[PopcornMegaphone]

I'd say they succeeded in creating a device that surpasses the Wii for casual gaming, but have failed to live up to expectations they created for core gaming. If you bought a Kinect to play exciting innovative titles such as Milo, then it's going to collect as much dust as the Wii does. If you're one of the seemingly few core gamers who doesn't mind dancing and playing motion sports with friends on the weekend, or you're solely a casual gamer (which Kinect was primarily catering too), then there is a lot to enjoy. There are certainly enough solid casual experiences to warrant a purchase if that sort of thing appeals to you, and there are a handful of games that appeal to the gamer in you too, just not enough to warrant a purchase for those experiences alone. In that regard, it is disappointing that Kinect hasn't had that one great core experience. Gunstringer and Child of Eden are great, but it never got its Milo. Whether that's due to hardware limitations, problems with the controller-free concept or problems getting funding for an expensive, risky project that will only appeal to and is only playable by a limited number of 360 owners is hard to say, but it's probably a good mix of all of those things. Fable: The Journey has promise, but I don't see it being the Mario Galaxy of Kinect. I'd also add that voice commands have added a lot to the few core games that use it (and menu navigation especially) and while Eurogamer is right that it disappointingly sidesteps the main functionality of the sensor, I hope and expect that voice recognition at least will be a built in feature of the next Xbox for every owner. A recent interview with Rare indicates that the next step for Microsoft in this area is Siri-like natural conversation rather than forced commands, which should make using it a lot more comfortable too.

Great post. I agree with it completely.

Personally, Kinect was a letdown, but I'd still like to see the tech improve. I think there's potential with it.

[TTP]

If you had an updated pseye with dual move controllers, would you need a depth sensing camera? Isn't the depth sensing so it can detect movement forawrd/back? You could do that with the moves.

Yes, but only with regards to those hands holding the Moves. A depth sensing camera would allow to detect the whole body in 3D space and therefore make a better distinction between hands and body movements. Think of Move Fitness for the example. When both Moves are pushed forward, the virtual hands go forward as well but after a while (about a sec) they slide back to the original position under the assumption that the user didn't actually extend his arms but just happens to have stepped forward with his whole body.

With a depth sensing camera you wouldn't need to assume anything.

[Alx]

Yes, but only with regards to those hands holding the Moves. A depth sensing camera would allow to detect the whole body in 3D space and therefore make a better distinction between hands and body movements. Think of Move Fitness for the example. When both Moves are pushed forward, the virtual hands go forward as well but after a while (about a sec) they slide back to the original position under the assumption that the user didn't actually extend his arms but just happens to have stepped forward with his whole body. With a depth sensing camera you wouldn't need to assume anything.

Besides a depth camera wouldn't need as much hardware (one multi-purpose sensor Vs one camera + 2 wands per player). A depth cam can't be as precise as accelerometers held in your hand, but it's much more versatile (and complex).

[Guevara]

It always just seemed like a cheap and callous cash in to me. Take something inexpensive, advertise the hell out of it, convince people it's revolutionary, when people lose interest promise it will be significantly better next gen.

Exactly like Siri in my opinion.

[border]

the only thing with which I don't really agree (besides a few technical details), is that something "happened" or "went wrong", when I think they just followed the plan where "traditional core gaming" never was an important part ; it always was a second thought at best, and "gesture gaming" (which could be "core" too, or not) a good opportunity to use and spread the device.

Even if you ignore the core market, the Kinect has failed to deliver any kind of innovative software - core, casual, gesture-based, or otherwise. The article does a pretty good job of tracking Microsoft's level of ambition -- we started with Milo, and ended with Dance Central 3 and yet another fitness title.

For a platform that started with a great deal of promise, I don't see how you can believe something hasn't gone wrong. The games span a very narrow range of genres and are all highly derivative of what's been done before on the Wii.

[Gustav]

Been saying this for years: Kinect, like all optical sensors is fundamentally limited in what it can be used effectively for. MS marketed the hell out of it as general-purpose gaming device, most likely in spite of very many voices internally telling them that it would never be that. That's somewhat dishonest, but its good sales strategy - you want to eliminate all negativity in your pitch. The basic premise has always been that here's this device that can make interactions much more natural and instinctive because it knows what your whole body is doing at any given time. Which is great, except that for that to actually work as advertised it would need to basically be reading your mind at all times, and that's not what it does. Lag isn't just a product of the time it takes for the camera/data latency, its dependant upon the phenomena its observing. You need to physically complete the designated action for it to be registered; you can work around this to some extent by breaking down complex motions into (temporally) shorter segments but ultimately the program is going to make a binary success/fail decision on each chunk and bail-out if one part of the chain doesn't complete. Occlusion/visibility issues are another concern. The user(s) need to remain in the camera's field of view at all times, basically putting you in a virtual wheelchair as far as locomotion is concerned. You can't use your legs for their biological purpose of moving about and so designers need to invent some sort of mime equivalent (unnatural and immersion breaking) or straight-up take away that ability from user control. This is a HUGE limitation compared to conventional interfaces. Small muscle motions (hands and fingers) are difficult to track not just because of sensor resolution but because of the risk of them being hidden behind other limbs/body parts. In which case the system needs to fall back on a predictive algorithm; this is fine when the motion being simulated is "loose", but you can't abdicate critical decision making to the software even 1 time out of 100. Because if it gets it wrong (predicts an unintended outcome) the user is going to curse you for it. All this comes back to the whole "mind-reader" level of acuity that is at the heart of the sales pitch; what Kinect is doing is actually adding an interpretive layer between action and response recognition in the software. Rather than making input more direct, its actually doing the reverse by creating a mid-ground abstraction that the program its servicing needs to respond to. This is a massive drawback for performance critical situations where the absolute current-high/current-low states of a microswitch offer unambiguous, definitive binary feedback to the system. The underlying premise of good interface design is minimizing the distance cognitively and temporally between intent and actualized external action. Kinect or whatever comes next is NEVER going to achieve this, because it simply doesn't work like that.

This post is fucking perfection. And still people will choose to ignore this.

[tinfoilhatman]

That's like saying that Guitar Hero isn't a fad because we've had rock music since the 60's. Dance/fitness titles are on the same trajectory as music games -- they will probably always be around in some form, but their time has passed.

Highly unlikely , working out and fitness is on an uptick at least here in the states(yea 1\3 of us are fat asses) I see workout\fitness games playing a larger and larger role as the "home computer\console" generation gets older.

