Back to Basics

Last week at E3, Microsoft make an announcement that rocked every 360 fanboy's world: Project Natal.  Natal is a hands-free motion-sensitive controller system, making it essentially Microsoft's answer to the Nintendo Wii's "controller" system.  However, unlike the Wii, Natal provides much of that same functionality without the necessity for any peripherals at all. If you want to kick a ball in the game, then you make a kicking motion with your foot; buzzing in to answer a question on a quiz game simply means bringing your fist down on your hand as if it were a buzzer.

Natal even offers users the ability to interact with in-game avatars, as demonstrated by Peter Molyneux's display of Lionhead's Natal dependent title "Milo".  In a trailer to demonstrate this, a woman (Claire) speaks to the game's titular character, Milo, insisting that he is good at drawing; he objects, insisting that fish (he has some in a bucket beside him) are hard to draw.  Claire offers to draw one for him and proceeds to draw a picture of a fish on a piece of paper which she then holds this up to the Natal motion sensor.  At the same time, Milo appears to reach up and take his piece of paper from the top of the screen as if Claire really has just handed it to him.

This is, of course, fantastic and amazing technology, and you'll hear no argument from me that it is definitely astonishing stuff.  The implications that being able to directly interact with in-game avatars has on what sort of games we can make is unthinkable and I can definitely see a lot of non-gamers finding the idea of using your body as a controller a lot more approachable than the multi-buttonbumpertriggerstick set-up they have to deal with outside of the Wii at the moment.  That said, I do have one itty, bitty, tiny problem with the whole thing and it's the exactly same problem that I had with the Wii and with Microsoft Surface.

We are a tool using species - one of the few there is on Earth - and we have been using them since the dawn of time.  We knocked rocks together to start fires and invented the first knives to cut up our meat; we used saws, hammers and nails to build the first solid housing; telescopes helped us to discover that the Universe was not as we thought it was and the microscope meant we could discover bacteria.  Even now, looking to the mundane every day, there's tools everywhere in your world - cooking pots and wooden spoons, kettles, mugs, keys, umbrellas, pens, computer mice and keyboards.  We invented all of these as a means of making our lives easier.  These instruments helped us complete tasks that were otherwise made difficult  or impossible if we only used hands, teeth and other body parts.  This has, ultimately, made humans into the world's dominant species.

With technology such as Microsoft Surface and Project Natal, perhaps even the Wii to a lesser extent, we are stripping away tools and going back to just using our hands and bodies to achieve our goals.  We are taking away from ourselves something that sets us far apart from the animals we share the Earth with.  While, yes, there still remains a tool of sorts in the motion capture devices required to use the technology, it doesn't seem nor feel that way while you're using it.  It seems that rather than laud our unique capability, motion sensor technology seeks to paint it as dirty, wrong and, worse, unnecessary.  While sitting on your backside using a controller is far lazier than leaping about knocking footballs around with Natal, there seems to be a certain academic laziness that arises with the use of motion sensor tech.

There also comes a certain lack of precision with this technology that as a user of the good ol' mouse and keyboard set up for many years most have become accustomed to.  You don't usually have to worry about clicking on the wrong thing with my mouse unless you've not been paying attention, but unless the hitbox for every action/motion is massive with Natal then you are ultimately going to hit the wrong ability or option with your clumsy great big hands, or shove your elbow into an NPC's face in Fable 3 when you turn around to grab a cup of water from the coffee table.  It means taking a great deal more care in your movements whenever you stand in front of the sensor to make sure you don't make any unwanted actions.

Additionally, the freedom of movement associated with Natal means having to be aware of the effect of your movements on more than just the screen.  I'm sure everyone remembers the furore that arose on the introduction of the Nintendo Wii-mote?  Broken television screens as a result of people forgetting to hold on to the device meant that Nintendo had to press the issue of using the wrist straps with them.  Can you imagine what might happen if someone gets so immersed in their game they forget themselves and go crashing into a bookcase or table?  Having your body acting as a controller and having to have that awareness as a result could potentially mean that some of that immersion has to be lost during gameplay.  This is a rather a step away from the accuracy and, therefore, peace of mind that tool use afforded us and is, in my opinion, a step in the wrong direction as a result.  A controller became invisible as you became engrossed in game - your whole body is not as easy to forget.

I am not without the wisdom to recognise that tool use in modern life has lessened with time - input devices for PCs now are light-years away from what they were when the computer was first invented.  Even our most rudimentary daily tools have improved with time - the common potato peeler started out without its rubber grip and hurt the hands of anyone who used it, serving its purpose but not efficiently.  It just seems to me that if we have a tool for something that is perfectly functional why can't we find a way to simplify and improve that tool rather than remove it completely?  As much as I dislike the Wii-mote, its concept was more along these lines than to eradicate controllers altogether and hey, look, it worked!  Commercially and critically, the Wii-mote has been celebrated and proved an all-round success.  Clearly it's a design that appeals to the majority and perhaps with enough tweaking it would appeal to everyone and we wouldn't need to be looking to advance technology just for the sake of saying we did it.

As the old saying goes: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.