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Towards the end of last year (but prior to Project Natal’s announcement), I was mulling over the used game section in my local gaming store when my girlfriend tapped me on the shoulder and gestured to the Xbox 360 Accessories section. Towards the bottom of the shelf was an Xbox LIVE Vision Camera bundled with the 2008 casual gaming experiment, You’re In The Movies, with a price tag of $19.99. We took the device home and spent time playing a few rounds of what amounted to an interactive movie-themed casual-party-gimmick fest culminating in a campy movie trailer with our likenesses inserted for good measure. By the end of it, both of us were physically exhausted from the minigames and laughing like crazy at the movie trailer.
And something dawned on me – I had more fun than I thought I would. This was alarming given how imprecise the device was (to the point that entire parts of our bodies sometimes were invisible to the sensor, even when trying to adjust lighting conditions when calibrating). However, although it was very obvious to me that the tech had a lot of problems compared to the “demo” (using the term loosely here) shown at Microsoft’s press conference at E3 2008, it was still fun. It certainly wasn’t something that we would play every day – but something like a board game, brought out of the closet for parties or bouts of boredom.
We continued to pull out You’re In The Movies when my family, or my girlfriend’s family, or our non-gamer friends visited us. The game always received a positive response. Admittedly, the technology was different – certainly far less advanced than what Microsoft is going to release into the wild three days from now. But looking back and remembering the positive reactions the device elicited from the groups of non-gamers who played the game with us, it began to make me wonder if Microsoft may actually be onto something with Kinect.
Removing the “gamer goggles” and looking at the device for what it is, I believe that it has the potential to create new kinds of experiences without eliminating the ones we know and love. I’ve talked with plenty of hardcore gamers who believe (and hope) that Kinect is going to fail. The Project Natal announcement trailer was admittedly far too ambitious for what Kinect has actually become – but the truth is, nobody purchasing the device is going to care. Kinect was not made for hardcore gamers. This is a fact that has become blatantly obvious since this year’s E3 conference.
It’s certainly an adjustment, but I’m beginning to warm up to the idea of welcoming the casual experience to our previously “exclusive” gaming hobby. The new experiences created by motion controlled gaming are going to lead to plenty of new innovations in the industry – both for casual gaming and hardcore gaming as well.
