Sunday Thoughts: Buttons

I managed to get my hands (and the rest of my body) on Kinect a few weeks ago. Since then I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot. There’s no reason that the technology could be considered anything less than amazing, the way it tracks your entire body is simply fantastic and left me in awe at first; I really didn’t think it would be that accurate. There is, however, one big flaw; one thing it lacks completely; one reason that I can’t see us being able to use it as an alternative to a controller completely: it lacks buttons.

Dance Central is a prime example of why Kinect doesn’t need buttons and Your Shape uses the technology very well; but these type of games won’t last forever, we’re going to need some variety every once in a while. And when the time comes that we need that variety, I believe that we’ll also need to see some peripheral with buttons. Buttons have been a big part of gaming since it existed and using your limbs instead, whilst quite fun in some games, doesn’t quite cut it.

This is where Move got it right; the technology is nowhere near as amazing as Kinect, it’s just a camera tracking some glowing balls, whereas Kinect actually tracks you; I’m sure that glowing balls are easier to track than a full body that can be different sizes, colours and shapes. However, Move has the buttons as well as tracking the controller in the room. So, how could we implement this into Kinect? Sticks with buttons on them would be the obvious choice, but it would perhaps be too obvious.

So, what are the alternatives? Perhaps a glove-type device with buttons on it, or am I looking too far into the future? A normal controller is too impractical to use, so something that you can just hold in one hand would be perfect. A controller in the style of a gun that we could disassemble and fit together in different shapes does sound like a good idea, but I’m honestly not sure how realistic this could be. Another thing is that different games would have to support different types of controllers, so if we were stuck with lots of controllers that each only worked with one game, it would be more cluttered than my room is with Rock Band instruments.

If Kinect actually tracked fingers, I doubt we would need buttons at all; different finger commands could do different things, but there has to be a limit to the technology somewhere, it’s outstanding enough as it is. It’s just that the idea of playing a shooter that tracks your whole body excites me, I’d love to run, jump, take cover and shoot at enemies with a peripheral whilst looking at my TV screen. Implementing button controls would be no harder than implementing them into a normal game, but it would take a lot of time and effort to perfect them for working with the full body tracking. Although, with the open source developing community modifying Kinect to do some insane things on PC, we may end up seeing this (albeit not on Xbox) sooner than we thought.

Another thing that Kinect can do is voice recognition; but I don’t think that this would ever replace buttons in any other genre than RTS and it would have to be perfect with all accents before being good enough to replace them. Pointing and shouting is a good idea in some respects, but still doesn’t meet the requirements of some games; I can’t imagine shouting “Shoot!” at the screen for the character to fire being very realistic. This is also the problem with racing games, holding thin air doesn’t feel quite as realistic as a steering wheel and slamming your feet on a non-existant pedal for acceleration isn’t my cup of tea, I’d rather feel what I’m doing in the game.

In an ideal world, Kinect would track your entire body, fingers and have peripherals that you could actually use to input commands; this would feel completely realistic and we’d have the perfect gaming experience. In the end, I’m wanting too much out of what is already an absolutely amazing piece of technology that’s completely unmatched by anything in its field. I’m very sure that we’ll get some games that include both Kinect body tracking and actual buttons, but it still won’t be perfect for me. The main flaw with Kinect (but it’s probably a fault in myself) is that while it can do a lot of amazing stuff, I still want more. Then again, I still want more out of everything I have; nothing is perfect, but Kinect with the addition of buttons could be extremely close.