Casual Games, Game Design, Gamer Culture, Nintendo Wii
The Joys of Being Simple
Simplification for the masses.
Nintendo’s doing it, catering to the casual crowd with its dreck for the Wii, and Microsoft aims to do the same with Project Natal.
“Blasphemy!” old-time gamers say. But simplifying things really isn’t so bad. Simple games like Today, I Die show the benefits of paring games down to their core, and by becoming increasingly accessible, games can become experienced rather than played.
Being the powerhouse of this generation of gaming, it’s a shame that the PS3 has rarely gotten to show off just what it can do. Most notably, its limited amount of uses for the Sixaxis motion sensor. With a few gimmicks and a couple of games developed specifically for the device, it seems that the motion sensitive addition is misused. That said, here are a few ways to make the Sixaxis seem less like a ploy and put a bit more “motion in the ocean.”