Mediated Input

Chris DeLeon Jan 2012 Expanded from a paper originally prepared for Dr. Ian Bogosts Philosophy of Sport class

Simulation Test
To test the accuracy and realism of iRacing1 (Motorsport Simulations 2008), the creators of the television show Top Gear contacted the worlds best iRacing driver, Greger Huttu, and put him behind the wheel of a real racecar in Atlanta, Georgia [Read 2010]. Gregers lack of physical preparation to tolerate the Gforces in real racing prematurely ended the event, leading him to give up 15 laps after he first had to stop due to throwing up inside his helmet. Otherwise, his performance was quite good the racing simulation held up well under scrutiny. As Top Gear reported in their online piece, The telemetry confirms it. His braking points are spot on. He's firm and precise on the throttle. And in the fastest corner, he's entering at 100 mph compared to an experienced driver's 110 - a sign of absolute confidence and natural feel for grip. Aside from the need to physically tolerate g-forces, driving a racecar mostly consists of managing the cars input devices steering wheel, accelerator, brakes, and shifter to determine and correct for motions of the car on the track. Further complication arises through the need to account for the positions of other cars, if present, and on longer races managing pit stops by pacing engine heat, fuel consumption, and tire wear. Switching between input devices from videogame peripherals to the real mechanical interface, as Greger experienced on Top Gear, requires the user to acclimate a bit, and to recalibrate the mapping of their intentions to car movements. However the input provided in this case is still the same fundamental kind and complexity, serving to translate and amplify driver intention into changes in vehicle behavior. Moreover, both input and feedback of that inputs effects are fluid and continuous, making it possible to apply real-time corrections: if the driver means to apply a little more force right, or a little more gas or brake, compared to what they witness their current level of input accomplishing, that correction can occur subconsciously within a fraction of a second [Swink 2009; Ericsson 1996].
1

As a point of clarification, despite the i at the start of the title, iRacing is software developed for Windows PC, not for the Apple iPhone or other iOS devices.

Why not use a similar approach to take the worlds best player of Madden NFL 12 (EA 2011) and stick them into an American football game against NFL athletes? To avoid the possibility of failing due to poor physical conditioning, or wrongly matched body type, imagine for sake of argument that our extraordinary Madden player just happens to be a large, strong adult male in peak condition. Perhaps this player is a Special Forces soldier recently returning to civilian life, a professional athlete from another rough sport, or (purely for illustration) someone with Olympic gold medals in both weight lifting and running events. The critical distinction in our case is that this otherwise athletic individual has no prior practice playing American football. It seems very likely that even if the persons heart is in great shape, the persons muscles are properly conditioned, and the players Madden skills are completely unmatched by others, he would nevertheless have next to no ability in the context of professional football. He would need to throw with precision, catch with ease, and manage rapid changes to his bodys movement on the turf without hesitation. In Gregers case with the racecar, he developed skills around feeding the right input and reactions to his computer peripherals. Top Gear simply asked him to adapt from manipulating the controls he knew to manipulating the controls inside an actual car. In both cases, the interface mediates the players input, unambiguously and consistently transforming minimal expression of intention into mechanical realization of that action. Much of the skill in driving a racecar well comes down to being able, in real-time, to appropriately judge how much to accelerate, brake, shift gears, and redirect the tires to follow ideal lines and pass others, but at a mechanical level its the car (or simulated car) that sees to the low-level execution of those intentions. People that dont understand NASCAR, mocking it for example as hours of turning left, harbor an incorrect comparison between stock car racing and their casual experiences with foot races divided into lanes. This parallel mistakenly imagines the difficulty in racing as the challenge of moving fast, which in automotive competitions gets somewhat trivialized by powerful engines. Further, regulations in stock car racing specifically require similarity between cars [NASCAR 2004]. That trivialization and enforced consistency of mechanical aspects, combined with the lack of clear lane divisions, elevates auto racing to a more mental competition. Because every car on the track has comparable ability to efficiently accelerate, brake, and steer, the advantage instead comes down to superior timing, control, and decisions (fuel usage, when/how to pass, and so on), rather than competing over simply trying to move faster. By comparison, being successful in a sport requires evaluating opportunities at eye level (Madden provides a strategic, elevated view), bracing for imminent risk