[Jomjom]

What was wrong with it? It was a huge financial success and sold millions upon millions.

[border]

Highly unlikely , working out and fitness is on an uptick at least here in the states(yea 1\3 of us are fat asses) I see workout\fitness games playing a larger and larger role as the "home computer\console" generation gets older.

Fitness itself is not a fad. Fitness videogames? Definitely a fad. Remember when Wii Fit was on the NPD charts for like 2 years straight? Yeah, that's never going to happen again.

Fitness games will probably always be a tertiary part of the market, in the same way that I'm sure a lot of workout videos are still produced. There's always people looking to exploit the fatass market. In the same way that fitness videos do not dominate the DVD/BluRay market, I would expect them to have increasingly residual effect on the games market. The novelty factor of a fitness game is long gone, and I think plenty of people have probably realized that putting a pretty videogame wrapper around a tedious everyday workout routine is not going to be enough to motivate them to keep up with a fitness regimen.

[TTP]

Besides a depth camera wouldn't need as much hardware (one multi-purpose sensor Vs one camera + 2 wands per player). A depth cam can't be as precise as accelerometers held in your hand, but it's much more versatile (and complex).

Indeed. Actually, I don't think a "proper" depth sensing camera is needed at all in the context of simply detecting body position relative to hands. You can do that with head tracking, both along the XY axis and the Z one. The current PS Eye already allows that actually (remember the puppet demo) but it's application is limited due to low resolution coupled with relatively low light sensitivity (and probably processing power needed to do all the face tracking stuff on top of sphere tracking to begin with).

I tested the PS Eye camera with some face tracking software back when I did my GT5 headtracking analysis and it works super well if you sit very close to the camera. Even in darkness.

http://youtu.be/edXRmj4mpvI?t=4m18s

I guess upping the res would allow for that kind of tracking even from a distance.

[Alx]

Fitness games will probably always be a tertiary part of the market, in the same way that I'm sure a lot of workout videos are still produced. There's always people looking to exploit the fatass market. In the same way that fitness videos do not dominate the DVD/BluRay market, I would expect them to have increasingly residual effect on the games market.

You don't need to dominate a market to be relevant. Fitness videos did find their market and probably have their steady revenues, I don't see why it couldn't be similar for fitness games. Hence, not a fad.

Even if you ignore the core market, the Kinect has failed to deliver any kind of innovative software - core, casual, gesture-based, or otherwise. The article does a pretty good job of tracking Microsoft's level of ambition -- we started with Milo, and ended with Dance Central 3 and yet another fitness title. For a platform that started with a great deal of promise, I don't see how you can believe something hasn't gone wrong. The games span a very narrow range of genres and are all highly derivative of what's been done before on the Wii.

I think that you need to see the big picture to appreciate the innovation. Because innovation is in the details that make all the difference.
The impressive parts of kinect are not in games where you talk to a virtual boy (that's just an upgraded Seaman after all), or kick a ball or dance to a tune. The impressively innovating parts are in those features : "walk in front of the TV and wave at it", "say Xbox play", "say Xbox Bing Harry Potter" etc.
It is innovative as a user interface, and that's the whole point of kinect. Gesture gaming is just a byproduct, one that helps funding it and selling it to people, but there is a bigger point.

Exactly like Siri in my opinion.

Exactly like Siri indeed. I don't own an iPhone myself, but the way I see it, Siri is the future. Not all the future, mind you, and we'll still use our fingers to dial and swipe and zoom on our phones, but using natural language with electronic device is something that will be used by everybody, and Siri is one of the first steps. It may be clunky or gimmicky at the moment, but it's only the beginning.
And kinect is in the exact same vein of natural interfaces (actually I am eagerly expecting something merging the functionalities of kinect and Siri). Those are what will become standard in future electronics, and by developing them, MS and Apple are trying to make sure that their names will associated to everyday features.

[NavNucST3]

Erm, I'm not freaking out here, I just posted a calm but thorough walkthrough on how we might expect replacements to impact hardware sales to follow up to yourself and wf, both of whom engaged me on the point in question. Voice commands in some games work very well. I used them on and off for Mass Effect 3. They worked 100% of the time. I think for the kind of stuff Microsoft showed at E3, it'll work quite well. Does it really add anything that a controller doesn't? Well, I don't really think so. Maybe it could if software was developed with it in mind, but for the most part it isn't. Mass Effect 3 was mostly played by people who don't own Kinects, and so the Kinect functions were only ever going to be a voice layer on top of a game that was already built and balanced around a controller. In other, worse games, not so well--Who Wants to be a Millionaire sucks because of it, since first of all they don't work 100% of the time ("B" and "D" are tough to detect; Brain Age had similar problems with the voice commands in my opinion) and second of all because the delay in detecting the commands is very frustrating. "Yes! Final Answer! Final Answer! Yes! Ugh!" The worst part is that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire has no controller support, just gesture or voice, so every game lasts ten times as long as it should. It is not a good game. In the operating system... It's not so good for picking options that are on the current menu, because it's pretty much always faster to just press "down -> right -> A" or whatever to make your selection. I would never use Kinect to fastforward a movie or pause. It's a little bit better for searching for stuff, especially across applications like if you want to watch a movie but you don't know which services have it available. It's quick for finding games on the marketplace too ("Xbox Bing Adventures of Shuggy" is definitely faster than going through the marketplace). I would say it works maybe 80% of the time--there's an XBLA game called "Schizoid". Would you pronounce that "Skitz oid" or "Skiz oid"? The difference is a subtle matter of accent. Don't expect to use Kinect to search for ambiguous stuff like that. One thing that is good is that if you have 100+ games on your 360, it can take a while to load the page with all of them, so you can "Xbox Bing A Kingdom for Keflings" and then launch it from there. Using just voice control it's a bit cumbersome, but using voice control to get the content you want and then using the controller to launch it is pretty quick, faster than the UI on any other console would be. I wouldn't buy a Kinect for voice commands.

I am of the contrarian viewpoint that OS control is where it excels. I recognize that for many people there is this idea that we all walk around with controllers in our hands but I'm often cooking in my kitchen and "watching" (read: listening) to a TV show or movie and the voice controls are certainly faster than me walking back to my living room and grabbing a controller and turning it on just to use transport controls or even just when I need to get up to use the head. I say this even with having a Harmony 900 with RF that I can use from just about anywhere in the room but it isn't something that I just walk around with. Using my Harmony I turn on the projector which triggers my screen and the audio but I might literally just drop/throw the controller, randomly, on one of my couches; I'm not one who needs the remote or controller in hand.

