Rare Says Controllers are Too Convoluted, Motion Controls Key to Reaching Technophobes
For a time now, a lot of what Rare has done has felt as though it echoes Nintendo, but with their own twist. Banjo-Kazooie felt like it echoed Super Mario 64, Star Fox Adventures felt like it echoed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and most recently, their sentiment regarding the complexity of controllers seems to echo Nintendo’s own as they introduced the Wii.
In attempting to reach an “expanded audience” of non-gamers and those who had abandoned the hobby, Nintendo saw the average video game controller as something of a prohibitive barrier; a complex mesh of buttons, sticks, pads, and triggers that would scare away those not intimately familiar with the workings of a video game. Hence the Wii Remote, which was designed to resemble a common television remote control, but with fewer buttons and a more intuitive motion-based interface for some games.
As the release date for Microsoft’s project formerly known as Natal draws near, Rare’s Kinect development director, Nick Burton, echoed the ideal at the fifth annual Develop Conference in Brighton, Great Britain. He explained to those in attendance that controllers “have become convoluted, they have raised the bar to entry too high,” and recounted an experience he had with his daughter as an example:
“So my daughter was asking what all the buttons did, and I told her just two were used. She just couldn’t get her head around the fact that the other buttons were redundant.”
Burton put forth the idea of technophobia being a barrier to people unfamiliar with gaming, that they are afraid that the wrong push of a button could yield disastrous consequences.
The solution? Motion control, naturally. Of course, when one hears a member of the Rare staff speak of motion control, one is inclined to believe they mean “Kinect motion control,” rather than “Wii motion control” or “Sony Move motion control,” but we can give him the benefit of the doubt here.
In that vein, Burton puts forth that it is not merely the intuitiveness of motion controls which helps overcome the technophobic hurdle, but because there is no incorrect way to run in place or swing a bat (though we’re sure there are some baseball players who would argue the latter, but we digress).
“It removes the layer of scariness that a controller has,” he said. “There are so many opportunities that can arise from that.”
Finally, to follow up on that “echoing of Nintendo” thing that was mentioned earlier, Rare is said to presently be in the final stages of development for their first Kinect title, Kinect Sports, a game made in a similar style to– you guessed it– Wii Sports.
Source: Develop Online (via GoNintendo)