of serious impact, and throwing an accurate pass to a moving target over great distance. These activities happen every play, and require a mastery of practiced, split-second coordination to take action based on the innumerable variables in personal and peer movement. Even sports with less contact still place strain on the limits of perception and attention, requiring athletes to remain ready for rapidly changing goals, for example how a baseball pitcher needs to watch for possible steals [Gumbrecht 2006]. In a videogame the pitcher can instantly throw straight to any base with a button press or two. A live athlete risks missing that throw if its rushed faster than they can manage. Players spend decades drilling these skills not just the timing of when to apply them, but also the subtle tacit details involved in how to apply them to better perform certain mechanically complex tasks under pressure, and to better estimate their unique abilities in various circumstances. Control isnt mediated in real football or baseball, isolated from the mechanical realization of intention; intention is inseparably tied up with ever-changing personal and situational limitations on execution. The aspects of auto racing handled by the car are demanded instead of an athletes body in conventional sports: translating intention to accelerate and maneuver into realized action becomes different for every player, a function of subtle difference in bodily preparation and tacit knowledge. Transplanting a Madden player onto a football field is moving them from a domain with mediated input which boils down a long-range, accurate pass into a button press to a situation without mediated input, in which that skilled action needs to be honed by years of practice. Thinking that a players ability in a sports videogame could transfer to real bodily athletics is no stranger than expecting anything done with videogame controller to prepare someones body to execute a reverse group (diving), a triple axel (figure skating), or a front tuck (gymnastics). These actions, no less than the skills required for playing football or baseball, require practiced full body coordination, handling disorientation, control over reflex, and the automatic, subconscious orchestration of hundreds of muscles over fractions of a second. Videogames utilize mediated input to simplify away nearly every complexity involved in an actions execution except the timing, which the player is responsible for managing via button presses and analog inputs. In my high school years as a folkstyle wrestler, and my experiences with boxing and fencing in college, I gained an appreciation for a category of skills that I never needed for Street Fighter II (Capcom 1991): drilling moves to suppress counterproductive but natural reflexes weve evolved for being hit in the face, violently rushed, or deliberately though briefly entering dangerous situations in an attempt to achieve surprise advantage. Nothing I have ever experienced in a videogame came close to that type of sensation; I could watch my virtual

character on-screen get punched, kicked, and thrown all day. Children playing baseball have to learn to suppress the reflex to hide from an incoming ball. Theres another side to this, too: gaining a feel for the level of physicality allowed in a game like basketball or hockey before it might result in a penalty for being excessive. Mediated input makes that line easier to not cross in a videogame. Mastering when to press buttons in Fight Night Champion (EA 2011) is not preparing anyone to throw or take a good punch. Carefully timed mouse press and release in the classic Links 386 Pro (Access Software 1992) golf simulation games cannot convey the countless details critical to a successful golf swing in real life; at best the observation of on-screen animations may offer some basic information about what the end result should look like, but its obvious enough that seeing someone make a shot in basketball or hit a homerun in baseball can hardly prepare someone to succeed at the task. And yet, flight simulators work so well that theyre often integrated into the training of both civilian and military pilots [Aldrich 2005]. As is the case for racecar driving, piloting a real aircraft also happens via mediated input. Thus, going from simulation to real flight is a case of shifting from mediated input to mediated input, rather than changing from mediated input to an activity where the players body then has to perform different, complex, coordinated actions. Thrown into an athletic activity after practicing only with a mediated one, the player may have a clear idea of what to do and when, but that cannot help stir the body to do the precise and difficult moves necessary to realize those intentions. The players acquired sense for what to do and when could unproductively feed those intentions into the next step of performance which, in the unmediated case, replaces automatic execution with a need for tacit skill to transform those intentions into action. Mediated input handles that last step for players, which is a convenient way to bypass a decade of practicing fundamentals in order to instead focus on the game at another level, but its not a substitute for practice.

