Thoughts On Motion Controls

Gamers tend to have strong feelings about motion controls. Part of this is due to hardware limitations that make most motion controls less precise than button presses. Other times, it’s because it turns out that imagining yourself, say, throwing a Poké ball in the world of Pokémon, is a very different kind of fun than, say, actually throwing a plastic ball on a strap toward your TV screen.

I hate motion controls, but not for either of those reasons.

I hate motion controls because if I can’t turn them off, I often can’t play the full game without pain.

One of the first times I noticed something was wrong with my right arm was when a friend and I were playing Wii Sports archery. Wii Sports was heavy on the motion controls–that was its whole schtick, which I enjoyed–so we were using nunchuks and Wiimotes to mime shooting arrows. We’d been doing pretty evenly up until the final round. Then my shots starting going wild. I couldn’t seem to hold the Wiimote steady.

We laughed about it, the way you trash-talk your friends when you’re having fun with some silly contest for bragging rights. I figured I’d just lost focus or aim or patience or something, the way I did with real-world activities like bowling and mini-golf.

It wasn’t until a little later that I noticed I’d lost range-of-motion in my arm and started to feel the pain that’s been with me ever since. Only much later did I recognize that quick exhaustion and lack of fine motor control as early symptoms of an ongoing problem.

I’m very lucky, as such things go: I’m not in constant pain, I can manage everyday tasks most of the time, and I still get to do most of the things I enjoy. Is it annoying when I can’t shoot as hard at floor hockey because my right wrist isn’t as responsive as usual? Yeah, but I’ll live. Would it be easier to do strength training if I could still do push-ups without pain? Probably, but I’m working my way there again. There are tons of accessories and ergonomic tools I can buy to help, like grips for my handheld systems and padding/supports for my workspace.

And will I still play Mario Odyssey even if Joycon-waggle moves are mostly off-limits to me? Yeah. I mean, I did. And if once in a while I needed to use motion moves that lack alternative button-press commands, like throwing Mario’s hat in a circle, I managed to flick the controller in the corresponding direction.

However, completing the move any more frequently was off the table. Games like Mario Galaxy, which required controller shakes to make Mario spin, and Mario Kart Wii, which used the same motion for speed-boosting tricks, very quickly hurt my wrist. This made it especially difficult if the game also required me to point the controller at the screen–when my wrist hurts and is tired, it’s very tough for me to hold it still and aim.

It may seem like I’m picking on Nintendo games, and I am. I play more Nintendo games than I play games by any other developer for any other system, but even so, Nintendo’s design philosophy means that they disproportionately affect my perception of motion controls. Not because they use them frequently–they do experiment with the hardware possibilities of their systems, and I’m cool with that. I may not have enjoyed blowing into the DS mic, but I appreciate that they try to do new and interesting things.

Rather, I struggle with Nintendo motion controls because Nintendo tends to minimize player customization of the game experience. As others have already described, Nintendo treats its game design the way chefs at a really fancy restaurant treat creating their menus. A world-class chef designs each dish carefully to take advantage of the interplay of textures and flavours and create a transcendent experience. You don’t like onions? Too bad–you can either order the dish as-is and see if the onions surprise you, or you can order something else without onions (possibly at a different restaurant).

Honestly, when it comes to cooking, I get it. Adjusting the dish isn’t as simple as “take out the onions”; if you only want to try the food you already believe you’d like, maybe you’d be better off going to a different restaurant where choice and customization is the staff’s priority. But you go to a world-class chef because you want to take advantage of that chef’s expertise. And you can’t do that by second-guessing their choices.

However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t ask expert chefs to accommodate your needs rather than your tastes. Are you allergic to onions? Does your religious or ethical relationship with food forbid them? Perhaps it’s not simply that you don’t “like” them, but that your anxiety or phobia or other mental health condition makes it harmful for you to consider eating them.

If both you and the chef are willing to be flexible–if you accept that you simply can’t try their most famous dish that relies entirely on the ingredient that will, say, put you into anaphylactic shock, and they accept that they can make great stuff without that ingredient–you can both still enjoy the preparation and execution of fine cuisine. Sure, the chef’s job isn’t to make their work accessible to every single person ever and cater to every diner’s whim, but it’s also not to exclude groups of people without consideration of alternatives.

As a university instructor, I experience a similar scenario from the side of the chef: by law, we must make our courses as accessible as reasonably possible. That means giving some students access to resources and strategies that aren’t usually part of the academic process.

Many instructors find this tough because, if we didn’t require accessibility accommodations ourselves, we received the academic experience in a single, complex package. We know some parts of that package are necessary–for example, taking in, understanding, and expressing knowledge; preventing a learner from getting credit for work they haven’t done or knowledge they don’t have. But it’s difficult to separate what we need from what’s always been that way.

Yes, there are some obvious extreme situations (if you’re severely colourblind, you can’t learn how to pilot a plane; contrariwise, there’s no reason you should be forced to visually distinguish colour in order to pass linear algebra).

There are some situations that become easy to parse on further thought–no, taking notes on my subject oneself is not the skill my class is meant to teach, so a student who requires a note-taker should be able to use one.

And then there are some that are very difficult to judge–my students are meant to leave my class with presentation skills, but students in some health situations can’t present in front of a group, but that’s the basic skill I’m meant to teach in this module, but my course overall is meant to teach workplace communication and someone in this health situation would receive accommodation in the workplace as well… etc.

My problem with motion controls is that the creators of most games that use them don’t seem to consider any of the above. Shaking the Joycon to throw Cappy doesn’t seem to make me happier or more engaged than I’d feel pressing a button. It doesn’t make me feel more anything–except for in pain, of course. So why not give me the option of turning it off?