One of the bigger problems I see with MSFT in communicating voice controls, only as they relate to system, would be the idea that one need await the visual prompts before speaking additional commands or in a few locations speaking terms which even if you did await prompts you would not be aware you might not be aware that you could say/execute it. I am certainly not going to suggest that, for those of us who've become intimately familiar with navigating the 360's many iterations of dashboard, that there aren't times where a few LB's or RT's aren't faster for things but to be honest I would wager that for the lifestyle of my family that Kinect exceeds our voice control expectations.

I'm keenly aware that I don't fall into the perceived archetype of a GAFfer given that rewards.xbox.com tells me that the average download per LIVE community is 7 and I'm at 74, that Zune Video Marketplace is where a large chunk of my disposable income goes for TV Shows and Movies, I've purchased over 20+ Games on Demand, and I have a Zune Pass, a Windows Phone even though I'm an all Mac household for 10+ years (save the phones post 3GS). I couldn't tell you if I'm core, hardcore, casual...I mean I'm sure I have over 200 XBLA titles and no clue how many retail titles I've purchased but Kinect works for me/us. While I definitely have the space (check the Gaming Setup 2011 thread) my son doesn't in his room for gaming yet he uses his Kinect every day for Netflix controls.

Having said ALL of the above, I too wish for more gaming content, but to be honest I don't need a "core game" to have the controls I simply want a good game to have them e.g. Gunstringer, Child of Eden and Happy Action Theater. What I DON'T need is Steel Battalion...

[Shai-Tan]

Kinect is one of those products that sells well based on using smoke and mirrors to feed the imagination. The reality is the product is not accurate enough and has too much input lag. Casual people will buy it and use it a few times for the novelty outside of the very limited set of games where the technology is sufficient.

It's funny thinking back on how Sony was marketing Move as a hardcore alternative to Kinect when it's also crap because of massive input lag (and other unresolved issues)

[DeaconKnowledge]

I actually don't think Kinect was a failure - considering the sparse ability of the technology MS managed to juice a lot out of it - but as it stands Kinect has seen the end of the road. It is the "fad" everyone's been waiting for since the beginning of the gen. MS is out of ideas as to where to take Kinect, for all intents and purposes the market for it has dried up, and third parties never took the tech seriously to begin with.

Kinect is dead. Sure it will still sell units and games but as for longevity it is dead hardware. Whatever extension MS debuts with Durango will have to be drastically upgraded to bother with inclusion. There is literally nowhere to go with Kinect in its current incarnation.

[mrklaw]

Besides a depth camera wouldn't need as much hardware (one multi-purpose sensor Vs one camera + 2 wands per player). A depth cam can't be as precise as accelerometers held in your hand, but it's much more versatile (and complex).

I disagree. In the aspect of depth sensing, sure. But kinect on its own isn't at all more versatile, it simply isn't living up to the promise. Kinect plus some kind of control is needed - motion controller would be ideal to give more options

[Dark Octave]

I got a Kinect 360 bundle and still haven't taken it out of the box. All I got is Kinect Adventures, no way I'm touching that shit as an adult, maybe when the cousins come over.

Kinect Adventures is a fun game. I always crack up when I see it at Gamestop for .89 cents.

Also, this always messes with me.

[Alx]

But kinect on its own isn't at all more versatile, it simply isn't living up to the promise.

Those are two unrelated things. Whether or not you think it is living up to the promise, a depth camera can still do many more things than a regular camera + motion controllers can do, although what motion controllers can do they do better. So the depth camera is less precise but more versatile, I don't see how you could deny that.

[mrklaw]

Those are two unrelated things. Whether or not you think it is living up to the promise, a depth camera can still do many more things than a regular camera + motion controllers can do, although what motion controllers can do they do better. So the depth camera is less precise but more versatile, I don't see how you could deny that.

What kinect games use depth at all? Most are gesture based and could be done on move or a pseye, or just use voice

[Ranger X]

This post is fucking perfection. And still people will choose to ignore this.

Also what I have been thinking all along and Kinect proved it once more.
Movement gaming IS just a fad and the balance will come back soon. What will truly revolutionise and replace traditional controllers will be something that brings us the 2 key aspect needed that humans needs: efficiency and ease of use.
The only device that, I suppose, would do this better than a traditionnal controller will probably be a mind controlled device ---- and we are a long way from that.

[Shai-Tan]

Exactly like Siri indeed. I don't own an iPhone myself, but the way I see it, Siri is the future. Not all the future, mind you, and we'll still use our fingers to dial and swipe and zoom on our phones, but using natural language with electronic device is something that will be used by everybody, and Siri is one of the first steps. It may be clunky or gimmicky at the moment, but it's only the beginning. And kinect is in the exact same vein of natural interfaces (actually I am eagerly expecting something merging the functionalities of kinect and Siri). Those are what will become standard in future electronics, and by developing them, MS and Apple are trying to make sure that their names will associated to everyday features.

I think you're infusing these technologies with qualities they don't actually have. Siri is useful for exactly what it's being used for now, to make simple queries or commands in a restricted problem space. I'm not trying to downplay it as there is a class of problems where it's much more efficient in time and effort than opening an application, navigating, typing input, etc. However all it's doing is translating a natural language input into a fixed grammar with no semantic understanding whatsoever. It doesn't even "know" things like past AI such as Cyc. So it's always going to be error prone and arguably more so when functionality is expanded causing "collisions" in the translation of the natural language input (what they call ambiguous grammars).

http://evolution.voxeo.com/library/g...rammar-gsl.pdf

[NavNucST3]

What kinect games use depth at all? Most are gesture based and could be done on move or a pseye, or just use voice

Both Your Shape's use depth, Double Fine Happy Action Theater, and Kinect Adventures.

[The Albatross]

The Kinect is a pretty awesome device from a geeky tinkering tech crap point of view, right on there with BeagleBoard and Arduino. But, the marketing hype was obviously not like how BeagleBoard and Arduino are marketed, so while the device is a great success from the homegrown, weird shit you can do with Kinect point of view, it's a total failure from the point of view of how it was initially marketing.

Why did it "fail," because there's nothing wrong with controllers. It's trying to a fix a problem that isn't there.

