Breakdown! Project Natal

This Christmas, Microsoft is releasing a new add-on for the Xbox 360. Its codename is Project Natal (nuh-TAL, not the other one), and it's going to be able to watch and hear you. Should you get one?  Butler and Aaron weigh in.

BUTLER'S TAKE

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who think motion control is a really neat addition to videogames and those who actually play videogames.  Does everyone remember in 2006 when the Nintendo Wii came out, introducing motion based controls to the world of videogames and changing them forever?  At first, like me, you may have been trepidatious about a controller that looks suspiciously like something you use to change the channel.  But oh, the excitement you felt as you played Raving Rabbids  or any of the launch titles with your friends and thought: “hey, this could actually work.”  And for a while, hell, it even seemed to.

Flash forward to the here and now.  Quick, think of the last game that came out where you played BECAUSE OF the motion controls, rather than IN SPITE OF them.  Got nothin'? It's ok, neither do I.  Motion controls are quite often the ruination of what could have been a good game.  The best example I can think of is Mad World, which would have been a fantastic arcade-style beat-em-up if it didn’t also risk giving me a repetitive strain injury from wildly flailing my wiimote around to do basic attacks.  And that is what most motion control degenerated into: aimless flailing that kind of approximates movements sometimes.  Movements which could also be accomplished with the push of a button, with the bonus of not making you look like a dancing chimp holding a TV remote.

So when Microsoft jumped on board the motion control bandwagon, they decided that while they would still like us to jump around like the aforementioned chimps, they will at least make it so we have our hands free.  To distill down a lot of technical specs, the (*sigh*) Natal sensor bar uses an infrared projector to basically see in 3D, claiming to be able to have body, face, and voice recognition features and tracking of facial features and 48 different skeletal movement points.  I say “claiming” above like they are lying to us, and while I’m sure that’s not the case, I see these all as promises soon to become just as sloppily executed as the wiimote that once wowed the gaming world for all of 2 months before we got sick of it.

Let’s take a look at the demo titles from the E3 2009 briefing.  There is a Breakout-esque game where the player uses their body to bounce the ball back at the blocks, a painting game where you throw paint at the screen and pick colors with aforementioned voice recognition, and a game called Milo and Kate wherein the player picks a titular character and then proceeds to interact with… things.  It’s no surprise that Peter goddamn Molyneux is behind that last one because it’s another one of his goddamn “life simulators” only this time exclusively to show off that things I’m doing in real life can also be imitated on a screen.  Someone catch me when I fall from the edge of my seat.

 Yeah, I'm really, REALLY excited to "interact" as this

little bed-wetter.

Look, I’m not saying that they haven’t cobbled together some hardware that is new and innovative, but I am saying that it will undoubtedly be awful in its implementation.  The first two preview titles? Mini-game based, so it’ll work well enough to impress you, but you’ll stop playing after 2 weeks.  Milo and Kate?  Obnoxious grind based drivel from Peter  goddamn Molyneux, the king of that abominable domain, wherein the point of the game is to simulate performing actions in real life by pretending to perform actions in real life.  Sometimes I wonder if Peter goddamn (yes that is his middle name) Molyneux is even aware of the words going through his head as he vomits his lies and bile over the gaming masses time and time again.

Another somewhat troubling point:  Where is outside interest from worthwhile developers?  Designing mini-games can be done fairly well and easily.  The Wii already proved that and with 4 years to figure out how to refine it, I see no reason those kinds of games won’t do alright.  But where is the staying power?  I get annoyed when Wii games that are more than just mini-game collections make my wrist cramp up after prolonged play.  Can you imagine going through something like, say, Left 4 Dead 2 having to pantomime your actions for firing, meleeing, and fleeing in terror?  You can’t?  Well neither can Valve.  Or Bungie.  They have… uh… EA sports on board, so, you know, there’s that  Oh, and Sega! THEY are truly some real winners!

Pictured: representation of a typical weekday at 3 PM for

the Sonic Team crew. 

The big question that arises from this whole issue for me, then, is “why”? As in why do they think that because they have removed the controller itself, motion controls will not still have all of the same imprecise problems leading to shoddy, flailing based crap churned out by developers not because it benefits the game in any way, but simply because they feel like they SHOULD include it?  And when the big dogs like Valve and Bungie all look at this piece of equipment and heave a hearty “enh”, this should be a gigantic red flag that this will be no more gimmicky than the last time someone tried to traverse this motion control path.

So please, Microsoft, from me to you, just stop.  Until you can garner the confidence of someone besides Peter goddamn Molyneux, just be content to steal our money with your valueless Microsoft Points and keep the shooters coming.  I hear the Unreal III engine is still fresh and exciting.  Just… stick to what you know.

AARON'S TAKE

Butler makes some good points that are worth thinking about. But he also touches small choirboys and beats women. At the same time. I've seen it.

Look, I think we can all agree that nobody wants a bigger, more inaccurate, more expensive Wii. We don’t want more frustrating mini-game collections and old games re-released with new gesture controls. But I don't think comparing Natal to the Wii is entirely fair.

The technology in the Wii is essentially a positioning device. It's blindly guessing what you're trying to do based on the orientation of the Wii remote and nunchuck at a given time.

