I’m trying my best to reconcile my blistering rage regarding Microsoft’s application of the Kinect versus my amazement at the hardware itself. It’s hard to argue with impressive technology, but from watching today’s white-knuckled attempt at convincing gamers that the Kinect experience is a match made in heaven with traditional gaming, I had to take a long walk around the block and listen to several creepily relaxing self-help tapes to bring my blood out of a boiling state.

Microsoft and its partners are making babbling cavemen out of people, and trying to sell it as though it is the future. It goes right against everything I feel is central to being a modern human being, so much so I actually feel it’s an anti-human movement to try and spread this philosophy among consumers.

Language is about symbols. Words are a mechanism for describing a symbol, and the spoken word is a physical abstraction. Throughout human history the ability to convey concepts and ideas effectively have been at the vanguard of the evolution of human society; The ability for a people to carry and learn from their history is why we are where we are today. The abstraction of symbols and the ability to argue their meaning is literally what separates man from other animals, and as we’ve become more and more modern, the natural evolution is one of further abstraction; The evolution of language has been about efficiency and precision, and in generalizing language to the point where the symbols themselves need little translation to be understood across borders. In spite of all snobbery, the smiley face is a genius invention of written language, and it happened organically. A symbol for sarcasm, for disdain, for sadness. You can convey so much information with so little effort.

Programming is a wonderful metaphor as well, giving you not only the power to engineer complicated mechanisms from symbols, must allows you to define the symbols for yourself. It’s an art of pure language, and every seasoned developer knows the typed words are a means to an end; The more you do it, the less you want to type. You just want to get right at those symbols and craft.

Controllers are a generalized, efficient method of interacting with the symbols of the virtual game space. The symbols of alphabetized buttons, the control stick and the digital pad have, with the history of video game culture, matured to the point where a player versed in the symbology can make assumption as to their meaning within a given context. When Halo revolutionized the twin-stick control scheme now common to first person games on consoles, it was the dawn of a new dialect. A new configuration of known symbols that would enter our common language.

There is a purity, a beauty to the evolution of the game controller, because it has evolved alongside the demands of game developers and game players, with occasional mutations bringing about change. If you want signs of true divergence between the major players in the console scene, look no further than how they have handled their controllers. Whenever a new system comes out, the question is always; How will we talk to it? For me, personally, the hope is always that the controller will become less noticeable, for the sake of immersion. I want a beautiful, seamless experience.

But the Kinect is an absolute aberration in this regard. Never in the history of video games have players yearned for less responsiveness, less feedback, and more exertion, yet Microsoft seem to think removing nearly every sense that makes us human is the future of immersion. The idea that taking  the player’s physical space into the virtual brings an experience closer to reality is an absolute insanity, because as much as the brain wants to make the body believe, the body simply will not. Ask a piano player to play a beautiful piece of music on a piano that plays the keys 100 milliseconds after they are hit. No matter how much mental conditioning you go through, the shift in perception will never, EVER make for a natural experience.

But the latency is the innocent tip of the treacle-slow iceberg of hopeless bullshit Microsoft are attempting to foist on us. Voice control, another fallacy and fantasy of hopeless technicians and scientists without a vibrant soulful bone in their bodies, not only drags us kicking and screaming back to the spoken word, but it actually makes the spoken word worse. You are now expected to speak in a stilted made-up inhuman dialect that would only be made acceptable if it came from a particularly excellent Christopher Walken impersonator.

Today’s Star Wars Kinect demo, where a player shouts in an unnaturally enunciated voice, “light saber, on!”, sums up the futility of the spoken word in a context where tactile response and immediacy is the key to every possible shred of immersion the experience has to offer. Bioware’s demo of voice recognition in Mass Effect 3 was a staggering display of stupidity; Who are these blithering idiots who believe I want to introduce even an lighting flash of a second’s worth of my own physical body into a video game role playing experience? Stephen Totilo asks; What if I’m playing a female character? Consider too that you are holding the controller in your hands as you are expected to say these words, in the slow enunciated fashion the technology requires. You are a BUTTON PRESS away from making a statement and getting on with your life, immersion intact.

(It’s all I can do not to break down and lose faith altogether. I thought game developers and designers were smart people! When I was a kid I thought those guys and gals were wicked space wizards who wanted nothing more than to blow my fucking mind, and here you are, making yourself, and your audience, look like bumbling morons. Game developers need to take a stand here.)

But Kinect goes below and beyond perverting an art form. As designers make moves to craft custom experiences that “make the most of the hardware”, the true weakness, and true evil of the technology, becomes apparent: There is not a single Kinect-centric experience now, or upcoming, that does not reduce its users to cave men. Without fingers, a sense of touch, a sense of feedback, and without the ability to even communicate like normal human beings in the language of our choice, Kinect reduces us to invalids, unable to attain mastery beyond the confines of a technology that operates primarily on guesswork and heuristics.

Kinect is a devolving necromancy,  old discarded tissue brought back like a cancer to slowly poison a beautiful, pure language that has evolved organically since the very beginning of the industry. While I love working and playing with the hardware on my PC, as a gamer for most of my life, and especially as someone who loves language, I fucking hate the Kinect so, so much, and everything it stands for. It’s fucking vile. If there is any Darwinistic justice, this experiment will be aborted and discarded like the weakening mutation it is.

