The new motion controller pairs a handheld wand with a camera for unparalleled accuracy, but a hyperaccurate game isn’t really what players want, says Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios.

“You have to be very good at pingpong in real life if we make a simulator,” said Yoshida, who oversees all game development that happens under Sony’s wide umbrella. “Our teams have devised a way to make you feel that everything you do is accurately tracked; however, the game does a lot of assisting so that you won’t miserably fail.”

During the Tokyo Game Show last week, Yoshida answered questions about creating games for PlayStation Move. Another notion Yoshida floated: Because Move games can be built purely around unique 3-D gameplay experiences instead of characters and storylines, they might more easily overcome the cultural barriers that have long existed between Japan’s game industry and the West.

Yoshida spoke with Wired.com about Move’s capabilities, its skimpy resource requirements and the various ways the new motion controller might shake up the videogame industry.

Wired.com: Move is much more accurate than the Wii remote, so it can be used to create much more complex games. But will those be attractive to a general audience?

Shuhei Yoshida: We never intended to use the accuracy as-is, because that makes games totally unplayable…. But people love one-to-one, they really enjoy seeing on the screen what you are doing, actually tracked. Our teams have devised a way to make you feel that everything you do is accurately tracked….

It’s taking the intent of the player by looking exactly at what he or she is doing, but assisting, filtering it a little bit, and still giving a little bit of what he or she has done. You feel like, “This is what I intended.” It makes you feel like a good player, but still allows people to progress from entry level to advanced. You remove the assistance bit by bit. Games become more challenging, but at the same time you understand completely that if you fail it’s your fault, and if you succeed it’s your achievement. I think that’s a new requirement for designing games using accurate motion tracking. But unless you have accurate motion tracking, you cannot create that depth of gameplay.

PlayStation Move's handheld controllers work with cameras to provide hyperaccurate response.
Photo: Jon Synder/Wired.com

Yoshida: When we were developing Move, we really wanted it to be the second standard controller for PlayStation 3. One requirement we had for ourselves and the hardware guys was that Move shouldn’t take many resources from the hardware — CPU or memory usage.

The Move team asked our studio members how much memory and CPU we were willing to give them, and the team said, zero memory and zero CPU. You might know that Move uses a fraction of 1 SPU out of the six SPUs (on the Cell processor) that games can use. Even with four Move controllers at the same time, the use will never exceed 1 SPU. Most games on the PlayStation 3 have never used all the SPUs.

The requirement is that the resources taken by the hardware shouldn’t be so large that developers feel that by adapting to Move they have to compromise the main game.

SOCOM 4 was technically almost finished, engine-wise, when they received the Move dev kit. Same with Killzone 3. They were able to put Move support in pretty quickly. I was happy to see comments from the developer of Ruse, a strategy game [from Ubisoft]. When they showed the game at Gamescom and the developers were asked in an interview when they started integration, they said three weeks ago. The result is beautiful.

He went on to say that comparing the different versions of Ruse on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the PC is the best user interface with the mouse and the keyboard, which is the way that real-time strategy games are usually played. But the PlayStation 3 is the most fun.

Our studios are not making any such kind of game. But those hard-core games not necessarily started or designed for Move will find a great use of it.

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Authors: Chris Kohler

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