Re: gesturing

At 06:23 PM 1/5/2004, you wrote:
>Our current proposed solution is to move the "game" from aiming to firing 
>of the weapon.  We hope to do this with gestures.  This has been done to 
>some extent on the PC in games like Black and White, and also there was a 
>demo at the experimental game workshop at GDC.

Quite simply, I think that while looking for a new control mechanism for 
FPS is a very worthy goal, and trying to put the casual and hardcore gamers 
on more equal footing is probably worth as well, what you're proposing is 
very bad design. I'll try to explain my reasons below.

>What I envision is a system where the firing of the weapon is done with 
>the analog stick such that the more accurately you reproduce the gesture, 
>the better your "shot" is.

So .. you want to exchange hand-eye coordination for manual dexterity and 
pattern replication.

The downside to this is that you take an interface that many people are 
familiar with, and that translates directly with the action the player is 
attempting, and replace it with something very arbitrary and totally 
unrelated to the action at hand. In a very general sense, this is a 
fundamentally bad idea. It's always good design to make the actions on the 
controller mimic the actions taken in the game where possible. Creative 
interfaces for things like casting spells (or whatever the thing was called 
in Black and White) are reasonable because there isn't a direct translation 
and there wasn't a direct interaction with the world.

In other words, it's very clear to a user that when you push a button it 
means, "Shoot what I'm looking at". It's not so clear that making a gesture 
means "Aim for me and shoot".

>   For example, let's say we want to snipe somebody with a rifle. I see my 
> target in my scope and the crosshairs are moving about just like a normal 
> FPS.  Instead of using the analog stick to aim the crosshair at my 
> target, I perfom a "fire" gesture, say a simple clockwise spiral 
> inward.  If I do it 90% or better correctly I get a headshot, 60-90% I 
> get a body shot and 40-60% I get a legshot, less than 40% misses (but I 
> still see some sort of shot fired).  While I complete the gesture the 
> scope locks onto (stops moving) the part of the body I hit so I can see 
> my result.

I see you having many issues with target selection while trying to attack 
moving targets as well as while the player is moving. Not to mention that 
in order for this to work you're going to need to position a view / motion 
with one hand, while performing gestures with another. This means you're 
doing precise motions with two hands at the same time, and this is 
EXTREMELY hard for most people. Normal FPS use a hand to run / move and 
another to aim / fire .. as these are actions we normally do automatically 
in our daily life and are tightly coupled to each other this works 
reasonably well. However, now you're asking people to develop completely 
new skills in an ambidextrous manner ... not a good idea in my book.

>   The advantage is that you can perform the action as slowly or quickly 
> as you want, and we reward the hardcore people who will take the time to 
> learn the gestures well, while not punishing the casual gamer.

How does aiming punish the casual gamer more than your approach? Just like 
your technique, aiming is a skill that gets easier with practice and 
hardcore players will always be better than casual games. The only 
punishment happens when you have hardcore players fighting against casual 
gamers .. and in both scenarios, the casual gamers are going to get spanked.

There's zero advantage here ... you've just make the system much more 
complicated, and if anything, increased the gap between casual and hardcore 
gamers because of the magnitude of the learning curve.

>   The amount of time to do a gesture would be tweaked such that it will 
> be on par with the time to aim (assuming average console gamer) so the 
> other mechanics should be able to be balanced normally.

Part of aiming includes target selection ... I don't see how you plan to 
handle that here. Especially when you have multiple targets on the screen 
and are running around.

>Are there other game mechanics that can be used in place of aiming besides 
>gesturing?

When the game is a shooter ... where in the game you need to shoot things 
... using something other than aiming seems questionable at best.

Tom



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