Microsoft's creative director Kudo Tsunoda thinks that Kinect encourages games developers to 'method act' their ideas more so than ever before.
Speaking to Edge, Tsunoda explained that Microsoft is still on track to achieve his team's original goal of making interactive entertainment more accessible to people and making it a more social experience.
"Out of all the Xbox/Kinect bundles that've been sold since launch, the majority have been bought by people who are making their first Xbox purchase. So we've really been happy that the stuff we've been doing has been resonating with customers," said the Kinect boss.
The Method
Tsunoda continued: "And it's been an interesting journey overall – how we have to redefine our design process in making this kind of entertainment.
"I think just as game designers we've been so focused so long on doing things a certain way: sitting in a conference room trying to come up with great ideas to put into games and really creating things in our heads as far as what are going to be the types of experiences that we as gamers like to build and play.
"Learning how to re-orient our creative process around not so much just coming up with great ideas out of our heads for games but really trying to do more of this method acting version of game design where you can really focus on immersing yourself in the types of experiences that people want and the type of experiences that you're building. Really doing the research and doing the creative exercises that give you good ways of implementing products that are different than you've done before."
Controller design niggles
In terms of what doesn't work so well with Kinect, the Xbox man also revealed that: "What we've found probably isn't natural is when you give people a long, learned list of gestures to make which trigger specific actions, where you need to do this one specific thing with your body that the game tells you to do, that designers have said, 'Hey you have to do this one specific thing and you have to do a bunch of those in sequence.'
"That kind of stuff is taking 'what you do with the controller' game design and putting it into Kinect, and it just doesn't feel as natural or approachable as the other two ways."
Via Edge
