I've just been listening to Aoife Wilson and Julia Hardy's debrief on the conferences they've been to...
 
I have to say I am mainly disheartened by what I am hearing.  Microsoft is supposedly really trying to push kinnect forwards and get people to put down their controllers, I believe the exact quote was, 'If you like your controller... Well, tough luck! '
 
I want to be 100% clear about this I genuinely hate Kinnect, with a vengence.  I suppose I can see the reason for it - pressure on the games industry for making kids fat, ho hum, well fair enough... I can't see why kids can't go and play outside for a bit, then have a game before bed?  Or when it's raining?  This idea that everyone should be firing up their console, then leaping about the living room knocking ornaments and drinks off causing havoc every time they want to game - I find frankly stupid.  Due to time constraints, I currently tend to find my game time is restricted to 'the witching hour' when wife and two kids are fast asleep and I feel like chancing the fact that my 2 month old son might wake me up in only 2 hours time...
 
I like to sit down in front of the XBOX 360 with a glass of beer, and sit quietly with my headphones on... And I can do that!  What I couldn't do was start throwing myself around the living room, leaping over the coffee table and waking the entire house up!  I also have serious reservations about the accessibility of Kinnect.   The trouble with Kinnect is you need a lot of space to play it.  Okay, games have moved from the bedroom into the living room, but anyone living in a terraced house will only have a 12' x 12' living room... I built my own house and the living room is about 11' x 19' and I don't think there's really enough room to play Kinnect in my living room... So is gaming going to become a luxury for people who can strip a room of furniture and make it into a gaming room or who have 15' x 24' living rooms?  I can see Kinnect might be popular with some people, kids, non-gamers, casual gamers... But I suspect many of these people will eventually want to progress to a gaming with more substance and depth - and at the moment that isn't something covered by Kinnect, and I'd like to think I'll still be able to sit down at night for a game in 5 years time... These elements of the gaming demographic may also get to a stage when the kids have gone to bed, and there's nothing on the television, so they feel like a game - if all that's available is Kinnect games then that might not be possible.
 
So what do I do make the switch and go Sony?  Thanks, but no thanks, this idea that everything has to be 3D is stupid... I really think it needs re-thinking.  I don't want to put some stupid glasses is on to play a game, 3D environments is fine for me... I don't want to have to take two Nurofen before every gaming session to pre-emptively attack the bouts of headaches and nausea...
 
I'm all for innovation and experimentation, but these things can go too far - who can remember the runaway success of the Nintendo Power Glove and Virtual Boy? 
 
What happened to sitting down and making a cracking game?  That's it - no stupid, pointless bizarre way of controlling the action, no really clever new way of presenting the graphics (Anyone remember those Virtual Reality Arcade Games that popped in the 90's?  They stood the test of time...) just a damn good game, with decent graphics, an absorbing story and interesting and solid core mechanics?
 
I suppose it could be that the big companies are going where the money is, or where they percieve it to be.  However I think that's a dangerous move.  The casual gamer, doesn't want to spend part of their regular incomes on games, it's more likely the hobby or hardcore gamer who will pre-order a new release during the middle of the year because they're excited about it - the casual gamer will tend to wait for Christmas or a Birthday, and if they don't get drawn into gaming so they evolve into something of a hobby gamer - then interest tends to wane.  Alot of the casual games and innovation control systems seem to rely on the novelty factor, and novelty wears off.
 
I used to like the SNES, but I really don't like the direction Nintendo took, it followed the money I suppose... And did very well out of it - but I still don't think it's sustainable... Unless I'm wrong and that is the direction that gaming can go in - but it feels like the big three are getting ready to shove us there whether we want it or not.  As the casual game model rises in popularity, complex, in depth lengthy games might become less commercially viable, and where will we be left then?  And sometimes, chasing the money can alienate your customerbase so much it kills your product.
 
I've brought it up time and time again, but I think this is partly what happened with the original Star Wars Galaxies, they wanted the success of WoW (World of Warcraft), they thought they should have more subscribers so they WoW'ified the game.  Nobody left WoW to play Star Wars Galaxies, all that happened was a lot of people left Star Wars Galaxies to play WoW.  How Sony Online Entertainment thought this would work is beyond me, to rush out a more or less entire new game using the old games graphics in six weeks or so - to try and take on a game which was developed over a period of over two years by a company (Blizzard) who basically only release something if it's polished, bug-free and guarunteed to get a metascore of over 85%... 

So I've ranted and bitched about what the big three are doing, what I haven't done is offered an alternative.   I could say I'd like bigger, more complex games with more depth and with branching and fold-back narrative structures - but these are going to be more time-consuming to develop than some stupid 3 screen, motion controlled bowling simulator that is less accurate than telling the time by licking your finger and holding it in the air... But both games will retail at £39.99... If you were developing a game which do you think would be easier to make money with?
 
Really, I'd like to see Video Games seen as a serious art form, and they can be to a degree, Limbo by Playdead is a work of art, you might even argue games like Modern Warfare or LA Noire constitute art in a different way.  
 
Something like 'Kinnect Rafting Adventures' is NOT art... It's a stupid interractive exercise routine that you might enjoy if you are five or don't have all your faculties...
 
We'll see how the rest of the show shapes up, it's my birthday later this week, and I suspect I'm getting LA Noire and Duke Nukem Forever so I should have a good taste of where the games industry is at from that... I'm particularly interested in DNF for the fact that it took so long to develop and it has been ported across about six different 3D engines... LA Noire, I think represents Rockstar maturing and taking things to a new level, at least from what I know about the game - I'm really excited to play both of these titles.... What I'm not excited about is finding out about the latest releases for Kinnect or Wii, if I wanted to jump around the living room,  flailing my arms and legs about, I'd take a few Ecstacy tabs and some LSD, then put some Techno on in the living room and get someone to flick the lightswitch off and on really quickly... And that'd probably be a 'more fun' option...