E3 2010 Won't Let Me Sit Down

Yes, the Wii has been around for four years, but now all three major players are in the "motion controls" game, the Xbox with Kinect (should have stayed Natal if you ask me) and the PlayStation Move. Thankfully the motion controls are optional with the Xbox and PlayStation, whereas with the Wii it's pretty much their whole schtick, but they're still moving the industry in a direction that refuses to let me sit down when I want to play a game.



I don't know about you, but when I play Xbox I'm not sitting straight up in a chair with the controller directly in front of me. Sometimes I like to lie down. Other times I like to put my legs up and hold to the controller off to the side. The point I'm getting at is that when I play games I like to sit anyway I like, knowing that as long as my hands are on the buttons everything's all good. But here comes motion controls which want me to hold out my arms pretending to be holding a steering wheel (that's you Kinect), or waving a remote/dildo hybrid around like a jackass (that's you Wii). When did video games become so much work?

Now people will probably say, "You're just really lazy if you think motion controls are too much." You know what's lazy? Buying a video game that has you run in place while an avatar on screen runs. You know what's available pretty much anywhere? Solid ground you could be running on for free. Or how about a video game where you block soccer balls. Maybe you could just buy a soccer ball. So pretty much any sports game is out of the question because if you really cared about athletics, you'd be stupid to buy hundreds of dollars of electronics to pretend to do things that are completely available to most people all the time. It's not laziness when I want games to remain games and sports to remain sports.

Then there are motion control games that aren't about sports, and involve things such as holding out your arms and pretending to hold a steering wheel. Try a little experiment right now and hold out you hands and pretend to drive without holding anything for ten seconds. Now imagine how horrible that would become if you kept that up for an extended period of time. Yea, not fun.

People may also say, "If you don't like them, then don't buy them." Is that really what the game companies want? Me, a loyal customer, to not buy their product. Sure, they're trying to obtain market share and not be left out of the game, but at what cost. Publishers and developers can only afford to make a limited number of products a year. They can't risk dividing their market, and excluding their heaviest consumers. Let's face it, motion controlled games are targeted towards the casual audience which is named "the casual audience" for a reason. They're not the ones spending a significant amount of their discretionary income on video games.

It's not that motion controls are a completely horrible concept, it's just that the technology isn't there yet to make it worthwhile and it's implementation is often underwhelming. There just aren't many novel uses of the idea, and most motion control games don't even come off as anything more than glorified tech demos. Maybe one day if 3D technology improves, and we can get some Minority Report type stuff going on it could be more appealing. I'm just concerned that this fad will take away from the development of games I actually care about.

Also, I like to sit down.