Today was a busy day. In addition to the Sony keynote which I talked about earlier, I also made it to two other sessions. The first was Game Design Considerations for Alternate Controllers. It was a talk given by a couple of guys from Harmonix, a company we all know I love, Greg LoPiccolo and Ryan Lesser.
They talked about three of their games, Karaoke Revolution, Antigrav, and Guitar Hero (yay!), and the different controllers used in each. One of the early points they made that was quite interesting is how traditional controllers (ie the PS2 Dual Shock) can be quite intimidating. Your girlfriend doesn’t want to pick one up. Your mom doesn’t want to. Hell, I have a co-worker who loves Harmonix games and is a total gamer who doesn’t want to pick on up either. He says he just doesn’t like them.
The microphone is something everyone can understand - just pick it up and start singing. Another interesting story was how the first version of Karaoke Revolution shipped with a headset mic, similar to that used for voice chat in other games. They implied that this was for reasons determined by their publisher - they really wanted to use a handheld mic (I’m guessing the fact that a handheld mic has such a limited application was the issue - they didn’t want to go into production of the thing if it couldn’t be used for something else). Apparently, when they actually managed to get it shipping with the handheld mic there was a huge leap in understanding from the consumers and the sales went up.
Next up was Anti-grav. This game came out of a desire to make something that used the eyetoy as a controller in an innovative way. It was an interesting section of the talk, but I haven’t actually played the game, so maybe took a few less notes than for Karaoke and Guitar Hero 
One interesting technical bit was that they were only tracking the players face and hands. The game would instruct the player to crouch down, and because the head is attached to the body (hey, who knew?), they could figure out you were crouching. They had no feet data, because most eyetoys are placed such that the feet aren’t in the frame. All that stuff is driven just off your head and hands. Pretty darn cool.
Lastly, my most recent Harmonix love, Guitar Hero. They talked about how their goal wasn’t to simulate playing guitar, but to give the feeling of being a Rock&Roll guitar player. That’s awesome, because that’s totally what they did. Whenever I play the game and I’m doing well, I feel like a rock star - not like a guitar virtuoso, but a rock star. They mentioned that they had played around with a mode that let the player do solos and improvise, but they had cut this mode for a number of reasons. And that someone would be demoing this at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop session later in the day. *scratch scratch woosh* That’s the sound of me scribbling out the session I had been planning to attend and circling the EGW instead.
That’s about it for that talk. It was interesting, and I liked their points about how they designed their games and their controllers. First, they decide what they want the player experience to be. Then they decide what they should be using as the controller. It makes a lot of sense when you spell it out like that.