The Microsoft Kinect is available today, and with it come innumerable reviews of its successes and flaws (find a summary of them at Gamasutra). A common property of many negative reviews is the enormous amount of living room space Kinect requires, far more than most people will have in a sizable home let alone a modest apartment.
I wrote about exactly this problem in my 2007 book Persuasive Games, and it seems worth hauling out an excerpt of the chapter on exergames in the context of Microsoft’s entry into the fray. The following appears on pages 314-316 of the book (which you can now get in paperback for only $19!)
Re-reading it now, a few things have changed (LCD TVs are even more inexpensive than I thought they would be when I wrote this in 2006), but many have only amplified (the entire U.S. housing market collapsed, drawing more attention to the space we think we need to live).
A wide variety of exergames use gameplay and input devices to motivate physical activity. An analysis would be incomplete without considering the environment in which these games are played in the first place. Today, the majority of games sold are played on videogame consoles (as opposed to personal computers). Consoles need to be connected to televisions, and televisions are generally large, immobile appliances that an entire household shares. The TV is usually is positioned in a living room or den surrounded by couches and chairs; many such rooms also house a coffee table or other large furniture between the couches and the television. It is common to eat or drink while watching TV, and coffee tables support the coffee, beer, soda, and other sundries to be eaten while watching primetime comedies, weekend sports events, or the nightly news. The living room is generally an inactive, static space with large, heavy furniture dividing a large, open space into many smaller, closed spaces.
Each and every one of the exergames discussed here [in the book, this excerpt follows a lengthy discussion of numerous exergames] requires considerable physical space for successful, safe play. All but the Eye Toy and Nintendo bongo require something to be physically placed on the floor under the player. And all save the bongo demand considerable freedom of movement around the player, including open space on all sides to avoid injury in the case of a misstep. As the popular press has discussed extensively, the Nintendo Wii also requires considerable freedom of movement for many of its games, including the most novel concepts that map gross motor gestures to in-game actions like swinging a tennis racket or a sword.
Catalogs and home furnishing displays idealize the living room or den as a place of inactivity, with substrates for food and drink flanked by plush seating, eyes oriented toward a television. Given the average American living room or den, it seems that many families would need to move furniture—especially coffee tables—out of the way to facilitate successful exergaming. A device like the Powergrid Kilowatt is heavy, difficult to move, and takes up as much room as a large exercise bike or home weight machine. The infeasibility of such devices cannot be taken for granted in an analysis of exergaming. Even DDR dance pads are bulky devices that must be stashed under furniture or stored awkwardly in closets. And bulky plastic peripherals like bongo drums and Joyboards hardly make for aesthetically pleasing display decor. Advertisements and media images of these devices typically depict them in an empty space, a white room like a gallery where no activity takes place save exergaming. Such environments go beyond even the idealized spaces of home furnishings catalogs. They apparently exist in a void.
Logistical and technical limitations also stand in the way of exergame play. In general, people place living room seating at an ideal position and distance to facilitate comfortable television watching from a seated or reclined position on a chair or couch. Even if no coffee table or other impediment stands in the way of the would-be exergamer, the player will likely stand three or more feet closer to the television, possibly compromising a clear view of the screen. As high definition TV (HDTV) adoption grows—especially given Microsoft’s and Sony’s aggressive push for HD on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3—more potential exergamers will upgrade their conventional sets for plasma, liquid crystal display (LCD), or rear-projection HDTVs. These appliances are expensive and often come with furniture designed specifically for them. Audiovisual experts recommend that HDTV monitors be positioned so a viewer’s eyes are in line with the center of the image when seated before it. These new sets—especially the lower-priced rear-projection LCD and digital light processing (DLP) units—often suffer from greatly reduced vertical viewing angles, making the screen dim or even unviewable to an upright player on a DDR dance pad or facing an Eye Toy camera.
Play on a personal computer is possible, but fraught with equal if not greater challenges. Yourself! Fitness was released for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation 2. Since the game targets a non-traditional demographic for videogame consoles, the PC version was probably released to accommodate players who don’t have a console or don’t want one. Yet, most families do not enjoy neat and tidy offices with space for physical activity, and furthermore most don’t have a computer monitor as large as their television to facilitate proper visual feedback from a safe distance.
