Plastic Controllers Are the Future – Stop Complaining

That Tony Hawk plastic peripheral skateboard elicited groans from people who didn’t want yet another plastic controller in their living room, but you know what? Suck it up, because they’re the future.

Do we want tens of plastic guitars, skateboards, drums, balance boards and light guns cluttering up our living room space? No, of course not. But ponder these simple questions.

1) Would you rather be pushing buttons in time to music with your Xbox 360 controller, or strumming along with your fake guitar and hitting a drum pad?
2) Would you rather be pushing buttons to make your character do a 720, or actually tilt your body on a skateboard?
3) Would you rather be pushing buttons and tilting a stick to shoot something on the screen, or point a gun at the screen and physically shoot the screen?

It’s simple; most everyone would rather be simulating the act because it gets them closer to the experience of actually playing the game and mimicking what the character is doing on screen. And that’s just the way we’re headed. The first controllers had a joystick and one button, and technology’s progressed along until we’re actually getting 1:1 motion detection.

But where is this all going? The endpoint, in our minds, is something like the Holodeck from Star Trek. A room that, although finite in reality, has the mechanical and optical abilities to simulate just about anything you can program. But we’re a long way from that. What we can do is take steps toward that goal, by simulating the experience with plastic instruments. But there are many steps between here and there, and hopefully the next one won’t cause us to fall down because there’s a plastic guitar in the way.