Game for a new level?

Kinect was a hit with casual gamers – longer-term Xbox owners were harder to impress. New games are more nuanced

MICROSOFT’S KINECT control system for the Xbox is a good illustration of how technology can swiftly go from futuristic to commonplace.

This time last year, at a preview event in Dublin, tech journalists marvelled at the new games control system. Gone were the wands and controllers of old; instead, a camera on top of the Xbox 360 console picked up your body’s movements and the onscreen avatar mimicked them. People compared it to the interface used in Minority Report. (When a new gadget is likened to something from futuristic sci-fi, it’s on the right track.)

Kinect went on to sell over 10 million units worldwide, having entered the Guinness Book of Records for the fastest-selling electronics consumer device in history. Like Nintendo’s Wii before it (which was a likely inspiration), the device both opened up the Xbox to a whole new market of casual gamers and brought a new form of physicality to gaming. Sony’s similar Move control system, also launched for the Christmas market of 2010, sold healthily (roughly 9 million sales), and in November last year Nintendo launched a more versatile controller for its Wii – something to tide people over until its next generation console is launched in 2012.

However, while Kinect was a hit with casual gamers and newcomers, longer-term Xbox owners were harder to impress: Kinect games have yet to eclipse controller-based ones, critically and commercially.

That said, recent titles like the psychedelic shooter Child of Edenand western marionette game The Gunstringerhave helped shake off the image of Kinect as a novelty product. And even the more broadly appealing games are becoming more nuanced.

One of the launch titles (and one of its biggest selling) was Kinect Sports,developed by Rare, a subsidiary of Microsoft. Its next big project, Kinect Sports Season 2, is released in November and shows how the technology is progressing.

"With the original Kinect Sportswe set the bar with what was possible with full-body gaming, and it was really about the experience," says Scott Henson, the studio head for Rare. "What we're doing with darts, further refining how we track the hand, is a good example [of progress], or what we're doing with baseball and how accurate it feels when you're swinging the bat … There's a lot of innovation that we've had to learn."

“So what youll see,” he continues, “is that our depth and mastery have improved. And that’s to be expected – we’ve learned about Kinect and what’s possible with it and learned how to do more things.”

As the technology becomes more refined, so does the game-play. Most of the launch titles for Kinect were completely controller-free, but new and forthcoming games are using hybrid controls – requiring a hand-held controller combined with body movement. Now that developers are learning to make Kinect controls more precise (Kinect was criticized in some corners for lack of precision upon its launch), it’s more suited to being used as a hybrid.

On a recent visit to Dublin, Dan Greenawalt, creative director for Turn 10, said he was keen to use Kinect for the highly anticipated racing game, Forza 4."It's interesting," he says, "the process of creative design and incubation around Kinect is entirely new. I've worked on PC and console games and the idea of taking a genre we know about – whether it's PC or 360 – and stuffing it into this new control model and paradigm doesn't work. It just doesn't work. You have to rethink all of your assumptions. That means a lot of throwaway ideas – you come up with ideas that sound brilliant and you write them out on paper and they turn out to be total crap!

“That process is invigorating, it’s really exciting for the team, but it means a lot of new ideas as well. Things like auto vista, Kinect head-tracking, Kinect voice and even Kinect driving – they’re not the same as the controller; they’re for different customers, different goals. It’s a really fun process.”

Greenawalt goes on to describe these new innovations: "Auto vista is unprecedented – this feature where you can open up the car, walk around the car, get some details and hear some of the Top Gearguys give their take on the car … that's brand new and I don't even have an analogy for it – it's not like a website or a video. The process for head-tracking was to videotape people, so we had people come into the office and had them "drive" and we found that people were naturally looking into the corner of the screen as they apex, and when they did that, it's amazing – when your eyes move your head follows, just slightly."

It’s surprising that new products like Kinect are emerging for the Xbox, and that graphics and game-play are still becoming more sophisticated. After all, the machine is now six years old – ages in modern technology terms. Despite that, Greenawalt believes that developers have yet to exploit its full potential: “A lot of people think that the only way to get better graphics is with power. The truth is that more power doesn’t make graphics better; it’s how well you use that power. It’s a blend between having new hardware and optimising your current hardware. Let’s say you’re moving house and you pack all of your things in a van. If you unpack it and put it on the sidewalk and then repack it, magically you’ll find a few extra feet because you’ve optimised your packing. If you keep doing that you’re going to find a little bit more space every time.

“Every time we make a new product we optimise our code, and we find a little bit more headroom and a lot of that comes with sharing with other developers. We work with Havok and Lionhead and other companies. And when they learn new optimisation, we learn, and vice versa. The biggest thing is the approach - like any problem, there are many ways to skin a cat, as the idiom goes…”

Forza 4 will be released next week;Kinect Sports Season 2 will be released on October 28th