For and Against: Motion Control

Eurogamer is no stranger to hot debate. In fact, from arguments about controversial review scores to debates over the pros and cons of laser eye surgery, it seems we all like a bit of a row.

Which explains the thinking behind this new series of feature articles, titled For and Against. We're asking some of the world's top videogame journalists to look at some of the biggest issues facing gaming today, and to have a bit of a row about them.

We're also conducting an online poll within each article so you, The People, can democratically decide who is right and who is wrong. Thus we will know The Truth once and for all and no one will ever argue about any of these issues ever again.

To kick things off, our very own Tom Bramwell is taking on the mighty Jon "Log" Blyth. Read on to find out where they stand on the question of whether motion-controlled gaming is any good.

Remember to cast your vote in the poll at the end. And please let us know in the Comments section if there are any issues you'd like to see debated in future, or if you'd prefer us to just get on with that PDC World Championship Darts review thanks.

The Case For... By Tom Bramwell

"Is your home Kinect-ready?" we asked in November, touring the homes of Eurogamer writers in order to put Microsoft's new pad-free Xbox gizmo, which has gone on to sell more than eight million units, to the test.

In some cases, the answer was yes. Eurogamer TV's Johnny Minkley can "jump in" to his heart's content, while Ellie can dance for literally minutes before her downstairs neighbour bursts in and murders her. In other cases, however, it was a big fat no.

My lounge is long and not particularly narrow, but when I'm sat on the couch my toes are only about five feet from the near side of my TV bench. As a result, Kinect does not work in my house.

My Kinectimal, Boom, peers out of the screen, forlorn, as I calibrate and recalibrate in the hope we can be together. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and roll around on the carpet crying, just to be with him in spirit.

Kinect isn't alone, either. Wii games and PlayStation Move also dislike my front room layout. If I want to experience motion control, I have to go to a friend's house or play stuff in the office.

"You may want to move your furniture out of the way for the best playing experience." No, I may want your stupid, trumped-up webcam to get some flipping skills. I am not the controller.

I am, however, roaringly in favour of motion control.

In the run-up to Kinect's release, Microsoft's team of evangelists, led by sunglasses-loving high-speed tracksuit scarecrow Kudo Tsunoda, told anyone who would listen that it was not created to divert resources from core games. Instead, they promised, Kinect would promote diversity and offer consumers choice. Sony said much the same thing about PlayStation Move.

We desperately need these things. We need to give developers a reason to think beyond the boundaries of their last release, and we need to show consumers that this is happening. Because while you may not care for Kinectimals or SingStar Guitar, you would suffer unimaginably in the world we'd have without them.

Nintendo saw all this coming. As early as E3 2005, company president Satoru Iwata began to preach that any growth we were seeing in the games industry was false, and unsustainable within current models. He knew it was a swell that would soon flatten into a placid sea of risk-averse sequels.

This, in turn, would shrink to a puddle of miserably obtuse control systems and impenetrable game mechanics, one which deflected all but the most dedicated attempts by new consumers to join in. It was already happening in Japan and would spread.

Wii was an attempt to correct this decline by focusing on simple, accessible ideas that satisfied the broadest audience possible. Fittingly, it was a design philosophy that owed a lot to the late Game Boy architect, Gunpei Yokoi.

He saw that using cheap and hardy technologies to build fun toys was a great business model. This new focus rejuvenated Nintendo and helped inspire Microsoft and Sony, both of whom were thinking in similar directions.

We need more motion control – or, rather, we need more disruptive technology that creates new paradigms.

Activision may have made $1 billion in revenue from Call of Duty: Black Ops, having already sold more than 20 million copies of Modern Warfare 2. But if I were Bobby Kotick I'd be depressed, because his company – and most of his competition – only seems to have one business model: do a thing, and if it's successful then flog it to death. Call of Duty is a bubble and Kotick's not an idiot – he knows they burst.

As Activision has demonstrated already this month, outside a few key franchises the traditional games industry is struggling. While the numbers may look healthier in places, boxed product is stagnating, creatively and commercially. Heavy Rain and Deadly Premonition may have been the only two daring releases in the whole of 2010, but between them I doubt they made money.

We shouldn't be excited by the scale of Call of Duty's business; we should be worried about it. It's leading the sprint toward an imagination vacuum. Everything is already a sequel. We now fall off our chairs if the latest instalment in a favourite series has the fortitude to do anything remotely different.

And if there's no real variation between the games, there will be no real variation between the gamers. It doesn't matter if there are 10 million, 100 million or a billion of us - if we're all that squeaky kid calling you a prick on Xbox Live, gaming will stop being a creative medium and become another variation on razors and razorblades.

Motion control – along with other technologies which force or inspire designers to think differently, such as Facebook, 3DS and smartphones – isn't a waste of money. The investment which goes into it would not be better be spent on a new Mario game or a new Halo.

Innovation and things that are designed to inspire are the last scions of creativity. We need them. Otherwise there won't be any new Marios or Halos, because gaming won't survive.

So yeah, buy Kinectimals. And vote motion control.

The Case Against... By Jon "Log" Blyth

I'm in a difficult situation. My position as someone who hates motion control puts me in the company of Luddites, trolls, pessimists and the self-proclaimed hardcore.

But I'm absolutely for accessibility. I'm bat-shit in love with innovation. And my reason for mistrusting motion control isn't based on an irrational feeling that other generations are stealing my hobby. That'd be rich, given the fact I'm in my thirties. I'm the hobby thief here.

Imagine a time-travelling visual effect. It's 1991 and Legend Quest has opened in Nottingham. It's a unique gaming experience, powered by the CS1000 virtual reality system. I was one of a gang of four teenagers who'd never developed the demanding social skills required to get onto Knightmare.

