The Escapist Bulletin: Motion controls are not the end of the world

Gamers’ attitude towards motion controls is a strange one: we’re fascinated by them, and terrified by them at the same time.

We digest every scrap of news about them, even down to the minutiae of who has trademarked what prospective name, and yet thanks to the runaway success of the Wii, which many ‘hardcore’ gamers blame for ‘dumbing down’ gaming, we’re scared that by adding motion to the 360 and PS3 we’re dooming gaming to a slow death of mini-games and embarrassing wiggling.

Even some developers are cagey about motion controls, and the long term effects they might have on the medium.

It’s understandable that people are a little cautious: after all, motion controls represent a fairly fundamental change in the way that games are played, but we seem to be creating a bogeyman unnecessarily.

Motion controls probably won’t change gaming as much as we think, or certainly not in the ways that gamers seem to fear. Motion controls can make for a much more immersive experience, and hopefully it will only take a few decent titles that use the controls in a clever way to win gamers over.

You can point to the Wii’s surfeit of casual games, and the relative scarcity of hardcore games on the platform, as evidence of the ‘corrupting effects of motion’, but ask yourself how much of that is down to the use of motion controls, and how much of that is Nintendo actively courting a more casual market with its marketing?

It’s naive to think that that no one is going to try and tap into the casual market on the 360 or the PS3, but at the same time it’s silly to assume that developers will abandon their existing fan bases.

The developers that weren’t interested in making casual games for the Wii weren’t waiting for a bigger market: they simply didn’t want to make casual games. What is much more likely is that both markets will get attention, and it’s worth noting that Microsoft and Sony already have systems in place for smaller, lightweight games in Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network.

What’s going to be really interesting is watching how multi-platform titles play out, as the systems that Microsoft and Sony have in place are actually quite different.

Best of all, and this is something that people aren’t really talking about, is that there is finally competition in the field of motion controls, forcing everyone to raise their game.

Assuming that Sony and Microsoft handle their respective marketing correctly, Nintendo may be in for a tough time on the home console front. The differences in price between all three systems aren’t that much anymore, and the 360 and PS3 have the edge technology-wise.

Obviously, as we’ve seen time and time again, it’s software that sells hardware, but when motion controls are no longer unique to one system the quality of that software becomes very, very important.

Are motion controls going to be the best thing that ever happens to gaming? Probably not, but they’re unlikely to be the worst either.