Separating Execution from Strategy

To further illustrate the effects of mediating input, well next explore the dart game Tic-Tac-Toe [A1Darts.com 2011]. Players throw darts into different zones on the board to earn Xs or Os in corresponding tic-tac-toe positions:

In Tic-Tac-Toe darts, players take turns throwing darts at the areas indicated on the left. After earning 3 points for any one area of the dartboard, that player can place their mark on the tic-tac-toe grid. Hitting multiplier rings scores 2 or 3 points at a time, earning positions faster. The center square, E, is scored by hitting the bullseye. Once a grid position is claimed it is permanent.

Traditional tic-tac-toe, played on paper without any need for darts, is a solved game. Solved, in this context, means that all possible moves have been considered, leading to the discovery that optimal play by both sides will either always end in a draw, favor whichever player moves first, or favor the player that moves second. For example computer scientists solved the game of checkers after 16 solid years of distributed calculations [Sreedhar 2007]; given the substantially smaller space of possibilities in tic-tac-toe its common for people to independently figure out, before adulthood, that players can always force a draw. What gives depth and uncertainty to the darts version of tic-tac-toe is the difficulty and bodily coordination necessary to consistently throw a dart to any intended spot. Subtle variations in how a dart is held, when the dart is released, and how the arm moves for the throw can make the difference between landing in different scoring sections, even at a very high level of player ability. Given the certainty of at least some deviation from the intended destination point, players need to aim for a point based not only on what will happen if the dart flies true, but also with consideration for what will happen if they miss by some approximate amount in any given direction [Tibshirani et al. 2011]. If both players somehow possessed superhuman skill at dart throwing, such that darts would always hit precisely the intended spot on the board, then dart TicTac-Toe would becomes no different than traditional tic-tac-toe as played on paper. More realistically, if one of the two players is much better than the other at accurately throwing darts, then theres a good chance they will simply dominate the game, without much need for clever strategy. In that case the winner is effectively decided by a variation of tic-tac-toe in which one side can occasionally take multiple turns in a row. The more reliably and evenly the participants can execute bodily maneuvers with consistency and accuracy, the more strategic the game becomes, leading to loss or failure being due to the decisions made, more so than the failure to execute on those plans. Conversely, the less capable both sides are of reliably executing those maneuvers, the more the outcome degrades into pure chance, going to 5

whichever player happens to first hit targets that work out in their favor. This distinction partly explains why, for athletic competitions with room for strategy, professional athletes are more exciting to spectators: besides everything simply happening on a more impressive scale, strategy becomes relevant at that level which non-expert athletes lack the ability necessary to realize. Young children playing American football are so unlikely to catch a pass that it would be fruitless to expend much energy planning out elaborate strategies; like two horrible dart players giving the Tic-Tac-Toe variation a try, the game will likely favor whichever team gets lucky the most times regarding the successful completion of even the most basic actions. Or from another angle, the effective range at which a youth pass can be completed severely limits the variety in strategies possible. For professional football, since the players are exceptionally adept at the games fundamentals, the number of strategies that can realistically be executed greatly expands. It becomes more about the tic-tactoe board, rather than who can simply throw the dart better. Because football takes place in continuous time and space, as opposed to turns on a board of discrete positions, it doesnt really make sense to consider whether football at a strategic level can be absolutely solved in the same way that tic-tactoe and checkers have been solved. The absurdity of imagining players capable of running any speed, throwing any distance, catching any pass, kicking field goals from any range, and plowing clean through the offensive line or, alternatively, halting every defensive linemen, reveals that while relevant strategies can be increased by higher levels of ability, the strategic part of the game cannot be as cleanly separated out as tic-tac-toe can be from dart Tic-TacToe. Short of such physiologically impossible levels of perfection, there is always room for advantage by outperforming the other team with superior fundamentals, diluting the significance of the other teams strategic choices by utilizing maneuvers that they cannot keep up with. This seemingly boundless potential for game-relevant increase in ability highlights another quality elevating professional sports for spectators. Recall that in dart Tic-Tac-Toe, a significant gap in player ability to execute intention could overwhelm any strategy by the other player by simply giving one side more turns at the tic-tac-toe board. In the same way, an especially talented player at the height of their career makes their significance as a statistical outlier even more evident by their ability to simply outperform whatever strategy the other player or team may attempt. The achievements of Andre Agassi [Wallace 2006], Michael Jordon, Mike Tyson or other sports legends stand out as the very best in the world because unusually often it seems as though their opponents are simply not capable of any strategy that could make up for their gap in sheer ability.

