Cross-Cultural Blog

Link to article: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijcgt/2008/539078.html

The Nintendo Wii was the main inspiration for the paper, with the researchers commenting that the for the Wii it was “undoubtedly its innovative controller functionality that has proved its most attractive feature.” In the paper, the researchers test the feasibility of turning the mobile phone into a new game controller modeled after the Wii remote that would bring gaming out of the home and into public spaces, raising games to new levels of accessibility and social interaction. To prove their point, they ran tests on the Nokia 5500 model, which has motion-sensing devices just like the Wii remote, produce a game that runs on this system and conducted a trial run of the game with 30-35 participants.

This article got me really excited, just imagining the way mobile phone game controllers would change the way we play games, which the paper has described as being “a novel interaction mechanism coupled with a fun group activity can provide an enjoyable social experience, with high levels of user interaction.” Just imagine this: walking along the street in a busy city, the big screen to your right suddenly flashes, telling passer-bys to “join in the battle!” Strangers all around you start whipping out their smart phones and they suddenly become your allies as they use their phones to play on the big screen, which many times larger than the biggest screen that you could fit in your living room. This technology not only brings user-game interaction to new levels, but it would effectively incorporate gaming into the lives of everyone, so long as they own a mobile phone.

Besides the hypothetical situation that I described earlier based on my reading of the research paper, another point in the paper that is essentially the same as one of my arguments for gaming peripherals was in the quote from an interview by Kenji Hall for Business Week in November 2006 with Shigeru Miyamoto:

“The classic controller was something we had become fond of and gamers had become comfortable with. It had many important elements. But it also had come to dictate a lot of what went into games—the way graphics were made, the way battles were fought in role-playing games, the arc of in-game stories. They were all being made to fit one standard. Creativity was being stifled, and the range of games was narrowing.”

The final statement caught my attention, as it captured the same thoughts that I had about why the development of gaming peripherals was so important in the success of video games. Gaming peripherals had to evolve and radiate in order to provide game developers with new opportunities to design games tat could be played in novel ways that are more attractive than the pre-existing ones. Studying the evolution of gaming peripherals would therefore be an important step in analyzing and predicting the types of games that would become successful in the future.

The mobile phone controller is just one of the many possibilities in the future of gaming peripherals. It is in this excitement that I would be continuing my research to show the impact of developments in gaming peripherals on games in the past and present, and thus prove that it is the main driving force behind successful game development