The Video Game Revue

Say What?

One of my pet peeves is when an otherwise intelligent geek decides to showboat a little by undertaking to pontificate on a subject for which said geek has clearly overestimated his own level of familiarity. I was witness to such a train-wreck recently when conversing with a recently hired video game developer who made the following observation with a rather scholarly air:

(loosely paraphrased) "With the latest interface technology provided by the Wii (the motion-sensitive Wiimote), video games have come much closer to the level of simulating real-life activities such as sports. I believe that the next trend in video game design will focus on creating experiences which are not possible or not practical in real life."

As much as I can appreciate this guy's sentiment (that is, wanting to remark about the amazing properties of modern video game technology and the exciting potential for future advances), I've found that there are layers upon layers of ignorance driving his little rant (I didn't tell him so, of course, as I didn't want to find myself involved in a lively "debate.") I'll point out what I believe are the most obvious failings in the above statement.

Wiimotes are not particularly good VR gloves, and any truly experienced gamer who has spent much time with the Wii knows this to be true. What the Wiimote has done is enabled loose gestures to replace the role that button presses served in pre-Wii games, which is a far cry from translating a user's 3-D actions into a game world verbatim.

For example, consider a game such as Soul Calibur. Let's suppose there is a Soul Calibur game for Wii in development. What this game will not be able to do is have an interface where a user's swings are literally translated into Soul Calibur as accurate sword slashes. In a nutshell, this is because the Wiimotes simply aren't that accurate, from what I can tell, although it's possible that this situation will change as the software techniques driving Wii games improve (still, I am cautiously skeptical that the accuracy of Wiimotes will ever improve to the point of enabling a full-on sword fighting game.) What this hypothetical Soul Calibur Wii game will be able to do is to remap the controls of the old Soul Calibur series games (pad button Square for horizontal slash, pad button Triangle for vertical slash, pad button X for block, and pad button Circle for kick on the PlayStation control scheme) so that they are instead represented by hand gestures--horizontal swing for a horizontal slash, vertical swing for a vertical slash, A button for kick, and B button for block, for instance. The key point to note here is that variations in the user's horizontal swing, for example, would translate into the same horizontal swing in-game every time; each horizontal hand gesture is simply the equivalent of a pad button press. This is essentially how Zelda: Twilight Princess's control scheme works. Of course Nintendo enjoys creating the perception that swinging a Wiimote while playing Zelda is just like believable sword fighting, but the reality of the situation is that you can play the game just as effectively with a GameCube gamepad and not loose any functionality.

It's also important to note that while the Wii interface is certainly novel, it has a lot of disadvantages too. For a game like Soul Calibur, the extra time required to perform hand gestures (versus merely tapping a button) would cripple the game's interface--one which is particularly fast paced and sensitive to timing. A Wiimote-based interface has the potential to feel more realistic in spite of its arbitrary nature (many Wii Sports activities feel a little bit authentic, for instance), but such an interface is not necessarily more fun than a traditional game control interface. Any game producer who does not understand this is certainly vulnerable to making a crappy Wii game.

Okay, so maybe this geek guy is just optimistic about the future applications of Wii-like technology, which is entirely reasonable. What I find much more offensive is the notion that games can now turn to the realm of fantasy having sufficiently mastered simulating reality. Are you fucking kidding me? Not only has the idea of using software to construct impossible fantasy worlds, as opposed to merely emulating reality, both old and widespread, but in fact there are many, many more games that construct impossible fantasy realms than there are games that try to be truly realistic. Look at www.ebgames.com right now and see how many games on the front page are serious simulations versus how many are essentially make-believe worlds; there's a good chance that all of them are shameless fantasies. That would have been the case five years ago, and it very likely will be the case in another five years. Pong may have been a realistic simulation of sorts (or not--you could argue that the game intentionally creates an abstraction of table hockey that differs from the real life activity in important ways), but it was quickly overwhelmed by a history of blatantly surreal creations such as Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and so forth. To think that the cumulation of video game technology over the past thirty years or more has been to arrive at the point of being able to accurately simulate reality is utterly ignorant of what video games are all about.

Are there other, more subtle levels of ignorance behind this guy's statement? One of the things that rubbed me the wrong way was his implicit assertion that, as a game developer (albeit one new to the job), he was automatically an authority on video games, even though it was fairly obvious to me that he had little personal (as opposed to professional) interest in the subject. But I guess what I find so noteworthy about what he said is that it isn't a simple matter of him having said one thing while meaning another; the deeper you dig into what he probably meant to say, the more you find yourself mired in bogus assumptions and outright false impressions about video games. He truly and simply didn't know what he was talking about.

posted by Parappa @ 8:52 PM