Dear Reader:
The man behind the Wiimote head-tracking speaks
You may not know Johnny Lee by name, but his projects have definitely caused a stir. Most recently, he got a ton of attention over his Wiimote head-tracking video. Now we are all dying for a dev to utilize something like this in a game. Game Informer sat down with the man himself to talk all things Wii.
GI: As a video-game player, what do you think of the gaming landscape now? Do you think there’s an acceptable level of innovation going on in the industry?
Lee: I definitely think that, at least among the traditional gaming platforms—maybe not on the Wii, but on the Xbox and the PlayStation—the way they’re going about providing a gaming experience is sort of an asymptotic experience, where they’re doing a very good job at it, but they’re not really evolving very far beyond that. To me, probably the most interesting stuff that’s going to happen to gaming in the future will be with new ways to control or interact with the system, either physically or using input devices. So actually I think games are one of the most interesting places to explore new computer-interaction techniques. I think the Wii is a particularly good step toward that, but I thing there’s still a long way to go.
I think developers are really excited about trying to explore these new ideas, but some of the skill sets that I think are good at making joypad games are going to take a while to appreciate and flesh out the capabilities of new controllers. Even on the Wii, you can see that some of these games are essentially joypad games that are retrofitted to the Wii controller. It works, but it’s not necessarily the best use of the controller.