[bill0527]

Its real simple, the games that work in conjunction with the tech ... pretty much all suck.

Its all very simple party type of games that have no depth.

I've owned one since it launched. The kids use it occasionally, like maybe once a month, but I don't think I've used it in over a year. The last thing I played on it was Fruit Ninja and that was fun for maybe 30 minutes. Nothing at all I feel the need to go back and play again or revisit on a daily basis.

[Alx]

I think you're infusing these technologies with qualities they don't actually have. Siri is useful for exactly what it's being used for now, to make simple queries or commands in a restricted problem space. I'm not trying to downplay it as there is a class of problems where it's much more efficient in time and effort than opening an application, navigating, typing input, etc. However all it's doing is translating a natural language input into a fixed grammar with no semantic understanding whatsoever. It doesn't even "know" things like past AI such as Cyc. So it's always going to be error prone and arguably more so when functionality is expanded causing "collisions" in the translation of the natural language input (what they call ambiguous grammars). http://evolution.voxeo.com/library/g...rammar-gsl.pdf

It doesn't need to go further than that. Like I said, it's an interface, not an AI. It is meant to do what it is told, not answer to "how are you today" or "does that dress suit me ?".
The only difference is the way to trigger the actions. We used to say things like "Command - open mail - Message - blablabla" etc, now we can do the same thing with more natural language, and that's what will make people use it a lot. And the natural evolution of technology will help make it work better, with more features...
Of course the more functionalities are added, the more difficult it is to avoid mistakes. That's why there is still work to do. That's also why it is important to have those technologies in the hand of the users, even at an early stage, especially in our times of cloud computing, because all those experiences will help train the recognition algorithms.

[KittyKittyBangBang]

i know i am probably in the minority, but for a first pass at a pretty new tech (at the consumer level) i like it. I agree that MS overpromised on its capabilities, and devs havent found real good ways to implement it (voice commands are mostly good though)

I think the Kinect II will be a significant upgrade

[border]

It is innovative as a user interface, and that's the whole point of kinect. Gesture gaming is just a byproduct, one that helps funding it and selling it to people, but there is a bigger point.

As a user interface, it's a $150 microphone. The article we're discussing pretty extensively covers Kinect's failure as a UI device. The voice controls are nice, but gestures and motion are in almost every way undesirable tools for the UI. Eventually your arm strains from being outstretched for long periods, having to hold steady over a selection for 2 seconds is tedious as hell, and it's about 10 times slower than using a remote or voice controls. Even the SmartGlass project seems to be an admission that yes, there are better ways of controlling a living-room device.

You seem strangely comfortable with the notion that all the gaming and motion control stuff Microsoft showed off was an intentional sham never intended to be realized. I'm not sure why you would rather paint MS off as con artists and snake oil salesman than admit to the much more likely notion that yes, something "went wrong". They had good intentions but have failed to capitalize on a novel interface. Nintendo had exactly the same problem, by and large.....eventually abandoning the sort of "full body, stand up off the couch" gaming that Microsoft is trying to tackle.

You don't need to dominate a market to be relevant. Fitness videos did find their market and probably have their steady revenues, I don't see why it couldn't be similar for fitness games. Hence, not a fad.

A fad is something that has a huge popularity spike......then popularity drops off a cliff and it fades into relative obscurity. Just because it doesn't completely cease to exist doesn't mean it wasn't a fad. I loved Rock Band, but I have no problem admitting that music games were a fad. Harmonix will live on making great stuff, but their heyday is completely over and unlikely to return. Similarly, fitness games and fitness DVDs will live on, but they will never be in the limelight and they will never be a determining factor in a consumer's purchase of an entertainment platform.

I think the major problem for Microsoft is that if they're planning on bundling this expensive-ass double-camera Kinect 2.0 with every Durango unit, they need it to be appropriate for use with more than a couple slowly dying fad genres. Otherwise they're wasting a ton of money for an input device that's only good to a niche audience -- it'd be like packing a racing wheel into every system.

[Bgamer90]

Try this game out if you haven't and own a kinect:

[NervousXtian]

My kids (6 and 8) love Kinect. Even playing that Starwars game. They also love the dance games. It's perfect for them. It gets them up off the sofa and moving.

This. My kids love it, but it also frustrates them. The simpler the game works the better it does with Kinect. Certain games work much better than others. My 4yr old (almost 5) is short, and the Kinect often thinks she disappears.

The concept though? They love it. I think it has serious potential for interactivity that the Wii or Move never had. Also to note, both my kids 4 and 7 hated the Wii.. we ended up selling it. They never were able to handle the Wiimote + Nunchuk combo worth a shit, but they both can play with a DS9 or 360 controller without a problem.

My son also loves doing the whole "Xbox --- BING --- Star Wars" thing.


I look forward to a Kineck 2.0 with greatly improved hardware.

[Alx]

As a user interface, it's a $150 microphone.

Even if you only use voice commands, it's a $150 microphone that will get your commands from the other side of the room. Do you know any other microphone that can do that ?
Not only is it an impressive feature, but it is a required feature for NUI.

The article we're discussing pretty extensively covers Kinect's failure as a UI device. The voice controls are nice, but gestures and motion are in almost every way undesirable tools for the UI. Eventually your arm strains from being outstretched for long periods, having to hold steady over a selection for 2 seconds is tedious as hell, and it's about 10 times slower than using a remote or voice controls.

I agree that the current systems are flawed. There are ways to improve that, though, but we need to rebuild the way we consider menus and interfaces. I have my own ideas, but will keep them for later, when I'll have time to tinker again with the SDK.

Even the SmartGlass project seems to be an admission that yes, there are better ways of controlling a living-room device.

Smartglass is just another alternative. The idea is that it won't replace controllers, or kinect, or keyboards and mouse. All of those will coexist and will be readily available.

You seem strangely comfortable with the notion that all the gaming and motion control stuff Microsoft showed off was an intentional sham never intended to be realized. I'm not sure why you would rather paint MS off as con artists and snake oil salesman than admit to the much more likely notion that yes, something "went wrong".

