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2007 started well for Sony’s new
motion-sensitive Sixaxis PS3
controller. On 8 January, Sony
announced that it had been
“recognised by the National Academy
of Television Arts & Sciences with a
Technology and Engineering Emmy
Award for the PlayStation 3 computer
entertainment system’s Sixaxis wireless
controller.” After that, the Sixaxis began
experiencing a distinct and persistent
downward motion.
On 9 January it emerged that Sony
had made a mistake, and that the
Emmy had, in fact, been awarded for the
DualShock controller, the one featuring
rumble technology that, at the time,
Sony had no legal right to use. But
that’s another story.
This story is about how most PS3
games tried to make some use of the
Sixaxis controls, but all except one had
us heading straight for the ‘OFF’ option
immediately after trying it once. The
other one, namely Lair, didn’t have
an ‘OFF’ option.
The fact is that only one game has so
far dared to push Sixaxis to the forefront
of its gameplay, and a second has yet to
be announced. It won’t have helped that
Lair was a critical and commercial flop,
but even before Factor 5 unleashed its
unwieldy beast on to the world, it was
pretty obvious that no one else seemed
to give a flying Nunchuk about the PS3’s
Sixaxis control.
But why not? Nintendo’s Wii is
currently dominating the console
market and that’s all about motion
control. So people like motion
control, right? Yeah, they do, but
they apparently like it much better on
consoles and games the design of which
has been centred on motion control
from day one. And as PlayStation boss
Kaz Hirai himself puts it, the PlayStation
controller has always been “an evolving
peripheral, in that we started out with
the original PSone controller with no
analogue, and it’s come all the way to
this point.” But ironically it’s this idea,
that ‘evolving’ somehow means the
same as ‘refusing to re-invent’, which
has jammed the PlayStation controller
into an evolutionary rut. A rut in which
its most celebrated feature is not a new
addition, but one invented (by someone
else) two generations ago. One that
should have been on the PlayStation 3
all along anyway.
There is a future for motion control
on the PlayStation 3, but not as part of a
device that has been very carefully and
purposefully designed to play games
in a distinctly non-motion-sensitive
way. Give us something that feels like
it is meant to be waved around and
we will happily wave it around. Until
then we’ll be enjoying “real-time and
high-precision interactive play” via the
“natural and intuitive movements” of
our thumbs. |
