A Sustainable Train of Thought

I was in San Francisco this afternoon and decided to stop by the Sony Metreon while on the way to meet some friends for dinner. Turns out the Metreon has about seven Playstation 3 machines in a roped-off area. I stuck around and played three games: a basketball game, Genji (a sword-fighting game), and an off-road racing game. The basketball game was pretty much just like every other basketball game I’ve ever played, except perhaps for prettier graphics. The off-road racing game was probably the best of the three games with some great graphics, but it’s not exactly a unique genre and the game-play wasn’t exactly ground-breaking either.

The sword-fighting game Genji deserves its own paragraph. Unbelievably, I managed to freeze this game: my character walked into another room and the game froze—the attendant had to get some keys to open the case to push the restart button. Prior to the game freezing, it seemed like it consisted of ten seconds of sword-fighting, a break while the PS3 loaded up a cut scene, then another break while the PS3 played the cut scene, then more loading before I spent another ten seconds fighting, a break while the PS3 loaded up a new room for me to enter, etc. While this behavior was most noticeable on Genji, the load times for the other games tended to be long enough to be annoying.

I’m not saying that the PS3 doesn’t have some strong points, such as amazing graphics: I briefly played some PS2 game at another station and can attest to the glaring difference between platforms (unless the PS2 games are somehow down-sampled to make the PS3 look even better). I am saying, however, that the novelty of amazing graphics wears off eventually, and in the end you’re left with a console that doesn’t really offer anything new in the way of unique interactions.

Contrast this state of affairs with the Wii, which offers a unique input system and focuses on game-play. Let’s see…a basketball game that has really great graphics, but requires me to shoot the ball through some combination of button presses and joystick movements….or a basketball game that lets me shoot the ball using a throwing motion via the “joystick”. I think the latter case takes the prize as an example of innovation.

It seems obvious now that the people who worked on the PS3 were obsessed with the machine: it’s got great graphics, I’m sure it’s powerful as heck, and it’s got all the technical features which say “next generation console”. But somewhere along the line they forgot that humans interface with this amazing machine. If anything, the phenomenal response to the Wii by all ages is a sign of how starved people are for unique interactions with what we might consider everyday devices.

While it’s certainly too soon to tell, it very well may be that the Wii has ushered in a new era of interaction. As we all know, economics consists of a dynamic between supply and demand, and until this moment I think there has been an abundance of supply (concepts for new interactions with electronic devices, for example) without a clear sense of the potential demand for that supply. The Wii justifies Nintendo’s efforts and it justifies our efforts as interaction designers. Demand does exist. People are excited by new, compelling interactions. Products and services can be successfully differentiated through the quality of their interactions.

After this evening, I think that Sony has found itself walking down the well-trodden path of conventional wisdom, only to find that their map’s a few years out of date. I think the same fate befell Microsoft, although I think they view the new X-Box differently than Sony views its PS3.

I predict that things are going to get interesting in the field of interaction design once these companies (and others) realize exactly what they’re missing! And even if it takes them a long time, the people have been woken, their curiosity piqued, their desires given form.

It’s an interesting time to be an interaction designer…