I’m trying my best to reconcile my blistering rage regarding Microsoft’s application of the Kinect versus my amazement at the hardware itself. It’s hard to argue with impressive technology, but from watching today’s white-knuckled attempt at convincing gamers that the Kinect experience is a match made in heaven with traditional gaming, I had to take a long walk around the block and listen to several creepily relaxing self-help tapes to bring my blood out of a boiling state.

Microsoft and its partners are making babbling cavemen out of people, and trying to sell it as though it is the future. It goes right against everything I feel is central to being a modern human being, so much so I actually feel it’s an anti-human movement to try and spread this philosophy among consumers.

Language is about symbols. Words are a mechanism for describing a symbol, and the spoken word is a physical abstraction. Throughout human history the ability to convey concepts and ideas effectively have been at the vanguard of the evolution of human society; The ability for a people to carry and learn from their history is why we are where we are today. The abstraction of symbols and the ability to argue their meaning is literally what separates man from other animals, and as we’ve become more and more modern, the natural evolution is one of further abstraction; The evolution of language has been about efficiency and precision, and in generalizing language to the point where the symbols themselves need little translation to be understood across borders. In spite of all snobbery, the smiley face is a genius invention of written language, and it happened organically. A symbol for sarcasm, for disdain, for sadness. You can convey so much information with so little effort.

Programming is a wonderful metaphor as well, giving you not only the power to engineer complicated mechanisms from symbols, must allows you to define the symbols for yourself. It’s an art of pure language, and every seasoned developer knows the typed words are a means to an end; The more you do it, the less you want to type. You just want to get right at those symbols and craft.

Controllers are a generalized, efficient method of interacting with the symbols of the virtual game space. The symbols of alphabetized buttons, the control stick and the digital pad have, with the history of video game culture, matured to the point where a player versed in the symbology can make assumption as to their meaning within a given context. When Halo revolutionized the twin-stick control scheme now common to first person games on consoles, it was the dawn of a new dialect. A new configuration of known symbols that would enter our common language.

There is a purity, a beauty to the evolution of the game controller, because it has evolved alongside the demands of game developers and game players, with occasional mutations bringing about change. If you want signs of true divergence between the major players in the console scene, look no further than how they have handled their controllers. Whenever a new system comes out, the question is always; How will we talk to it? For me, personally, the hope is always that the controller will become less noticeable, for the sake of immersion. I want a beautiful, seamless experience.

But the Kinect is an absolute aberration in this regard. Never in the history of video games have players yearned for less responsiveness, less feedback, and more exertion, yet Microsoft seem to think removing nearly every sense that makes us human is the future of immersion. The idea that taking  the player’s physical space into the virtual brings an experience closer to reality is an absolute insanity, because as much as the brain wants to make the body believe, the body simply will not. Ask a piano player to play a beautiful piece of music on a piano that plays the keys 100 milliseconds after they are hit. No matter how much mental conditioning you go through, the shift in perception will never, EVER make for a natural experience.

But the latency is the innocent tip of the treacle-slow iceberg of hopeless bullshit Microsoft are attempting to foist on us. Voice control, another fallacy and fantasy of hopeless technicians and scientists without a vibrant soulful bone in their bodies, not only drags us kicking and screaming back to the spoken word, but it actually makes the spoken word worse. You are now expected to speak in a stilted made-up inhuman dialect that would only be made acceptable if it came from a particularly excellent Christopher Walken impersonator.

Today’s Star Wars Kinect demo, where a player shouts in an unnaturally enunciated voice, “light saber, on!”, sums up the futility of the spoken word in a context where tactile response and immediacy is the key to every possible shred of immersion the experience has to offer. Bioware’s demo of voice recognition in Mass Effect 3 was a staggering display of stupidity; Who are these blithering idiots who believe I want to introduce even an lighting flash of a second’s worth of my own physical body into a video game role playing experience? Stephen Totilo asks; What if I’m playing a female character? Consider too that you are holding the controller in your hands as you are expected to say these words, in the slow enunciated fashion the technology requires. You are a BUTTON PRESS away from making a statement and getting on with your life, immersion intact.

(It’s all I can do not to break down and lose faith altogether. I thought game developers and designers were smart people! When I was a kid I thought those guys and gals were wicked space wizards who wanted nothing more than to blow my fucking mind, and here you are, making yourself, and your audience, look like bumbling morons. Game developers need to take a stand here.)

But Kinect goes below and beyond perverting an art form. As designers make moves to craft custom experiences that “make the most of the hardware”, the true weakness, and true evil of the technology, becomes apparent: There is not a single Kinect-centric experience now, or upcoming, that does not reduce its users to cave men. Without fingers, a sense of touch, a sense of feedback, and without the ability to even communicate like normal human beings in the language of our choice, Kinect reduces us to invalids, unable to attain mastery beyond the confines of a technology that operates primarily on guesswork and heuristics.

Kinect is a devolving necromancy,  old discarded tissue brought back like a cancer to slowly poison a beautiful, pure language that has evolved organically since the very beginning of the industry. While I love working and playing with the hardware on my PC, as a gamer for most of my life, and especially as someone who loves language, I fucking hate the Kinect so, so much, and everything it stands for. It’s fucking vile. If there is any Darwinistic justice, this experiment will be aborted and discarded like the weakening mutation it is.