VandenBerghe believes that developers have struggled with the transition from restricted analogue control to full-motion control. “For most of early game development, this was all we had,” he explains, pointing towards a digital joystick. “Have you ever fucked up pushing a button? Binary input is like drag racing. You have to hit the accelerator and keep going in a direction and not turn. It's not hard.”
“Then analogue control was introduced, and this sustained us for 15 years. It's worked great. If button pushing is like drag racing, analogue input is like Formula 1. You're still on a track, though, and there are still guard rails. We're in Baha buggy land with motion control. We can go wherever we like. There's not even a finish line. Players can do whatever they want, and they do.”
“Motion control is profoundly different. It's screwed up the entire industry! The most important feature is the absolute, utter lack of guard rails. This turns the human being holding the controller into the constraint, and this makes a designer's life a living nightmare.”
During Red Steel 2's testing phase, he attests, players absolutely could not figure out how to do the motions that the game required of them, falling back on either wild slashing or Wii-player waggling. “The result was chaos. Absolute random chaos. People would drop the controller in disgust, tell us the Wii MotionPlus doesn't work, that's what people would say. Of course it works. It works just fine. We were making the mistake.”
The solution, as VandenBerghe's team discovered, is in teaching players how to play with more than just arbitrary tutorials. “ We make lessons, not tutorials. We are teachers, not designers. This is how you teach karate, it's how you teach dance, it's how you teach any physical activity. When you're learning a physical skill, boredom is the target,” he jokes. “It's the goal. When you're player's going okay, I get it, it means that it's in their brain.”
VandenBerghe talked at length about the underlying problems behind Red Steel 2's lacklustre sales figures – the game only managed 270,000 worldwide, he claimed. As well as the restrictions of being single-platform and requiring a peripheral, he thinks it has a lot to do with players themselves. “I isolated this factor called audience willingness. There is a small group of people that is willing to get up and move and exert themselves for fun ... We had to ask ourselves: how many gamers are willing to move? I don't know how many there are, but it's no higher than 20 per cent. That's actually probably optimistic.”
It's a problem that can only be addressed, he thinks, as motion control becomes more universal. VandenBerghe's hope for the future is that motion control will become standard, which would take away the restrictions that prevent titles like Red Steel 2 from selling to their potential. “Things might suck now, but I think they'll get better,” he grins. “If they put motion control standard in the box, suddenly the model expands. THAT is money.
“My recommendation to you is that you should ship on multiple platforms. Nobody will want you to. Sony won't, Microsoft won't, Nintendo won't. But the market will... Many genres will remain unchanged, and some people will still not want to exert themselves. But if the hardware remains an add-on, motion control will remain niche.”