Snap Judgment in Real-Time Gameplay

One significant gameplay difference between dart Tic-Tac-Toe or ordinary golf versus activities such as soccer or racing is that these latter sports enable the competitors to perform simultaneously, in immediate opposition, rather than in discrete turns. This type of distinction isnt as clean a split as it first appears, with sports like baseball and football showing hybrid examples that mix turn taking with real-time response, but in such cases its still possible to study the real-time response portion separately from the turn-based structure in which it takes place. Anyone literate in how a particular sport is played could watch a replay in slow motion and point out what the losing player ought to have done differently - the batter should have swung sooner, the basketball player should have thrown their shot a little harder, and so on. The difficulty isnt necessarily a problem with making the right decisions, but is instead due to scarcely having time to make decisions at all, or in failure of practiced actions to consistently achieve intention. This time element is a constraint with cognitive and motor limitations, but practically speaking can become competitive at increasingly small intervals seemingly without bound. When reflex appears to exceed the minimum time separating perception from motor action, its accomplished by a combination of predictive estimation and chance [Swink 2009; Polin and Rain 1979]. One simple example of this is to picture a major league batter determining and timing their swing based on the pitchers leading movements, rather than trying to swing when the ball is where theyd like to hit it (at which point it would obviously be too late). The illusion of professional athletes simply having superior reaction time has been shed by research revealing no significant advantage in reaction time outside of their particular domain [Ericsson 2009]. Experience has trained these athletes to be able to read and properly respond to earlier stimuli, creating an advantage functionally equivalent to responding faster and more accurately2.

Earlier work by Keith Anders Ericsson investigated this concept indirectly by studying how experience level affects SWAT member responses to unfolding scenarios [Foer 2011]. More experienced SWAT officers perceived, diagnosed, and properly handled situations in response to earlier warning signals that inexperienced officers overlooked until it was too late. The effect of mastery on timeliness was not on account of superior reaction time at a motor level, but from being able to identify earlier signs with greater certainty, initiating the appropriate reaction without hesitation. 7

Probabilities in Personal Limitations

The most obvious way that players improve the consistency and timing of their fundamentals is through drilling and play experience. Depending on the sport, these might include taking shots, catching, passing, dribbling, skating, running, or any of dozens of other actions. When athletes perform these actions during a game of simultaneous or direct competition, they do so under intense time pressure. The player needs to execute without thinking about the maneuvers, trusting their drills and experience to produce the motions needed for their desired result. Hockey and soccer players need to be able to concentrate on what part of a goal they ought to shooting for, not on how to get their shot to go where they intend. Along the earlier example, this would translate to playing darts masterfully enough to focus on the tic-tac-toe aspects of the game. But, like dart throwing, and especially with the potential for one-upmanship in timing, those skills will never be absolutely perfect. Athletes need to accurately understand and account for their own particular degrees of imperfection. For the soccer player figuring out which part of the goal to shoot for, theres not a fixed probability of scoring regardless of where the player aims. The player in control of the ball cannot simple aim for whichever area of the goal is farthest from the opposing goalie, but must also account for the risk of missing the net if they overestimate their own accuracy under the circumstances. Alternatively, whether a basketball player should take a shot from any particular position at any given time is not only a factor of the angles, and the other teams current activity, but also of the shooters confidence (hopefully roughly fitting reality) that they personally have a good chance of making the available shot. Or and this is where strategy comes into play the player has to believe that the risk of taking a given shot is justified by the likelihood of earning a certain number of points, weighed against the other opportunities that play. Every athlete has different capabilities when it comes to accomplishing various fundamentals. Buzzer shots aside, many sports have negative consequences for overreaching, most frequently in the form of giving up (or greatly risking giving up) possession to the other team upon missing a shot, missing a pass, losing control of a puck while skating, or tripping over a soccer ball. This type of concern doesnt happen in tic-tac-toe, nor in games like blackjack or chess, because in these types of games the player intentions fully account for the fundamental operations in those games. Arguably the execution in such games reflects mediated input in the most extreme form of the idea, since no matter whether the player is moving a piece via mouse, by typing in g1 f3, using their hands, or having someone else make the actual board movements on their 8

behalf, the essence of these games is kept focused on the activity of pure decision making. No one loses at chess from meaning to move their piece from g1 to f3, but messing up that movement and thereby landing partly or completely on other tiles, in the way that someone might miss a shot taken in basketball.

