A New Way to Play (Part 5)

Gradually the gaming companies were moving into and past the silly gimmick based controllers for video games. These things served to remove all connection between the player and the game. As Sony did with it's PS Move controller setup, Microsoft found it's own way to move into this realm. I would argue that Microsoft was more misguided than any of these things that I have written about in the prior articles.

Chapter 5: The Dis-Kinect of Microsoft

While I have never been one to champion the Xbox 360, I have always, at least, been able to say that it was a real hardcore gaming system. I feel like most of it's exclusives are misguided, especially Fable and Halo, but have always owned a 360 for Gears of War. At the end of the day, as a Playstation guy, I feel like our biggest disconnect has always been that I am not the target audience of Microsoft's console.

While Nintendo threw all of it's decades old fans to the wolves, the last thing I expected was the youngest of the big three to flip off it's fans and show things like this.

Seriously... That wasn't just one part of it's big E3 conference of last year. That was the tone of most of it. Microsoft basically said, "Hey kids! You like Battlefield? You like Call of Duty? We're announcing Halo 4! But let's talk about this stupid fucking camera that you can set on top of your TV you can and flail around like the products of inbreeding that you probably are."

It seems to me that many Xbox fans were upset by this, and justifiably so. It is also worth noting that with the exception of Forza 4 and Gears of War 3, I don't think Microsoft released one new exclusive game in the past year that wasn't just a vehicle for the Kinect.

For those of you who don't know, the Kinect is a camera that very accurately detects your movement and in some ways detects your voice. If you haven't tried it, I'm surprised, as it's sold over 11 million worldwide at this point, but oddly enough I've never seen one at anyone I know's home. Perhaps it's Kolect-ing dust underneath their Wiis.

The big concept of the Kinect is the for all of these years we actually haven't enjoyed playing video games because we've been using controllers and when we've been sleeping the controllers have been molesting babies and murdering your grandparents. This is honestly how Microsoft is making it sound. Arrogant Dipshit Kudo in the picture below actually went as far as to say that only now, with the Kinect, can we really play games.

Ok. That face has convinced me that I'm wrong about the Kinect. Controllers have always ruined video games. What cases do we have for the Kinect as an actual gaming device? Dance Central and it's sequel, an embarrassing looking Star Wars game, that at E3 even made people who were excited about it shudder, and mini game collections, because the Wii didn't give us enough of those. Out of everything, it is good for dance games. This hasn't reinvented the wheel, it's just a slightly advanced Playstation Eye Toy...which came out in 2003, and was treated and said to be exactly what it was. A camera that you could flail around in front of and hit cartoony objects on the screen.

Gaming has evolved a great deal and it keeps on growing and being able to do more, but these days there are too many resources being put in to making games do less for people who don't play games. Here's how it works. People who don't play games, rarely play because they don't know how to play. They don't play because they don't really feel like putting the time into learning, because video games aren't important to them. Kinect and Wii and Move just show these people that video gaming is as stupid and 'lowbrow' as they have always thought they were.

I love gaming. I love being engrossed in an experience. I love actually having a connection to the stories in video games, and I think a better way to get someone who doesn't play games interested, is to show them how much games are like movies now. My mom saw me play some Uncharted 3 the other day and now she is asking about getting "one of those machines".

If this misguided attempt is the best the game industry can come up with to grow the market, it's pretty sad. Games like Uncharted, Flower, Papo and Yo and other things to that effect are what is gonna make it happen. Not because they are the best games, but because they are trying to do bold things that non gamers don't realize gamers do. To win them over, we must finally put an end to the debate about whether or not video games are art. I know they are, but people think they aren't because they haven't seen good examples.

It's not about the way you play, so much as it's about making what you are playing worth learning.