Natal is a pretty different approach. Instead of blindly guessing what you're intending based on the masturbating motion you're performing with the controller, Natal is essentially trying to mimic the human eye. A highly sophisticated camera sends lots of unique types of data to your Xbox. Xbox processes this information and uses some very intelligent Natal software to actually recognize things.

Granted, this is all theoretical and we haven't seen that many demos showing that Natal will deliver on this promise. Butler is definitely right to the extent that many uncreative developers will look at Natal and simply try to tack on weird body gestures to current game designs. But we’re only looking at Natal as a control scheme because Nintendo put all their new technology into the Wii's controller; the only 'revolutionary' difference we’ve felt as gamers was in how games were being controlled.

This is the fundamental mistake that both angry gamers and developers are making. The real question is whether there are areas in gaming where Natal will be a net gain. The losses will be in areas where Natal is trying to emulate the functionality of traditional controllers. The Wii has proven time and again that we don't want to waggle in situations where a simple button press is far more efficient and accurate.

But there are many levels of interaction that a traditional controller isn't trying to reach. This is where Natal should come in. Imagine a Myst game that isn't just a super-boring slideshow of pre-rendered art, but a real-time 3D environment that actually tracks where your face is looking to move your view of that world on the TV. Or a Mortal Kombat game that scans a full-body image of you and allows you to be a selectable fighter in the game with customizable moves (the DSi's camera is implementing a very primitive version of this idea in a game called Photo Dojo). Imagine a puzzle game that actively raises or lowers the difficulty level by reading the level of frustration in your facial expressions.

Imagine a world where hurling vulgarities at the screen

like a sailor with tourettes would actually yield results!

And it isn't just the camera. There's a lot of advanced audio recognition going on in Natal. While we may not be interested in little Milo (which I think is more of a tamagotchi pet than a social simulator), imagine playing a Pokemon-style RPG and actually being able to speak commands to control your monsters like Ash Ketchum did in the cartoon. 

The biggest potential I see in Natal is the opportunity to provide seamless interaction with an artificial world. The advancement of graphics have far outpaced that of player interaction, and the result is a bunch of games that LOOK immersive, but don't FEEL as immersive because pressing a button to do something might pull you out of the experience.

Take Mass Effect. We are drawn to its countless options and story paths - the ability to interact with the characters and story of a game. But what if you weren't selecting from a list of things to have your character say? What if you (the player) just said something, and what you said would be recognized and responded to by the game? This would be a massive (and perhaps impossible) undertaking. But even attempting it would be a step forward in games - an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure movie. One giant leap toward the holodecks of Star Trek.

Hell, even the DEMO looks like a holodeck prototype

But that won't happen this generation. Not convincingly. Not economically. But the idea is there; Natal is simply an attempt to immerse players with a variety of new technologies. We can choose to be offended by the number of developers who will use Natal to disgrace the effectiveness of traditional controllers, but Natal isn’t really for us. Microsoft and Sony bet on the hardcore audience and they both lost to Nintendo's completely unforeseen demographic: everyone else. 

BUTLER'S REBUTTAL

My worthy opponent is absolutely right (even if by Megan's law he is required to introduce himself to all of his neighbors as a registered sex offender for urinating on a police officer): comparing the actual mechanisms by which Wii and Natal games are controlled is an apples and oranges argument.  However, the technical specs that promise this level of precision and accuracy, in my opinion, mean squat if this technology isn't well implemented.  And as Aaron pointed out, we will see a lot of games that use this hardware badly.  That is not speculation.  With any creative medium, there will always be the process of digging the diamonds out of the heaping turd that is the rest of the pack.  My frustration comes from seeing games where this COULD have been avoided.  Mad World, No More Heroes, and almost any title that came out for the DS that was not a Nintendo IP are games that were good up until the point that some jackass on the development team decided they HAD to include whatever the shiny new toy was (motion control/touch screen functionality) regardless of how it might disrupt the game overall.  And if anyone can explain to me what possible purpose could have been served by putting motion control in New Super Mario Bros. Wii, I will eat my hat.  And the argument that Natal is "not for us" but for the "everybody else" demographic makes my blood boil, because developers will not stick to that mentality, and the people that do not want this technology will be forced to use it anyway.

"I'm afraid I can't let you ignore my existence, Dave."

So yes, Microsoft is putting together a decidedly more robust motion control peripheral, but this will ultimately mean nothing without a level of precision in its application that I simply have no confidence in.  And some of the concepts Aaron mentions above regarding what this technology COULD lead to are so speculative and far-off that if I didn't know better, I would say that his penultimate paragraph was penned by Peter goddamn Molyneux.  Calling Natal a step towards the holodeck is akin to calling a bag of screws a step towards building an F-15.  I mean, yeah, on the one hand it is in all likelihood a correct statement, as I am sure that screws are indeed a vital component in constructing an F-15, but you're still a few hundred million dollars of far more sophisticated equipment short of that bitchin' fighter plane, no matter how many of the basic components you possess.  The mundane march of progress for the sake of progress has been going on for years since the inception of stupid bullshit like the power glove, always promising to be a step in a culminating process, but failing to culminate in anything other than disappointing the masses at large (or in the case of the Wii, wearing out its utility and welcome), and promising that the NEXT step is where it will really come together, leading to a never-ending string of penultimate steps with no satisfying conclusion.