But the technological limits of exergame feasibility do not occur in a vacuum. In U.S. homes of the last sixty years, living room designs have assumed certain lifestyle considerations. One or more adults are expected to rise early in the morning, shower, shave, eat, and commute to work. Kids leave even earlier for school, keeping the house unoccupied for much of the day. Upon return from work or school, those households lucky enough not to be dysfunctional might enjoy a meal together before relaxing—not working up a sweat—in front of the television. As telecommuting and home offices become more common, many professional struggle already to find proper space to devote to work at home, even further reducing the space available for avocational activities like television, pleasure reading, and videogaming let alone health-conscious activities like aerobics, workout devices, or exergaming. For better or worse, the large majority of suburban U.S. homes with the time and money to afford videogame consoles and exergaming software and hardware are simply not designed to support it; physical exertion is something relegated to the neighborhood sidewalk, the local gym or, more commonly, nowhere at all.
When combined with easy access to long-term credit, the postwar work ethic we short handedly call “The American Dream” encourages families to buy homes that they can only afford by spending increasingly longer hours at work. Larger homes require us to move deeper into the suburbs, requiring ever-longer commutes across increasingly crowded urban sprawl. Working and commuting for longer hours reduces the time we have with our families and ourselves, leading to a downward spiral of less and less physical activity of any kind. Thus, no matter the efficacy of any of the rhetorics of exergaming, the most important one may reside in the complex social, political, and material structures that determine the spaces we occupy. Exergames reveal the incongruence of work and exercise or leisure, and the prevalence of the ideological structures that push us to work more and move less.
Comments
Dakota Reese Brown
I understand the arguments, and don’t necessarily disagree with them, but I don’t see how this is an entirely new problem.
Are not a significant number of US living rooms designed to be invaded by a large conifer every December?
A traditional Twister mat 67″ x 55″, and there have been many of forced play sessions of that at family gatherings.
Richard Simmons, Jane Fonda, and many others have made successful business models out of convincing people to morph their living space for physical activity.
Finally, can’t a small hipster flat in NYC be field-stripped to accommodate a full Rock Band setup in record time?
The technical issues you outline aside, the living room has always been a rather dynamic space in my experience. The Kinect may push those boundaries, but I think that anyone who really wantsto participate in this type of gaming will find a way to accommodate themselves.
Kimon Keramidas
So you are saying that the living room setup is inherent and essentialized in its nature and that people will not change or adapt it to fit the demands of a new intriguing technology. But if we look at the very simple media history of the twentieth century we see that that is exactly that happened when radios and then televisions came into the home. Furniture that had been faced inward to encourage discussion was realigned to be aimed at the radio and television to maximize media consumption. What’s to say that won’t happen with motion detecting devices? People will alter their leisure practices and design will adapt to those practices, just as it has before.
I know that I am in the market to get a new apartment in NYC and I have been thinking about how the space could work with motion devices since I am interested in the Kinect. Real estate doesn’t get much more cramped than it does in New York and prioritizing space considerations is paramount, but so is gaming in my life. People are starting to consider gaming as an important part of their daily lives and these technologies as part of their entertainment. Therefore, it is a little shortsighted to consider current home design trends as a determining factor in the success or failure of a technology. They are just that after all, trends. It also displays a lack of consideration of relative recent history related to technologies and the home that is crucial to thinking about the past, present, and future of motion technologies in gaming.
Robert Jackson
It will be interesting to see what kind of marketing strategy Microsoft has for Kinect in 1 â?? 2 years, seeing as the Casual Market is weakening and they arenâ??t financially comfortable with releasing a brand new Xbox anytime soon.