Timing in Mediated Input

Mediated input, whether driving a car, playing a real-time videogame, or playing pinball, falls into a strange place in the middle between coordinated athletic execution and a purely mental game. It removes the rich complexity of athletic motion, though so long as the game in question involves response to real-time stimuli, the timing of the maneuver itself and the decision of which maneuver is appropriate are still relevant elements of skill. The batting portion of baseball is a good place to highlight this distinction. In its full physical form, hitting the ball requires the player to both correctly time and correctly execute a particular motion. The combination of these factors in relation to the current pitch will determine the success of that swing, and making too severe an error along either dimension can render the other irrelevant. The ideal swing executed with improper timing is just as much a problem as an improper swing with ideal timing.

From left to right: (1) real batting, in which the player is responsible for both swing movement and timing; (2) T-ball, in which the player is responsible for swing movement, but not for timing the player can miss the ball, but its impossible to swing too early or late; (3) virtual baseball using mediated input, pre-motion control era, in which the player is responsible for timing, but not the swing movement the player can swing too early or too late, but with proper timing its virtually impossible to miss a ball thrown through the strike zone. Image sources in bibliography.

In addition to timing the bat swing, many videogames provided a little extra input fidelity. In the videogame shown above, Ken Griffey Jr. Major League Baseball

(Software Creations 1994), the player at bat can use the directional pad to slide around within the batters box to better line up the sweet spot of the bat with where the batter predicts the pitchers throw will pass. And, as in real baseball (but unlike T-ball) swinging a little too early or too late can cause the ball to veer left or right, resulting in a foul ball if overly so. However unlike real baseball and T-ball, in virtual baseball with mediated input the batters swing is exactly replicated every time the swing button is pressed. This always puts the mass of the bat at the same distance from the player every swing, and at precisely the same lapse in time (matching the batting animation) relative to each press. Returning to the earlier idea about why a racing or flight simulator can achieve real results, whereas simulators of sports are unlikely to play any real role in training, the mediation of input is the most important difference here, not the videogames virtual, digital nature. Evidence supporting this claim can be seen in electromechanical novelty games that were designed to crudely simulate the basic mechanics of batting in baseball.

This is a flyer for Upper Deck, a 1973 electromechanical game by Williams. This is one of many novelty games utilizing a pinball-like flipper action to mediate input, involving player skill similar to pre-motion control virtual baseball games: timing only, without responsibility for motion of the swing. Pressing the left button releases a pinball from the pitchers mound, pressing the right button powers a solenoid assembly beneath the playfield to cause the bat-like flipper on the surface to swing. Image source in bibliography.

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Another sign of this separation between timing and execution is that while we might find the athletic execution of a real batter noteworthy and beautiful, to be impressed at a game with mediated input we would have to be impressed instead at the overall play, since isolated events like batting or layups just happen as canned, consistent animations played in response to the users input. Whether by designer intention or as an economically reinforced coincidence, a major advantage to gameplay based on button mediated input rather than athletic action comes in the form of broad and immediate accessibility. When it comes to pressing a button to produce an action, there is no preference for body type, no requirement to have a particularly fit body, and it virtually eliminates concerns for injury. By comparison, many sports require or strongly favor a particular type of body [Markovits et. al. 2010], and can be a common source of serious injuries [Paolantonio 2008]. Lastly, by using mediated input the player does not need to be shown how to correctly perform whatever task is needed, they only need to figure out when to make the task happen; because the action happens consistently upon the press of a button, it becomes impossible for the player to execute the task incorrectly, only to time the execution incorrectly.

