Not all games are played on a sofa or at a desk. Electronic entertainment has grown to have a plethora of ways to interact. Motion Detection, Dance Pads, electronic instruments and other forms of control have found some serious success and carved out a decent chunk of the market with these titles. Just like how a lot of "passive" games were first developed to showcase the computing power of new machines, a lot of games have been made and many have found success showing new technologies, in particular motion detection. So, let's get personal.
Personally, I hate this stuff. I do not enjoy playing games on these sort of systems. On the Wii, the titles always felt silly to me, and things like Wii Sports and Mario Kart are for a different sort of person than myself. The Kinect was pretty bad at doing most things, and required obnoxious amounts of space to function at all. Guitar Hero and their many variants and Rock Band spin off things I never had any reason to play. Just like with Wii Sports, I can just as easily go out and do the real thing and enjoy it much more than what can be done with games. If I want to golf, I would rather walk down to the driving range or even just take plastic practice balls out to the yard. When I want to play the guitar, I take out one of the several real instruments that I own and play. When a group of us want to get together in a band, we just did that with our actual instruments in a buddy's garage. So, these things never had much appeal to me. That doesn't mean they are useless, though. I know a lot people really enjoy all these things, and that is great. My family members have always loved being together and playing Just Dance games on the Kinect or Wii, and there are good things to be said about things that can bring groups of people together. But I personally would rather not ever play them. So I do not.
Different ways of interacting with technology a bit of buzz, especially since different people are different and enjoy different things. I hate Guitar Hero, but I know there is a group of friends of mine playing Rock Band down the hall right now. And that is great, there should be these options and different experiences that people can have. Looking forward, the push seems to be for Virtual and Augmented Reality systems. Developers want to bring users even closer to the experiences than was ever possible before, physically bringing people into the action, and surrounding their senses with it, in the case of VR, or bringing the virtual world into one's perception of reality with AR. I have never used any sort of VR thing, but I am sure there is potential for great success with it. But, seeing as I know nothing about how it works or how it feels to use, I will say little if anything more on the subject. AR, on the other hand, is something I do have some admittedly limited experience with. This comes mostly through Nintendo and Pokemon Go and some simple titles on the 3Ds. It was really awesome to see Pokemon appear out in the real world on my phone's camera. For about 5 minutes. Just like with motion detection and rhythm games gimmicks, when the novelty of the new technology faded, I lost pretty much all interest in using it. It makes for a few interesting and unique moments but honestly did not add anything exceptional or necessary to my gaming experience. The uniqueness of the visual quirks that this gave did not change the fact that what I was playing was not a particularly engaging experience, and I often felt that all of these things rely on the technology to make people interested, and do not do as much actual work giving an entertaining product that utilizes these new technologies to enhance the experience. The games should be using the fancy new tech to enhance their ability to tell their story and engage the audience, rather than just being a skin plastered on a sort of toy. Well, I guess that is just if the companies want me to buy in to this stuff. Clearly they do fine without my personal support, and as long as they stay successful they will continue doing what has made them so.
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