I don't consider it a sham. We mostly got what MS promised (almost all of the features in the Natal trailer exist now, save for virtual dressing room), and MS never promised much "core gaming". It always was about fun and accessible games.
And making those games when you have bigger projects wasn't a con, only you have to choose a target feature to launch a new product.
In a similar manner, Xboxlive never was about online gaming. Online gaming was the main feature to launch their services, and they built on those foundations to add all kinds of services, and now Xboxlive is about having a portal to Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, Zune, game on demand ... online gaming is still there, but it always was a part of a bigger plan, and now MS proudly announced that Xbox owners spend the majority of their console time on non-gaming applications.
Just the same, natural interfaces are not about gaming, but the best way they found to make people adopt them was through motion gaming, because moving your body is fun. It doesn't mean that those games will go anywhere when natural interfaces will evolve, but they're only the beginning.

[weird]

Edit:

oh wow! Totally wrong thread. Sorry folks!

[pickle]

This post is fucking perfection. And still people will choose to ignore this.

agreed. great post.

[border]

I don't consider it a sham. We mostly got what MS promised (almost all of the features in the Natal trailer exist now, save for virtual dressing room), and MS never promised much "core gaming". It always was about fun and accessible games.

You can go back and find plenty of quotes from Kudo Tsunoda and other MS reps promising more core games in the pipeline. I think it's revisionist history to say that the platform was ever ONLY pitched as just "Hey, here's a new thing for some fun accessible family games!"

I think a large part of Kinect's promise was new experiences, and awesome games that were not possible anywhere else. The library has turned out to be predominantly games that are not only shameless copies of Wii software, but could often be replicated on the Wii as well.

Let's not also forget that they dangled the prospect of awesome Darth Vader lightsaber battles over our heads in 2010......then delivered dancing Stormtroopers in 2012. The narrative of Kinect Star Wars' development mirrors the Kinect hardware story to a tee. Incredible, ground-breaking and innovative stuff is promised.......then lowest common denominator mini-games and dance modes are delivered.

In a similar manner, Xboxlive never was about online gaming. Online gaming was the main feature to launch their services, and they built on those foundations to add all kinds of services, and now Xboxlive is about having a portal to Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, Zune, game on demand ... online gaming is still there

I'll ignore that it's a little unfair to compare an evolving online service to a $150 hardware platform that requires frequent game releases. Concurrently, I would like you to consider that Live actually delivered on the promise of an incredibly cool conline gaming infrastructure before they expanded to media services. Kinect is less than 3 years old and the 1st party software support has already turned abysmal......3rd party is not much better. You seem to think it's okay that the Kinect game market to be in such abysmal shape because there's potential beyond games.....that's a bit like saying it's okay for the XBL gaming servers to be broken because YouTube is coming.

Even if you only use voice commands, it's a $150 microphone that will get your commands from the other side of the room. Do you know any other microphone that can do that ?

The Wii Speak runs about $20.

[Sean]

What went wrong with Kinect: it was a peripheral.

Sure there are technical limitations and such, but the main failing is that it's a peripheral and will never be taken seriously by most developers aside from some optional functionality. Why would developers want to limit their potential userbase? Same reason developers don't bother with Move support or Wii Motion+.

[mrklaw]

You seem strangely comfortable with the notion that all the gaming and motion control stuff Microsoft showed off was an intentional sham never intended to be realized. I'm not sure why you would rather paint MS off as con artists and snake oil salesman than admit to the much more likely notion that yes, something "went wrong". They had good intentions but have failed to capitalize on a novel interface. Nintendo had exactly the same problem, by and large.....eventually abandoning the sort of "full body, stand up off the couch" gaming that Microsoft is trying to tackle. .

This is my biggest area of confusion. MS put HUGE amounts of money behind this (and luckily it was a financial success). But their support has been lukewarm at best. If it hasn't taken them long to realise the limitations, how didn't they see that before they launched? Did they simply feel they needed *something* to go up against the wiimote/move in the motion space, no matter how badly thought through? Regardless of the success in hindsight, you have to have some bloody big balls to spend that many millions marketing something you don't have much faith in

[Alx]

You can go back and find plenty of quotes from Kudo Tsunoda and other MS reps promising more core games in the pipeline. I think it's revisionist history to say that the platform was ever ONLY pitched as just "Hey, here's a new thing for some fun accessible family games!"

Maybe my memory's wrong, but I don't remember such quotes fro Tsunoda, and I followed closely all the Natal/Kinect news.
A quick search lead me to several interview similar to this one, and when Tsunoda is asked about "hardcore gamers", his answer is basically "our launch games will please some core gamers already, even if they're not shooters."

It all depends what you mean by core gamers. None of the games that we have in the launch line-up involve shooting or violence or things like that, but I think what core gamers really like is skill-based gameplay and depth. I always feel frustrated because I'm a core gamer as well and when people say, "all they want is violent games," I don't think that's very true. (...) Eurogamer: What are examples of games in your line-up that have those skill-based elements that core gamers love? Kudo Tsunoda: In Kinect Adventures they have the River Rush game, and there's hundreds of different ways you can go down each of those levels. It's a lot like a platformer game, which in general is a genre core gamers love. Kinect Sports also - obviously multiplayer is a big part of what core gamers appreciate, and that game's all based around really good multiplayer play. In Kinect Joy Ride, the whole way you can customise and upgrade your vehicle along the way...

yeah, that's PR BS anyway, but it's not really a promise of kinect being used for other kinds of games than the launch ones.

I think a large part of Kinect's promise was new experiences, and awesome games that were not possible anywhere else. The library has turned out to be predominantly games that are not only shameless copies of Wii software, but could often be replicated on the Wii as well.

It does provide a new experience. The definition of "awesome games" will depend on who you ask, but kinect did what it was advertised for. And no, a Wii couldn't do some of the games that were available at launch (dancing, several sports, snowboard games...)

Let's not also forget that they dangled the prospect of awesome Darth Vader lightsaber battles over our heads in 2010......then delivered dancing Stormtroopers in 2012. The narrative of Kinect Star Wars' development mirrors the Kinect hardware story to a tee. Incredible, ground-breaking and innovative stuff is promised.......then lowest common denominator mini-games and dance modes are delivered.

You still had the exact modes that were advertised... and silly mini-games in addition. The game wasn't good, but it was still faithful to what was announced.

I'll ignore that it's a little unfair to compare an evolving online service to a $150 hardware platform that requires frequent game releases. Concurrently, I would like you to consider that Live actually delivered on the promise of an incredibly onling gaming infrastructure before they expanded to media services. Kinect is less than 3 years old and the 1st party software support has already turned abysmal......3rd party is not much better. You seem to think it's okay that the Kinect game market to be in such abysmal shape because there's potential beyond games.....that's a bit like saying it's okay for the XBL gaming servers to be broken because YouTube is coming.