Considering your analysis of home furnishings and logistic living room space, I remember purchasing my Wii for my small, pokey flat and realising after a few days, that flicking the Wiimote with the wrist sitting down allowed for just as much technical skill as flinging my body about, which was largely trivial. We all like to think non-permanent arrangements like home furnishings or space in rented flats fail to determine our daily lives, but unfortunately you canâ??t always beat architecture (not without considerable effort). Although it must be said, presupposing the environment that gamers will actually play Kinect, does not rule out the determination of individuals changing the way they play, rather than wholly reject it.
One or two of the reviews have noted Kinectâ??s positives, such as voice recognition. As with most new game technologies, over time, game developers will single out a number of key gesture action algorithms for future development rather than probe the potential depths it had been marketed for. Thus, as I see it, Kinect wonâ??t be used for full body gestures or even the Blockbuster games market; Kinect game design will change to accommodate the ease of accessing entertainment (we donâ??t have Netflix in the UK, if we did, thatâ??s all weâ??d use Xbox Live for Iâ??d imagine, God knows why Kinect wonâ??t work with Netflix in the US though).
Ian Bogost
@Dakota, Kimon:
Of course our expectations and desires change with technology, but first our overall willingness to embrace that change in our physical space must reach a tipping point. The Christmas tree is a great example.
Dakota, I actually think the overall failure of home video aerobics (in terms of follow-through, not sales) emerge from precisely this same inertia.
You two are perhaps early examples of what will some day be the norm. But for now, you are exceptions. The television is still a device for watching television, for most. It’s really almost the same as it was in the 1960s.
Dakota Reese Brown
Ian:
I think you can easily extend the overall failure of home video aerobics to the overall failure of home fitness.
Due to my wife & I’s very active lifestyle, people are often professing their intentions to get into shape to us. Whenever they say they are going to workout at home, I give them a 10% chance of success at best.
I would replace your “willingness to embrace change” with “fortitude to create new behaviors.” Many of the reasons we are a lethargic super-sized society are tied directly to the television and the living room. While it is certainly a romantic aspiration to reclaim this space in the name of health and fitness, the truth is the couch and the Doritios are always right behind you.
So I guess I’m doing two things here:
1) Reiterated what I intended my first point to be, that people who want to play Kinect will find a way to make it work in their space (willing to embrace change).
2) Getting around to saying that I think exergames are just an early form of gamification complete with all the jokes & failures thereof.
Kimon Keramidas
I think the disconnect here is that Kinect is not being sold as home fitness and encompasses a range of activities and that the excerpt being connected to the release kind of implies that it is meant for exercise. I think that is where some of the connotations about leisure, exercise, technology, and space get conflated and as a result the argument is less effective. There is so much more tied into American perception of exercise as work rather than leisure that needs to get unpacked before we can jump to saying that leisure spaces and motion technologies are incompatible.
Ian Bogost
@Kimon
Keep in mind that I am not presenting the excerpt above as a flawless characterization of Kinect’s certain failure. Not the case. Rather, I’m reinvigorating a now four-year old argument to show that, yes, it still has relevance and ought to give us pause.
Alex Reid
Thanks Ian. I see your point this way. For 40-50 years, American living rooms (to say nothing of American lives) have been organized around the passivity of television viewing. To date the activity of console gaming (e.g. button pushing for the most part) has not disturbed that fundamental identity. Living rooms can be used for more strenuous activities of various sorts but it does require some divergent thinking maybe or at least a willingness to push objects beyond their designed purposes (or at least push them out of the way).
I suppose the question is whether Kinect is engaging enough to lead people to reorganize their living rooms, just like they did 40 years ago for their tv sets.
Ria
I see this as a non-issue. I live in a very, very small apartment, and have had no problems using Kinect. My living room is probably 12 ft at it’s shortest, and all I had to do was push one chair and one lamp out of the way. Maybe people should try moving furniture temporarily out of the way like the guide recommends; Kinect isn’t (yet) for every day use, just gaming.
Ian Bogost
@Alex
Right, that’s indeed the question. Wii hasn’t been enough, I’d argue. We’ll have to wait and see. I wonder if players and game hardware producers are willing to allow it the time it needs to develop, or if they’ll move on to another trend.
@Ria
Do you think everyone is willing to move furniture?