they did have rumble on some of the games that helped to give the player a stronger "feel" for a physical interface.

There are certain avid players in the gaming community who actually prefer to play when, uh, *cough* zoned out a little bit. I wonder how these more physically-active controllers are going to affect the play styles/enjoyment of these lovable munchie-craving couch-ridden gamers. :)

That aside, Jenova, I fooled around with both controllers and I have to agree that a little force feedback would have helped the experience, but I think this is where strong sound design and visual design also play a big factor. There are certain movies where you see a guy take a punch and you really feel it even without the seats rumbling or the theater shaking. In lieu of no force feedback, I would be very happy to see designers focus on Suspension of Disbelief, something I've always felt they tend to ignore.

I agree with your opinion. I just feel disappointed to lose one dimension of feedback, which is force. And I know the visual and audio will help. It still makes me feel missing subjectively something. However, human can always adapt to what have been given to them.

When I first tried the Wii-mote I had to admit to myself that I just didn't like using it. I couldn't put my finger on it so I dismissed the feeling as just being used to a traditional controller. I thought that I was being a bad gamer for not wanting change. But this blog has made me see the light. The problem isn't with me, the problem is with the lack of feedback. It's the absense of force that makes the experience of moving the Wii-mote significantly less satisfying than a traditional controller. But now that Nintendo has added the speaker to the Wii-mote, it could very likely solve this problem by giving the player direct audio feedback. Also the Wii-mote has 'rumble' so it can vibrate to give the player even more feedback.

I got to play with a 3d scanner interface that was hookedup to Cloud near e3. Raising arms = faster, lowering arms= slower, tilting bodies = left /right.

It was by far the most intuitive control I've had and the inventors of the interface were impressed about how quickly I ended up learning.

Of course I fly in my dreams every night, descent style, so it's second nature :)

It seems like the Wiimote will support rumble, but not true force feedback, as I think its prohibitively expensive, especially if Nintendo is shipping with two of the controllers in a $250 package.

Jesse makes a great point to the effect of suspension of disbelief, or as I like to think of it in the context of interactivity, the active creation of belief. Consider playing Cloud with the Wiimote, without a gyroscope giving resistance, you don't have direct sense of flying through the air, but you could have a swooping noise come out of the remote in constrast with sounds coming out of the TV. All these things are window dressing however, to the sense the player develops as they wave the thing around and see clear agency: nimbus clouds being conquered, clever patterns being laid out. They begin to believe in their flight, rather than the physicality of the interface device, which is incidentally flying in their hands.

People have said of the controller "I don't know why everyone thinks a controller will change everything, the game is whats most important." While I think they fail to see the opportunities in the controller, they make a good point, the interactivity is the end, the interface device is only the means to get there.

That said, I think the Wiimote would be the ideal interface for Cloud, my little sister might have trouble with the full mouse controls, but the Wiimote makes sense by definition. You swoop it around like a toy airplane in order to control flight, you can't make your design metaphor much more literal.

I think you also put too much stock in physical designs, the Wiimote has already shown great effect in musical games, and it's going to make interactive drama palatable to the masses.

Oh yeah, and as someone with a fair deal of drug experience, I can tell you that moving one's arms isn't a big deal when stoned, in fact, being high makes it a bit more magical. Jesse, I think you unfairly profile stoners, despite raising good points.

The 3D scanner technology sounds as if it plays a lot like the "Nights" level in the Eye Toy "Sega Superstars" game. That controlled superbly, although perhaps due to the nature of the game itself - when flying gracefully through the air, the forces on the player aren't so abrupt.

The concept falls apart slightly in the "Virtua Fighter" level of the game, where the player finds themselves lashing out at thin air in order to beat their opponent. The lack of resistive impact makes punching feel quite ineffective, with no physical cues as to how hard the punch hit.

This problem could certainly affect many of the Wii's games - most of the "Wii Sports" games spring to mind, along with the sword-fighting sections of Red Steel.

Some kind of Powerball-esque gyroscope could help recapture some of this feedback, although I suspect ergonomic and power-supply issues prevented its inclusion. Advances in miniturisation and battery-life technology could make this kind of thing a reality in future. In the meantime, let's hope that the rumble and sound features do a good enough job.

While the issue of physical feedback is concerning, I have to admit that I am more worried that the Wiimote will be used poorly in many games which fall back on gesture recognition approaches. Certainly, the first wave of games fall fowl of this, asking the player to make an arbitrary movement in order to "trigger" a descreet, prescribed verb in the game. Nice for a gimmick, but this doesn't make for the best use of the interface.

The problem with gestures->descreet verbs is two-fold:

1) A massive amount of information is cast aside. All the nuanced movements that the player makes have no affect on the final outcome - they simply have to fit within one range of possibility to trigger the stock verb. That verb carries none of their own expression, personality, or subtlety. It feels less like you're being "listened" to by the game, and more like you're being told to dance, monkey, dance.

2) The verb occurs AFTER the gesture has been recognized - this puts some real lag on the action made. Not a huge issue in games which aren't time critical, but certainly a dampner on games which require fast interactions.

...Not to say that there aren't significant problems with the polar opposite approach: mapping the full range of inputs into a game (I could write a bunch about that, too). But indescreet gestures which trigger descreet verbs are better afforded by conventional buttons, which represent the boolean of "verb is on" and "verb is off" nicely.

And if you need a case study of this, look no further than Darwinia - it initially required you use a gesture based system to select units to build, but augmented this with a very quick keyboard shortcut.

Jenova - force feedback would be lovely, but I think that there are a lot of games possible that simply wouldn't invoke any kind of metaphor/mechanic dissonance. For instance, don't make games with swords... make games with lightsabers (weightless, and cut through goddamn anything - then it's not necessary to model any kind of resistance, since no resistance is implied in the first place... other lightsabers notwithstanding). Or... don't make games with lots of collision in - make space sims, rather than games with solid landscapes. If you don't invite an un-affordable metaphor, and there needn't be an issue.

Aubrey, great comments. I am very much agreed with you on the mapping between gesture and discrete.

If you look at the available Wii titles, Wii sports for example. Bowling and golf are great implementations because player can apply their strength and manipulation into something that actually matters in the game. While tennis is rather a discrete Timing game. The direction and the speed doesn't really map to anything, which obviously made it less fun to wave.

For Wii, a lot of the learning actually happens on the controller while most traditional games happens after the discrete translation. I wonder whether this is going to be a big design transition.

Thanks for the info