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Already behind. Wii part 2 by tastydogma

Continuing from my previous post about how I think that the wii and other motion capture device designers need to re-think the way that they design products, in this post, I’m going to be more specific about how I think this might be done. I (matt) feel obligated to say first, though, that I’m definitely not a professional game designer – I’m a graduate student studying educational psychology. While I have, on the side or for specific projects, done some minor design, for the most part I have never really thought of myself as a designer or even marginally having a talent for aesthetics. Nevertheless, recently poking around game design (digital and non-digital) has helped me to think about how one might go about designing for human motion, especially since before my ed-psych studies, my research was focused on the psychology of motor control. End caveat.

There are two primary ways that I think psychology could help designers push forward on innovation with motion capture systems. By thinking about player input in it’s own terms, I think that designers can (or perhaps already have, but without talking about it) start grappling with new player verbs that could be used in games. Rather than looking at the controller’s inputs, in terms of the accelerometer or the buttons, designers need to add player “actions” into their design constraints and I specifically contend that figuring out what’s “fun” for players to do with their controllers would greatly benefit from a vocabulary or way of thinking about what the “words” of player action are: gestures and postures. Moreover, games that have been careful about what gestures they recruit for use in-game are more fun to play than games that tack on “wiggles” or “flips” into their repertoire of inputs.

These two ideas, gestures and postures, are fairly straightforward and for the most part, can be interpreted colloquially. A gesture can be thought of as a movement that conveys meaning, such as flipping someone the bird or throwing a thumbs-up. A posture can be thought of as the position of the body at a given point in time. By thinking about player input in terms of gestures and postures designers may be able to develop the verbs of action that could help make in-game input more complex and interesting. For example, consider a Dragon Ball game (or even a street fighter game) that includes a Kamehameha maneuver, an attack in which the player draws his hands back to his right hip and shoots them forward. Using the accelerometer and gyroscope (assuming motionplus), player gestures can be developed that match the fighting seen on-screen. What makes this powerful and interesting is not simply the one to one matching, rather is the way that the player is forced to make meaningful actions via macroscopic movements in game-play.

I do feel fairly guilty about the way that these design recommendations come from a fairly inexperienced designer with no actual hands-on experience programming wii input, so perhaps the next post will include my initial search for wii tutorials and source code from other sites.

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