Yes, I think that’s a decent way of looking at it. All these new, supposedly more “friendly” control schemes aren’t really acting as such. They are still forcing new players to remove their preconcieved attachment to, say, swinging a tennis racket, and replacing it with a more standard video game approach in order to get anywhere. They’re essentially just pushing buttons, in the end.
That’s not an issue with the Wii as such, I don’t think, as much as it is with the dumb, overly abstract way things are being designed. What I’ve noticed is that few Wii games either detect the Wiimote in realspace and realtime (as Boxing and Baseball do) or simply use the Wiimote for what it’s worth in added nuance (like an analog stick or trigger, only way more so). Instead, they’re just replacing buttons with gestures and canned animations. It’s frustrating to see — and not even so much as an end product as in what that product shows about how unable game designers currently are, en masse, to wrap their heads around the bleedin’ obvious.
Red Steel is a pretty good example. Instead of giving the player a sword and a gun, and letting him gradually learn how to use them properly — teaching new techniques and whatnot as the game progresses, staggering out “assignments” of sorts (not literal ones) over the game’s story, to allow players to get accustomed to some key concepts of swordfighting or shooting or mixing the two — you tell him to move the controller like this to make this animation happen, and maybe earn new gestures as the game progresses. What the hell? How could you possibly screw this up?
Though this is one of the more obvious examples, you’ll see this problem in pretty much all Wii games currently available — and indeed, in Gamer and press discussion about the system. You can see people straining their imaginations to figure out something to do with the system, and it doesn’t work. Either you get gimmicks or you get phantom buttons. Digital do-or-don’t.
It’s… really not that hard! The Wii really suggests two things: added nuance to traditional games (instead of just doing X, you can do X in any number of ways; the way the game plays changes dynamicly to match your body language) and giving the player true first-person control, for all the subtlety that implies, with a minimum of abstraction, over a certain range of motions. The advantage here is the ability to explore concepts with an organicity impossible with just a digital player involvement — again, making people really learn how to use a sword (more or less) rather than simply pressing buttons or making gestures to cause an on-screen character to do something.
Instead of the player’s avatar developing and learning new things as an abstraction of progress, and instead of learning complex arbitrary and abstract gestures (like moves in a fighting game), the player himself or herself physically learns how to produce difficult, subtle actions that have a tangible result in the gameworld to whatever degree of skill the player posesses.
Imagine a fighting trainer. The wiimote is exchanged for four sensor bands, strapped to each of the player’s wrists and shins, as well as perhaps a belt to provide a center reference point (and perhaps force feedback for when the player receives a blow). The game gradually metes out concepts to the player — not just to improve mechanical technique and to teach new maneuvers; also to improve the way the player mentally contextualizes all of this. It could to some extent teach the art of fighting as well as the science — or at least a reasonable enough facimile for verisimilitude. Likewise, completely new skill sets with no real-world parallel could be devised for the player — so long as they were produced and could be reproduced in a believable and nuanced way.
Games that involve physical concepts would use the Wiimote physically, as above; games that involve more abstract or intellectual ones would use it more abstractly — closer to how we normally think about playing videogames, except with an added layer of capability. Press forward to walk; tilt the controller subtly forward to jog or run forward; tilt it subtly back to creep; tilt it left or right (while still holding forward) to sway or dodge in those directions. The way this should be balanced, the player shouldn’t be expected to physically, consciously tilt the controller so much as the game should respond to slight changes in the player’s posture — those little subvoluntary movements that we make when we want the avatar to behave in a certain way — go faster, hold back, watch out! Excite Truck sort of tries to do this, though it doesn’t seem to be executed as well as it could be.
Likewise, a whole range of related motions could easily be mapped to a single button — much like the state-shifting afforded by shoulder buttons, except intrinsicly analog. Press the button to execute a punch; when pressing the button, move or position the Wiimote this or the other way way to punch in different ways for a subtly different effect. Flick the tip up for an uppercut, say. Imagine the way a Silent Hill 2 or a Metal Gear Solid could take advantage of this subtlety and flexibility — the way it could read into the player’s body language and movement patterns and extrapolate a certain level of psychology from them, to make unseen behind-the-scenes decisions.
This is a pretty damned important breach we’re crossing, here — and we’ve been given a decent, if somewhat rickety, bridge. Yet so far people are just laying the bridge on the ground and using it as a replacement for a sidewalk or a new kind of a bed, or trying to figure out really clever pieces of playground equipment they could turn it into. I kind of hope people get more smart, before the novelty wears off.
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