Tools
As argued earlier, simulations of activities that require mediated input for the real tasks, as in driving simulators and flight simulators, can have much more in common at a skill level with the activity itself. But, someone in disagreement might wonder, why doesnt a baseball bat, golf club, or hockey stick qualify as mediating those real activities that I claim rely upon bodily coordination? Are racecars and jets really so different from tennis racquets and fencing blades? Although all of these objects are alike in extending or amplifying the players activities, what the simpler tools fail to capture in terms of mediating the players input is the consistent and automatic translation between minimal expression of intention and the consistent, automatic performance of the fundamental act. When directly handling a bat, golf club, hockey stick, racquet, or fencing blade, a slight twist of the wrist or shift in balance or tightness of the grip may be the difference between successful and failed execution. The central quality distinguishing mediated input from athletic activity is the use of controls to render irrelevant any subtlety in execution besides timing (and in more complex cases for analog controls, degree and/or an isolated angle).

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Skill in Mediated Input

For an exploration of the many ways that skill factors into mediated input, please refer to my HobbyGameDev.com blog entry on Skill in Mediated Input3 [DeLeon 2011]. Though originally covered in this section of the paper, for this extended version I expanded the topic into a standalone write-up due to its relative utility and conceptual separation.

Practical Application: Design for Motion Control

Whereas natural mappings were previously only relevant to directional inputs left meant left, and up meant up - motion controls offered a way for action inputs to be naturally mapped, too. With traditionally mediated input, Y button might signal a players intention to swing the in-game bat. With motion control, the player swinging an imaginary bat became the signal to swing the in-game bat. Motion control, as provided in various ways by the Wii Remote, PlayStation Move, Microsoft Kinect, and smartphones, on the surface seems to do away with mediated input. A more thorough inspection reveals a more complicated relationship between motion controls and mediated input, providing along the way clues about which contexts and approaches work better for motion control. Before delving into that question, I need to acknowledge that there are several ways that motion controllers are used other than motion control in the sense of acting out player actions. Several strategies sidestep the main challenges and benefits of motion control by using the devices instead for more traditional mediated input. When a Wii remotes IR camera is pointed at the TV screen to control a reticle or cursor, serving as a hybrid light-gun mouse, that usage constitutes mediated input by giving the user a way to efficiently express intention through natural mapping. When an iPhones or Wii remotes accelerometers are used to gauge orientation while otherwise stationary in space, as when tilting to provide angular input, those rotational inputs are really no different than a steering wheel or an old Atari 2600 paddle dial. With regard to motion control in its widely hyped variety, that being the type in which players act out their intentions, detecting the action at all requires substantial enough movement to be distinguished from unintended noise data. Since casually reorienting and repositioning accelerometers in space cause some minor turbulent readings mostly on the order of 1G, on account of being held still against Earths gravity, the most trivial checks are whether the total
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http://www.hobbygamedev.com/adv/skill-in-mediated-input/ 12

acceleration is much different than 1G, signifying a rapid movement. Unambiguously recognizing a motion takes longer than pressing a button. Full recognition would require waiting until the end of an action gets signaled by lack of further change or by returning to a neutral position. Although an action can often be predicted partway through, logically the certainty of such predictions are roughly proportional to how much of the gesture has already been performed. Rather than waiting until an action is completed, which might shatter the illusion of connection between the player and on-screen response, interpretation typically occurs midway through, assuming (ignoring) motions that follows4. Its difficult to push an action button differently than intended. On the other hand there are countless ways to act out a swing, a throw, or any other action that might be required by a game. Subtle differences in orientation can yield significant deviations in accelerometer or Kinect data from motions that a human might otherwise perceive as roughly similar. In both cases a wide range of accidental difference have to be accounted for. Because that range is largely a product of unintended differences, this wide range is often handled as equivalent, possibly with deviation on account of user assistance combined with minor randomization. Even with a range of gestures conveying the same intention to the game, there are nevertheless other ways to perform actions that will not register the intention. The motion controls in this case become like a button, albeit one that takes the player longer to press and which may fail to respond. One way to eliminate that problem of inconsistent triggering is for the software to treat every action measurable by the hardware as the same intention. The only way to make this possible is for motion control to signify only one particular type of action in any given context. To someone unfamiliar with motion control, this may sound like a baffling limitation; to readers that have played motion control games, its likely obvious by this point that what I am describing largely applies to Wii Sports (Nintendo 2006) and many other motion control games. To make up for action recognition taking longer than a button press, timesensitive response needs to be eliminated or telegraphed. Action needs to either be initiated by the user (as in golfing, bowling) or timed in response to stimulus that gives ample warning (as with the slow pitches and floaty hits in Wii Sports baseball and tennis respectively). Boxing works due to the symmetry of input delays and inconsistencies between both players.
4

