Ready To Rumble

Okay, that’s it, I cannot remain silent on the topic anymore. I was hoping, nay – praying, that the motion control fad bubble would blow over without me having to spew my pessimistic bile all over it. I just wanted to go ahead with my daily business of not sleeping, get to the Winchester, have a nice cup of tea and wait for all of this to blow over. I can’t contain it anymore though, I must voice my thoughts as loud and proud as my keyboard can convey without the caps lock on.

What has sent me over the edge you ask? The embarrassing and testicle shrivelling performance from Microsoft at E3? The news that Heavy Rain has abandoned content of the game to work on the gimmick of using a whole different controller? The fact that even Nintendo has stopped mentioning motion controls to the same intensity that a fat person mentions cake? No. Kudo Tsunoda.

You may or may not recognise the name, but for those who don’t – Kudo is a former head of EA Chicago and currently employed in Microsoft’s ‘Project Natal’ division (I am still coming to terms with the fact I have to call it ‘Kinect’, for varying reasons). Kudo, you seem like a genuinely nice and enthusiastic man of the business, but do pardon me while I totally berate you for the following quotes you gave to EDGE Magazine:

“In many of the games we have, people will crash a vehicle and they’ll go totally like this [mimes dodging out of the way]! And even people playing games with a controller, there’s always people doing this [mimes driving motion]. They want to be moving. There’s natural movements and reactions involved. I’ve never seen someone doing that from rumble. It’s the audiovisual stuff.”

“The overwhelming thing we’ve discovered is that rumble is such a rudimentary form of haptic feedback. It’s not like a little rumble in your palm is your whole way of interacting with the world — it’s not like, oh, I stubbed my toe and I get a little rumble in my palm.”

“It’s almost laughable the way people hold on to rumble as the holy grail of haptic feedback. We’ve gone so far past anything that can be done with rumble, or that kind of restrictive thing you have to hold. It’s been creatively liberating to work on this stuff.”

I have two key issues with these quotations. First, and most confusing to me, is that you are criticising your fanbase (and customers) for labelling your current technology as their holy grail of feedback. We are all stuck in our ways, but ever since the Nintendo 64 appeared and shook the world with their ‘Rumble Pak’ addition we have grown accustomed to the controller’s vibration ability. Take this as a compliment, we like the product you are providing, it’s because we love it that we don’t want to lose it. That’s why we moaned like spoiled children when Sony tried to take it away from us, not because we had somehow misunderstood our own opinion that we preferred the controllers the way they were before.

Secondly, I have a suspicion that the word ‘haptic’ doesn’t quite mean what you think it means, or at least both I and Dictionary.com have a different definition to you. ‘Haptic’ technology refers to technology that interfaces with the user through the sense of touch. Project Natal (sorry, still can’t say it), has no touch or sense of physical feedback at all. Therefore, rumble remains the peak of haptic feedback, because we can actually feel it. If I stub my toe in a game using Microsoft’s glorified new camera, I’m not going to limp around my living room like a rather pathetically trained mime just to immerse myself into the game.

I’m not saying that the rumble is perfect, but I fear that controls such as Project ‘Kinect’ Natal and Playstation Move are going to attempt to replace a perfectly good control and feedback method that does not yet require replacing. Heavy Rain would still be the same game it is today (possibly larger) whether I flail or finger my way to the ending. I like my brown sauce brown – not green, my ice cream frozen – not melted, and my gaming feedback physical – not imaginary.

Mr. Tsunoda, along with every other game and platform developer out there, I beg you to not take away my standard controller or rumble contained within. I won’t shed a tear, or write a eulogy for rumble should it one day die, but don’t let the perfectly valid piece of technology that Kinect (that hurt) is, take over technology it was never meant to replace.