could be achieved given enough time and button pressing?

I’m not sure, and honestly, this is why I can’t quite figure out if I like Call of Duty, or if it’s just flipped a switch in my brain that keeps compelling me to play it. And the same goes for a lot of other titles these days.

I think I need a break. Anyone up for some Smash Bros.?

Oh you clever Right Wing political cartoonists, usually I scoff your attempts at humor, but this one is actually pretty good. Why? Because I’m tired of Obama bashing the Xbox in every speech he makes saying things like ”I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.” He’s repeated a similar phrase at least a dozen times since the campaign trail.

Because of his distaste for gaming, I fully support the use of an Xbox controller to make fun of him, even if I don’t exactly agree with the points being made. Which button vacuums up oil spills? We should probably look into that one.

[via TobyToons]