From Little Acorns Mighty Oaks Do Grow

On 11 December, GfK-ChartTrack released new data indicating that the Nintendo DS was the biggest selling games console in the UK ever.  Weighing in at 10.05 million lifetime sales against its predecessor the PS2's 10.02 million, this seems all the more impressive when you take into account that the PS2 was released over nine years ago and the DS has been on the market for a meagre five.

It is now estimated that one in six people in the UK own a DS, some of them owning more than one.  This is a remarkable figure even taking that into account and even more so if we cast our glance back to 2004 when the DS arrived on the scene.

The DS' arrival was not heralded to great fanfare by the gaming community.  It was hailed as clunky - cheap looking, plastic and ugly.  Its use of dual viewing screens and a stylus, by then seen as the outmoded peripheral of yore for PDAs only, was subject to huge criticism.  It's safe to say that no one imagined that five years later it would be dominating the console market, but it has, and this is due in no small part to its user friendly hardware.  Those of us brought up on a diet of games find this concept difficult to understand, but most non-gamers are immediately turned off of consoles and handhelds because of the controls.  A traditional controller set up, particularly in handhelds, is not intuitive or welcoming which causes a barrier when a company looks to attract new customers - a revelation we have recently heard repeated at E3 with the introduction of Project Natal.

The DS made gaming simple by breaking it into three simple steps: pick up the stylus, touch the screen with it, play.  No learning fiddly controls - no bumpers, no triggers, no joypads, no analog sticks and most importantly no confusing and frightening button combinations.  You have one peripheral and one input device, the screen, and that's it.  This painted a much more approachable picture to the casual and non- gamers and, most importantly, young children who make up a large part of Nintendo's target market with the DS.  The cheap and plastic look that was mocked by the gaming community to begin with seemed playful and fun to others.

It wasn't just the hardware that proved attractive - Nintendo came out with a slew of different titles that seemed to bridge every gap and fill every niché market imaginable.  These titles challenged everything we knew about handheld gaming, with titles such as Brain Training and Cooking Mama designed to educate as well as entertain.  The DS could be use as an e-book reader and a study aid as well as play fun and interesting gaming titles such as the Professor Layton series and The Sims.  This opened the device up to a market that its competitors just couldn't access by becoming an acceptable and often encouraged part of people's every day lives.

This device broke apart the very definition of "game" and as such our characterization of what a "gamer" is.  Hardcore gamers, who grew up on a regimen of Quake and Wolfenstein may scoff, scowl and mock, spitting venom at the casual gamers who dare liken themselves to what they perceive a gamer to be without realising times have changed.  In most people's eyes there is no difference between a man who plays Professor Layton for three hours a day on his commute home from work and one who spends the same amount of time on World of Warcraft in the evenings.  The growth in uptake of the DS, along with that of the Nintendo Wii, should highlight to gamers that the gap between "us" and "them" is ever shrinking.  We were wrong to laugh at the DS - we were out of touch with the way our world was changing then and if we continue to box ourselves in then this is the way it will stay.  More than ever, we need to accept that we are no longer a minority unless we make ourselves one - we need to face that are just another niche in an ever expanding and changing market and find common ground.

Game of Peggle anyone?

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.