Molyneux Raises Kinect Defences with Amiga Reference

[commodorejohn]

Someone needs to give Peter Molyneux a friend. I think that's really what he's been after all this time.

As for Kinect, I feel about it as I felt about the Wiimote: motion controls decrease immersion because they require more work for the same result than buttons. They are, frankly, a dead end as far as video games go. Let them die after this generation, as they ought.

[commodorejohn]

So, a true holographics VR setup, ala Star Trek's Holodeck, wouldn't be immersive, because you actually have to "walk" in order to walk?

Yes. "Yahtzee" Croshaw has expounded on this before:

See, the hypothetical  ultimate model of gaming is total immersion. The whole Matrix thing.  Plugging your brain into a virtual world that you see with your own  eyes, feel beneath your own feet, and commit genocide upon its  inhabitants with a napalm launcher in your own hands. Technology is  still a long, long way from this, though. I'm talking about a direct  neural interface here, something that plugs into your spinal cord and  diverts the signals from your brain to the computer avatar, so your own  body doesn't move, but the one in the game does. You think "do a hip  thrust," your own body stays still and Captain Jockbugger on the Planet  Killtron debases himself for the enemy.

What this is is the shortest possible connection between intention  and in-game action. "Shoot that guy," think you, and lo is that guy  shot. Thought → action. That's what technology should be working  towards. Standard controllers have a far shorter brain-action delay than  motion controls. The movement of our actual, physical bodies is  minimized to the tiny finger-jerks it takes to press a button. Thought →  tiny movement → action.

Motion controls add unnecessary distance between thought and action in a game, which detracts from immersion. Button presses are easy for the brain to automate and remove from the conscious process; motions less so. Motion-control in gaming suffers a fundamental problem in concept: even if you could get all the technological kinks worked out, it's less intuitive than it seems like it would be, because that assumption relies on the false premise that perception of realism is directly controlled by sensory input, and not by processing within the brain.

[commodorejohn]

That's exactly what I'm saying, yes.

[commodorejohn]

I think you are underestimating the brain's ability to "fool itself" into thinking something is real if it's similar enough..

Not at all. It's a fantastic ability that gaming makes use of in countless ways - and it's also why controllers with shorter response times will always be more immersive. There may indeed be a "psychological advantage" to motion controls for someone who's never  ever used a normal button controller before, but the brain's ability to  re-train itself means that once you're used to using a button  controller, the initial awkwardness is gone, and you're left with pure  muscle memory and drastically shorter delays between thought and action - and thanks to the brain's ability to "fool itself," (yay, imagination,) once you're used to it you won't notice the difference. To quote from the same article:

It takes a little while  to get used to it, and figure out what  buttons apply to what actions,  but hey, it took a while for you to  learn how to read, too. Motion controls, meanwhile, are thought → large  movement → however  long it takes for the console to register that  movement → action. It's  not immersive, it's going in completely the opposite direction to being  immersive.

[commodorejohn]

The motions themselves are still going to be larger lags than button presses.