Instead, we paid five pounds each to spend 15 minutes inside a hollow plastic tree stump, with TV helmets levered onto our heads. This is what we saw. Old graphics! They're rubbish, aren't they?

Most importantly, in our hands was a magical controller. How genuinely alien it felt, in that world of carphones and magazine personal ads. A twisted, broken world, where the most sophisticated way you could like a band was to catch a bus and buy a CD.

With this controller, if you held up your hand in front of your face, you saw a computerised hand on your head-telly. I still don't know how it works, because I'd prefer to think my childhood was genuinely amazing, and researching it would be like punching myself in the nostalgia.

(Aside: I'd still kill for a go on the gyroscope flight simulator at the end of this clip, mainly because it's controlled with buttons, and being upside-down is cool.)

It only took two minutes inside that tree stump to blow away the illusion. There's a key on the pedestal. Pick it up! I'm trying. It's not working. Hold out your hand! I am holding it out! Oh no, a low-resolution skeleton. Kill it! I can't!

It's not working.

Even in those days of low expectations the imprecision was disorientating, like hearing your own voice two seconds after you start talking. Like Oblivion's faces, or the Final Fantasy movie - the closer you get to realistic, the more obvious and disturbing the shortcomings are.

The fact you're waving your Wii Remote around like a sword only demonstrates how little like a sword it is. Slap it in a steering wheel and you'll probably start miming futile pedal movements, and lose to someone using buttons. Chasing reality in this way is like trying to chew a sausage back to life.

Immersion. Is that what this is about? Making your actions vaguely resemble what's going on on the screen? Is this about light sabres?

When Anton Mikhailov says Kinect can't do a good light sabre game, he seems to be implying that Move can. Quick question: in the imaginary light sabre game that you play in your head, are you doing backflips and flying across the room? Then I'm afraid motion control isn't going to make you feel like a Jedi, any more than winding your wrist around with your tongue half-out would. You're going to need buttons.

Beautiful, precise buttons. Buttons have got a bad reputation, mainly because of quick time events - but at least when you're asked to press X not to die, you know you died because you didn't press X. Interpreting the movements of every body shape means ambiguity, discretion, and delay - and the revolutionary claims of advertisers force the games into deceitful practice.

How long was it before you realised Wii Tennis didn't actually know you were doing a backhand? How often does that charmless cretin on FlingSmash go in the direction you wanted? Why is Kinect Adventure's Rally Ball so forgiving? Is it because it has to be? How is Ballmer's avatar making finger gestures?

I want to attack Move, just for balance - but I'm forced to admit my experience with Move is limited to Aragorn's Quest, a game whose main purpose was to raise the alarm that third-parties would just port over their Wii controls. But I'll say that, among all the things Heavy Rain was missing, "flapping around like a dick" wasn't high on the list.

It's not just about the wild, grand gestures of console motion control. Take Super Monkey Ball. I'll never forget the moment, while playing the GameCube version, that my body took on board the tiny micro-motor functions which transformed Expert 7 from an impossible task to something I'm could reliably, repeatedly beat.

On the iPhone? Furry, opaque balls. Have you tried Bit.Trip Beat on Tilt instead of Touch mode? Swollen, less responsive balls. Why was painting with the Celestial Brush in Okami less good on the Wii than the PS2?

I'm not claiming this is a universal law. Tilt To Live HD on iPad sucked me in, but that's because it takes imprecision into account and gives you visual feedback to compensate. It's rare to discover a motion control twitch game that works and this one deserves a big wet hug.

Dance Central - same deal. This game exploits Kinect's considerable strengths and sits on the opposite end of the see-saw to Sonic Free Riders - a game which, if it was human, would have chewed off and eaten both of its own lips.

It's not an empty landscape. But we're not there yet - and to be honest, I'm not sure if anyone knows where "there" is.

I'm open to revelation. I'd love a little epiphany. There have been times where I didn't "get" something, and ended up consumed by my own petulant outsideriness. I'd love to visit 2008 and slap myself for banging on about the narcissistic self-indulgence of Twitter.

"Ssh," I would say. "You're forgetting that you're a self-indulgent narcissist." Then I'd grab my own hair and roughly make out with myself.

On another level, I'm aware that this is a fake argument. Everything's motion control - pressing a button is as plainly a motion as waving a stick. But it's only when motion stops trying to complete with buttons and thumbsticks that it makes any sense at all.

At the risk of repeating myself, Dance Central. (I could have said Dance Evolution for variety, but that game puts a full-colour version of you into the game, and I'm still suffering from the trauma of being forced to watch myself dance. I'm a man who avoids mirrors as a replacement for going on a diet. Not cool, Konami.)

Buttons are unbeatable at providing instant, tactile feeback and sending an unambiguous message to a machine. Do something special, like the adverts promised. Do something like Dr Kawashima's Brain & Body Exercises, maybe - only don't ruin your own sense of party fun with a huge empty gaps between the games, and a menu system that makes my non-gaming boyfriend give up after ten seconds.

I guess my main problem with motion control is that it still feels like it's at the gimmick stage. Simply using motion controls feels like enough - maybe once that's out of our system, some majestic business will start shooting onto the shelves.

It certainly feels like we're on the tantric cusp of something great. But I'm not sure whether that's based on fact, or the same feeling of excitement I get when I walk into Ryman's and think, "God, I could write so many books on all of this paper."

And that's why, after 20 years of hope and disappointment, I hate motion control. We are, however, in relationship therapy.

Cast Your Vote

So, The People, whose side are you on? Do you agree with Tom's argument about promoting innovation and embracing diversity? Or, like Jon, are you a terrible racist when it comes to motion control? (Just to confirm, Jon is not at all racist with regard to anything else, ever.) Now's your chance to have your say!