These questions and others will keep academics circa 3009 well occupied. But here in 2009, I find myself wondering whose user interface tastes will define the next decade. By the time I came to gaming in 1999, the dual analogue stick controller was establishing itself as the leader thanks to Sony’s upstart PlayStation increasing its lead over the singlestick N64. Everyone learned their lesson during the next generation and brought dual analogues to market – except Sega, and we all know how that story ends. Meanwhile, SCEE took some chances (EyeToy Play, SingStar, Buzz!), creating a PAL success story that has yet to be reproduced elsewhere on the same scale.
And what would an interface-centric perspective tell us about this generation so far? Its terrific Xbox Live suite of services notwithstanding, Microsoft has, until this year’s E3, focused on mimicking Sony’s established interface victories as ruthlessly as the T-1000 morphed into a variety of humans. Sony’s EyeToy became Microsoft’s Xbox Live Vision Camera. Buzz! became Scene It. SingStar became Lips. But while Microsoft zigged with and ultimately past Sony, Nintendo zagged its way to the market-leading position with its Remote, Balance Board and additional gestural precision in MotionPlus. And while Sony and Microsoft rushed to zag at E3 2009 with their advances on gestural control – it’s telling that neither company felt that it could wait for the launch of its next machine to guarantee a 1:1 tie ratio – Nintendo zigged with its tell-don’t-show announcement of the Wii Vitality Sensor.
The point of my history lesson is this: we’ve been so conditioned to follow the ups, downs, ins and outs of the console wars that we pay much less attention to the interface wars – which don’t always play out as zero-sum games of winners and loses. Sometimes there’s no real competition on the field: while the EyeToy, SingStar and Buzz! controllers were primarily single-region smashes that spawned subsequent me-too rivals, the Wii Balance Board was a global hit that has yet to be imitated. Not only does the board now represent a platform of its own, spawning thirdparty successes like Jillian Michaels’ Fitness Ultimatum 2009 and Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout that have yet to be ported to opposing consoles; in fact, the entire fitness genre appears to be passing Microsoft and Sony by. Contrast that with what could have easily become a prolonged cold war between Activision and MTV Games over plastic instrument interoperability. Instead, cooler heads prevailed and, today, Rock Band and Guitar Hero devices play nicely together. It’s something to think about the next time you see Silicon Knights president Denis Dyack being criticised for predicting a one-console future.
The lesson, then, from this generation of hardware will likely prove to be that while networking innovation like Xbox Live’s community and services helped redistribute market share among the two dual-stick consoles from Sony to Microsoft, it is interface innovation that has genuinely expanded the market and moved Nintendo from last to first. And if I’m right, it could explain why the most troubled platform of all – in North America and large swaths of Europe, at any rate – is the one that’s undergone the least interface innovation of all. For all of the advances the PC has seen in 3D graphics and networking, it has experienced precious little progression on the interface side of things, where the mouse and keyboard have dominated for aeons, and the peak of invention was adding support for the 360 controller.
I don’t expect this state of affairs to change any time in the near future, nor do I expect traditional PC game publishers to take the interface evolution baton and run with it. At the Lunch With Luminaries during the 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Blizzard executive vice president Rob Pardo told a small group of journalists that his company would continue to focus on the PC because its games were best suited to a mouse and keyboard, and that until the console makers delivered a more suitable standard interface, it was highly unlikely that his company would change its stance. Afterwards, I asked him whether Activision Blizzard’s success with Guitar Hero had gotten him to consider creating his own plastic peripheral so that he could bring World Of WarCraft or StarCraft II to consoles without compromise. He said no, he hadn’t considered it. Short-sighted? I’d say so, though Blizzard’s billions might argue otherwise. But by the year 3000 or so, we’ll know who was right.
N’Gai Croal is a writer and videogame design consultant. You can follow him online at ncroal.tumblr.com.