You're the one judging that the kinect market is abysmal. For its core market, it's more or less the same as ever, with additional games and features coming at a regular pace. There's no tidal wave of blockbusters incoming, but it doesn't need to either. It's just a peripheral after all.

The Wii Speak runs about $20.

As far as I know, Wii Speak voice commands don't work very well in noisy environments, which is exactly the point of a mic array.

[Alx]

This is my biggest area of confusion. MS put HUGE amounts of money behind this (and luckily it was a financial success). But their support has been lukewarm at best. If it hasn't taken them long to realise the limitations, how didn't they see that before they launched? Did they simply feel they needed *something* to go up against the wiimote/move in the motion space, no matter how badly thought through? Regardless of the success in hindsight, you have to have some bloody big balls to spend that many millions marketing something you don't have much faith in

They do have faith in it. You're just not looking in the right direction.
http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/kinectaccelerator/

[woahjeez]

Is this really a question to anyone who has played it? Makes the original Wii remote controls seem awesome in comparison

[Deus Ex Machina]

What Went Wrong with Kinect('s Core Gaming Support)? [Eurogamer]

Motion Control... that's what went wrong with it. It was a novelty

[border]

There's no tidal wave of blockbusters incoming, but it doesn't need to either. It's just a peripheral after all..

I would respond to this first, as it seems indicative of the lack of ambition and goalpost-moving that's marked the Kinect era.

2009: "OMG THIS IS THE FUTURE!"
2012: "It's just a peripheral! You shouldn't expect them to have blockbuster games for it!"

2009: "HOLY SHIT MINORITY REPORT IN MY HOUSE!"
2012: "Well the voice commands are good sometimes. Maybe they will figure out motion controlled UI in the next console."

When asked about core games in 2010, Phil Spencer said "Well we view Kinect as a fundamental part of the [Xbox 360] platform. It is as core to the platform as [Xbox] Live is. And we think about the all products in our pipeline, including things that haven't been announced."

This holiday, Microsoft is publishing less games than they did at launch, and less than they did in 2011. Can you really believe they're treating Kinect as a fundamental part of the 360 platform? Is it as core to the 360 experience as Xbox Live? To say that this thing was sold just as some new way to enjoy simple, casual games is to forget or whitewash the entirety of the near 18 month pre-launch hype cycle.

Microsoft's default position on core titles is generally to sorta mention what they have at the moment and make a veiled reference to unannounced things in the vague future (as Phil Spencer did previously above). It's always been "The core stuff is coming!" Whether they've delivered or not I guess is subjective, but it seems clear that their priorities have shifted pretty significantly. It's less about motion control and new experiences, and more about shoehorning voice control into whatever orifice a game can fit it into.

And no, a Wii couldn't do some of the games that were available at launch (dancing, several sports, snowboard games...)

Are those games really, seriously fundamentally different than dancing with a Wiimotes, playing sports minigames with a Wiimote, or snowboarding on the Balance Board? All that stuff is essentially rooted on the Wii. Kinect might track more limbs or make it more accurate but can you really call it a new experience?

You're the one judging that the kinect market is abysmal.

Well the games almost never chart on the NPD and rarely crawl above a 80 on GameRankings/Metacritic......so the consumers and critics don't seem particularly pleased with the software market either.

As far as I know, Wii Speak voice commands don't work very well in noisy environments, which is exactly the point of a mic array.

Is there really a point in pretending that a voice-control only module couldn't be made for probably 1/5 to 1/4 of the cost of the Kinect?

[Alx]

I would respond to this first, as it seems indicative of the lack of ambition and goalpost-moving that's marked the Kinect era. 2009: "OMG THIS IS THE FUTURE!" 2012: "It's just a peripheral! You shouldn't expect them to have blockbuster games for it!" 2009: "HOLY SHIT MINORITY REPORT IN MY HOUSE!" 2012: "Well the voice commands are good sometimes. Maybe they will figure out motion controlled UI in the next console."

This kind of misunderstanding comes from the bad habit of gamers (or people on message boards in general) having no middle-ground, it's either everything or nothing.
A new tech being "the future" doesn't mean it will replace everything and has to be used all the time. It means it will be part of our everyday life. Cloud computing is the future, but there will always be offline computing too. Online gaming was the future (now the present), but offline gaming didn't become irrelevant.
Even as a big kinect supporter, both for the technology and some of its games, I still spend most of my time on regular games. Because my interest for those games didn't magically disappear with the arrival of new types of games.

This holiday, Microsoft is publishing less games than they did at launch, and less than they did in 2011.

They're publishing less games in general since they're focusing on the next console. It's not exclusive to kinect.
For the kinect launch they didn't have much choice since they had to push the product, now there is more support from third parties.

Can you really believe they're treating Kinect as a fundamental part of the 360 platform? Is it as core to the 360 experience as Xbox Live? To say that this thing was sold just as some new way to enjoy simple, casual games is to forget or whitewash the entirety of the near 18 month pre-launch hype cycle.

Considering that there were probably more updates on kinect features than Xbox Live recently, yes I think it is as core to the 360 experience as Xbox Live.
And once again go read everything that was said during the "pre-launch hype cycle", and it mostly described what happened in the end. Don't confuse what MS promised and what gamers imagined.

Microsoft's default position on core titles is generally to sorta mention what they have at the moment and make a veiled reference to unannounced things in the vague future (as Phil Spencer did previously above). It's always been "The core stuff is coming!"

Those vague statements, joined with Kudo's "Kinect Adventures is good for core gamers too" should have given a clear idea of what their priorities were, or how meaningless those declarations can be. Since there's no clear definition of core gaming, those statements will be interpreted differently depending on the reader.

Whether they've delivered or not I guess is subjective, but it seems clear that their priorities have shifted pretty significantly. It's less about motion control and new experiences, and more about shoehorning voice control into whatever orifice a game can fit it into.

Voice commands are just as important a part of kinect as gestures (probably more for generic user interfaces, actually, since we'd rather use language than gestures). And during the sensor design, they seemed to put as much effort in it as motion tracking.
Generalizing its use is not a shift of priorities, it's just trying to develop a still underused feature. Gestures didn't disappear either, and they're obviously still working on it (the 1.5 release of the SDK includes improved 3D face tracking, joint orientation, sitting person handling,... it was released in may, and updated 3 weeks ago).