For context: my specific experiences with motion control development are from working on Boom Blox (EA, 2008) on Wii, Topple (ngmoco, 2008) and feelforit (DeLeon, 2010) on iPhone, and Kinect programming for the Digital Improv project at Georgia Tech. Beyond that my understanding is based on observation and experience playing other games using these devices for motion control. 13

While working within those constraints worked incredibly well for Wii Sports, it also helps highlight why motion controls have widely proved problematic for many other types of videogames. The lag necessary to identify action has made motion control unsuitable for quick-reflex games. The need to treat every motion as effectively the same motion had meant that motion controls really only work well for games that would use motion to only mean one action, done one way, which doesnt map well onto games that depend upon how long a button or direction gets held to have certain significance. Motion controls shine when, rather than being interpreted to signify a discrete action, a range of success becomes possible depending upon how the action is carried out. When the quality of the outcome varies on a complex continuum, it becomes more like an athletic action than a case of mediated input. Wii Sports does incorporate limited range of this sort, within which actions can be done better or worse. For example, rotating the remote unintentionally during the bowling or golf swinging results in impaired accuracy. Though these discrepancies are not treated with a simulation-level of accuracy, this demonstrates one form of unmediated input (players arm twist during swing, dealt with as such) mapping roughly to another (arm twist for the action). The Wii MotionPlus adapter included with Wii Sports Resort (Nintendo, 2009) enabled that game to come closer to a 1:1 mapping for movements, creating a richer range for actions to be performed well or poorly, coming somewhat closer to the athletic-complexity5. Dodge ball games work well on Kinect because the positions of the users limbs are the meaningful input, directly. Body positions are not interpreted as a gesture to initiate some action. Kinect dancing games have likewise likely fared well on account of their ability to gauge success by degrees, by comparison to full body position. By contrast, games using motion control to initiate a discrete action the same way every time, rather than using that range of input fidelity, may be better served with buttons than motion controls. A concrete example of this phenomenon occurred when Zelda: Twilight Princess (Nintendo 2006) came out with nearly identical ports for both GameCube (traditional button controller) and Wii (motion control). A distinction made by players and reviewers comparing the two versions is that whereas the player could rapidly initiate an attack with a button on the GameCube, performing the same attack on Wii was delayed by
5

These titles are obviously not meant to be accurate simulations. Full-body movements get simplified into hand gestures. Athleticism and conditioning also remain completely separated from the experience, as is likely intended. 14

needing to waggle the remote [Zing 2009]. To be clear: these design constraints are not a problem of the software or hardware improperly accounting for the data. These issues are inherent in gesture recognition, and often result in it being little more than a silly-looking but otherwise inferior form of mediated input6. Consumer response after the release of Wii and Kinect has at times incorrectly assumed an industry-wide learning curve akin to graphics on each console generation, as though developers just had to figure out how to use the hardware to its fullest advantage. The difference is that in the case of motion controls, what motion controls are good for was figured out very early, after which weve seen a mixture of repeats, games that utilize the motion control devices to provide input unrelated to motion control (light gun, mouse, D-pad, waggle stick), and games being released in genres that are deeply incompatible with the particular strengths and weaknesses of motion controls but nevertheless get made because they appeal to consumers by their recognizability.

Closing
Ive attempted here to outline a number of distinctions about the nature of mediated input. The elevated role of precision timing and the lowered importance of coordinated muscular action are essential to the core gameplay of many realtime videogames dating back to the early classics. Mediated input qualitatively differentiates these types of play experiences from traditional games and sport activities. Lastly, contrasts were drawn to contemporary motion control, illustrating how concepts introduced and discussed elsewhere in this paper can be of use in discourse about more modern and varied forms of input.

The entertainment value of silly-looking should not be underestimated. 15

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