Ben Gonshaw: Digital Media Theorist & Game Design Consultant
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MAN IN THE MIRROR

18th October 2004

Immediacy of interface is very important in gaming and it is what proves to be the major barrier of entry for the average person on the street. They sit there and hold the controller alienated and afraid. They are unsure what to press and how, plus they don't want to break anything. They are bemused that pressing a button makes the character jump, they get confused between the different functions and which button causes what movement. In the end the experience is frustrating, unintuitive and off-putting. Most people find the interaction on a par with programming someone else’s video machine for the first time with no manual: impenetrable and irritating.

For games to become mass market we need to break through the interface barrier. Camera peripherals could be the key to this. Everyone has got first hand experience of how these work because mirrors are a ubiquitous part of life. I doubt that any westerner with a TV has never looked in a mirror. The most important thing about this is that people understand how they work on an intuitive level way more significant than anything a mere AI layer between a traditional analogue stick and the screen can offer. Prince of Persia may offer near perfection of smooth control, but how often did you tap the wrong button by mistake and jump off a wall instead of run along it? Remember, that person who accidentally hopped to their doom was an experienced gamer. How much more frustrating and baffling would it be for someone who had never played a game before?

Many games actually treat the control system as the entire game, rather than as a means of access to the game. As discussed in Beat This! the challenge is in control system alone. To take that thought to its logical conclusion, for the majority of never-gamed, getting to grips with the controls is such a challenge that they may never experience the game at all.

Perhaps a combination of cameras with a dance mat could offer the break-through that people need. However, it does turn the experience into one of bodily immersion in the TV, when part of the attraction is in sitting back and relaxing. . . . maybe there is no ideal input method, short of brain waves and then we really are talking sci-fi. Right now brain wave controllers are more pesky than first-generation speech recognition in their accuracy rate and their fearsome training regimen .would cause a special forces cadet to go pale.

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