Are those games really, seriously fundamentally different than dancing with a Wiimotes, playing sports minigames with a Wiimote, or snowboarding on the Balance Board? All that stuff is essentially rooted on the Wii. Kinect might track more limbs or make it more accurate but can you really call it a new experience?

You could say that "fundamentally" it's still sport and dancing... ("fundamentally" COD and Doom are the same games too) but yes I would say that playing soccer with your feet, moving around in volley-ball, dancing with your whole body is a new experience (for videogames).

Is there really a point in pretending that a voice-control only module couldn't be made for probably 1/5 to 1/4 of the cost of the Kinect?

I think kinect itself could be made for 1/5 to 1/4 the cost of the kinect (probably already does, actually... just for information, MS buys the 3D sensing part $10 apiece from Primesense). But yes, you could have a device specialized in voice commands without the gesture features. It still wouldn't be a simple microphone, like you're trying to suggest.

[SamVT]

Pretty sure it was abandoned because it was a pipedream. Molyneux is good for creating buzz and getting people excited about possibilities. In practice his games always fall short of his ambitions. Milo is an extremism of this, something far harder to achieve, and looks much less like a game. To call it a risk would be an understatement.

I assure you Milo was a game you could play, it had a story and gameplay, it was a +10 hour experience. A team of +/- 50 people worked on it for a long time. In the end it was people's lack of imagination that killed it - in my view - "gamers" (the majority of GAFFERS) have an idea of what a videogame is. Anything that doesn't fit, gets ridiculed. You can imagine what senior and marketing people at Xbox thought when reports landed on their desks with the public's reaction to Milo...it got killed because it wouldn't sit well on the shelves next to COD, GTA and other games. It was taking a new sort of interactive entertainment a step too far for its time.

On the one hand we lament the lack of innovation in the industry, but on the other hand when we see something that is so different we diss it. We want to have our pie and eat it too. I fear this industry isn't going to go anywhere but at the same time, lack of vision and fear of the unknown means we'll be playing the same games for the next two decades.

The video that was played at E3 2009 was scripted of course, how else would you achieve a high quality high impact piece that has to convey "the dream" in under 3 minutes on a stage in front of 3,000 people and a Online/TV audience of 25,000,000??? But I assure you, as someone who directly worked on that video - the game that you saw on the TV was an actual game. You could play it. It worked, there was nothing "fake" about it other than the fact that it was optimized for an audience who would see it on video playback anyway.

The day after it was shown on the stage, I gave that exact demo to Miyamoto in a behind-closed-doors session. Milo didn't call me Claire, he called me Sam.

And Fable: the Journey will be another great example of what Kinect can do if we (developers) try and think outside of the box, try and think of something new - approach how we design games in a different way, do what it does well, avoid what it does badly. We're our own biggest critics - and I know it's cool to diss something that's different from the norm, but realize that every time we do that, changes are that we'll be playing the same games for the next two decades...

[shinnn]

Steel Battalion Real gameplay
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hifFOnjoBHk

Kinect implementantion in SB is actually impressive when you have your setup functional (which is not the case with most of game journalists). The game though looks an abomination mostly because game design than kinect itself.

[glaurung]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij5J4...tailpage#t=22s

[Meier]

No need to right an article -- it's answerable in a tweet. Core gamers prefer controllers. Who would they be developing for?

Done.

[Clear]

On the one hand we lament the lack of innovation in the industry, but on the other hand when we see something that is so different we diss it. We want to have our pie and eat it too. I fear this industry isn't going to go anywhere but at the same time, lack of vision and fear of the unknown means we'll be playing the same games for the next two decades.

This I agree with, completely. However:

You can imagine what senior and marketing people at Xbox thought when reports landed on their desks with the public's reaction to Milo...it got killed because it wouldn't sit well on the shelves next to COD, GTA and other games. It was taking a new sort of interactive entertainment a step too far for its time.

Would you concede that Milo was simply a bad choice with which to demonstrate the technology and creative techniques Kinect facilitated?

I'm sorry, but the whole concept of befriending a young boy (particularly without framing the nature of the relationship between him and the user) was always going to problematic in this day and age. You, (Peter certainly) should have been aware of how troublesome this would be to a marketing-driven company like MS... any sort of allusion to "grooming" was guaranteed to make them uneasy! And that was inevitably going to happen.

And Fable: the Journey will be another great example of what Kinect can do if we (developers) try and think outside of the box, try and think of something new - approach how we design games in a different way, do what it does well, avoid what it does badly. We're our own biggest critics - and I know it's cool to diss something that's different from the norm, but realize that every time we do that, changes are that we'll be playing the same games for the next two decades...

I'm glad you have confidence in it. That being said, again I have serious qualms about the way Peter was evangelizing the role of the relationship between player and horse (psychology is all wrong), even if it does get around the "virtual wheelchair" issue that I've mentioned elsewhere.

The bottom-line for me is that Kinect is inevitably going to be inferior to standard controls for user-elective locomotion. And that's a very big fundamental issue to overcome for any sort of design approach.

I'll be interested to see how the "Segway" (lean to move) approach works, but on the face of it I can't see it offering an improvement over simpler alternatives like the Wii nunchuck or the PSMOve Navcon. Its more effort physically, and forcing the player to be mindful of their posture at all times seems like a hassle to me.

[diamount]

Microsoft attempting to cash in the Wii's success. Nothing else needs more to be said.

[Oni Jazar]

Been saying this for years: Kinect, like all optical sensors is fundamentally limited in what it can be used effectively for. MS marketed the hell out of it as general-purpose gaming device, most likely in spite of very many voices internally telling them that it would never be that. That's somewhat dishonest, but its good sales strategy - you want to eliminate all negativity in your pitch. The basic premise has always been that here's this device that can make interactions much more natural and instinctive because it knows what your whole body is doing at any given time. Which is great, except that for that to actually work as advertised it would need to basically be reading your mind at all times, and that's not what it does. Lag isn't just a product of the time it takes for the camera/data latency, its dependant upon the phenomena its observing. You need to physically complete the designated action for it to be registered; you can work around this to some extent by breaking down complex motions into (temporally) shorter segments but ultimately the program is going to make a binary success/fail decision on each chunk and bail-out if one part of the chain doesn't complete. Occlusion/visibility issues are another concern. The user(s) need to remain in the camera's field of view at all times, basically putting you in a virtual wheelchair as far as locomotion is concerned. You can't use your legs for their biological purpose of moving about and so designers need to invent some sort of mime equivalent (unnatural and immersion breaking) or straight-up take away that ability from user control. This is a HUGE limitation compared to conventional interfaces. Small muscle motions (hands and fingers) are difficult to track not just because of sensor resolution but because of the risk of them being hidden behind other limbs/body parts. In which case the system needs to fall back on a predictive algorithm; this is fine when the motion being simulated is "loose", but you can't abdicate critical decision making to the software even 1 time out of 100. Because if it gets it wrong (predicts an unintended outcome) the user is going to curse you for it. All this comes back to the whole "mind-reader" level of acuity that is at the heart of the sales pitch; what Kinect is doing is actually adding an interpretive layer between action and response recognition in the software. Rather than making input more direct, its actually doing the reverse by creating a mid-ground abstraction that the program its servicing needs to respond to. This is a massive drawback for performance critical situations where the absolute current-high/current-low states of a microswitch offer unambiguous, definitive binary feedback to the system. The underlying premise of good interface design is minimizing the distance cognitively and temporally between intent and actualized external action. Kinect or whatever comes next is NEVER going to achieve this, because it simply doesn't work like that.

Been saying this forever too. Preach on.

[TheRagnCajun]

I assure you Milo was a game you could play, it had a story and gameplay, it was a +10 hour experience. A team of +/- 50 people worked on it for a long time. In the end it was people's lack of imagination that killed it - in my view - "gamers" (the majority of GAFFERS) have an idea of what a videogame is. Anything that doesn't fit, gets ridiculed. You can imagine what senior and marketing people at Xbox thought when reports landed on their desks with the public's reaction to Milo...it got killed because it wouldn't sit well on the shelves next to COD, GTA and other games. It was taking a new sort of interactive entertainment a step too far for its time. On the one hand we lament the lack of innovation in the industry, but on the other hand when we see something that is so different we diss it. We want to have our pie and eat it too. I fear this industry isn't going to go anywhere but at the same time, lack of vision and fear of the unknown means we'll be playing the same games for the next two decades. The video that was played at E3 2009 was scripted of course, how else would you achieve a high quality high impact piece that has to convey "the dream" in under 3 minutes on a stage in front of 3,000 people and a Online/TV audience of 25,000,000??? But I assure you, as someone who directly worked on that video - the game that you saw on the TV was an actual game. You could play it. It worked, there was nothing "fake" about it other than the fact that it was optimized for an audience who would see it on video playback anyway. The day after it was shown on the stage, I gave that exact demo to Miyamoto in a behind-closed-doors session. Milo didn't call me Claire, he called me Sam. And Fable: the Journey will be another great example of what Kinect can do if we (developers) try and think outside of the box, try and think of something new - approach how we design games in a different way, do what it does well, avoid what it does badly. We're our own biggest critics - and I know it's cool to diss something that's different from the norm, but realize that every time we do that, changes are that we'll be playing the same games for the next two decades...

Sounds like you had something to do with the project. I'm sorry it didn't pan out. Did you honestly believe you could deliver on the E3 2009 demo? And have it sell well? Even if you say 'yes' I'm doubtfull.

I think you are right that we are not ready for this kind of software yet. But try not to be too hard on the gamers, or NeoGAF. This sort of idea has to mature naturally, you can't force it, bringing it to market prematurely is just an expensive mistake.

[border]

They're publishing less games in general since they're focusing on the next console. It's not exclusive to kinect. For the kinect launch they didn't have much choice since they had to push the product, now there is more support from third parties.

Huh? I look at Microsoft's lineup for 360 proper and I see major flagship titles like Halo, Gears of War, and Forza. The 360 will be seven years old in November. The Kinect is not even two years old and the level of support it's getting is pretty pathetic by comparison.

Considering that there were probably more updates on kinect features than Xbox Live recently, yes I think it is as core to the 360 experience as Xbox Live.

You can't really compare a seasoned online service that's been iterating for nearly a decade to a beta-level product that hasn't even been out 24 months.....of coursse they'll be polishing the new product a lot more than the old.

And once again go read everything that was said during the "pre-launch hype cycle", and it mostly described what happened in the end. Don't confuse what MS promised and what gamers imagined.

Go back and look at the Milo video and tell me we weren't meant to expect more than slightly more advanced versions of Wii games. It was a semi-believable AI that could see you, read your emotions from the sound of your voice, look and copy things you've drawn, and converse with you in natural human phrases. You tried to shrug it off as "an upgraded Seaman" when it's clearly more than a virtual pet that just spouts some canned phrases when it hears certain keywords. If you think that Dance Central is some huge revolution over Just Dance on the Wii, then it should be impossible not to admit that this was more than a slightly improved Seaman. The Milo project itself seemed more like a weird art project, but it certainly boded well for both immersion and character interaction in other games.

That level of ambition no longer seems to exist. But hey, we got Usher in Dance Central 3 right?

[Alx]

Go back and look at the Milo video and tell me we weren't meant to expect more than slightly more advanced versions of Wii games. It was a semi-believable AI that could see you, read your emotions from the sound of your voice, look and copy things you've drawn, and converse with you in natural human phrases. You tried to shrug it off as "an upgraded Seaman" when it's clearly more than a virtual pet that just spouts some canned phrases when it hears certain keywords.

But that's still what it was. The big innovation was in reading the emotion in the voice indeed, everything else is just things that are already done in other games : kinect OS/games already "see" us, recognize our face, and even a simple camera in eyePet is capable of reading a drawing (actually it's more advanced in eyePet, if you pay attention Milo doesn't show the scanned drawing, nor reproduce it ; Molyneux said it was to avoid the inevitable penis jokes).
And watch the demos carefully, the character did spout somme canned phrases, based on keywords and maybe gestures, emotion etc. All the Milo lines are pre-recorded. It is all an illusion of AI, Molyneux said himself that the trick was in doing a believable character simply based on subtle hints.

I don't want to offend SamVT though, it doesn't mean the game couldn't be good (I agree that it would have been better received with a fantasy character instead of a little boy, though). But it's the kind of things that gamers have been misunderstanding from the beginning, and now they're complaining that it's not what they dreamt of and that they've been lied to. In an ironic way, it shows that Lionhead succeeded in making their tamagotchi believable, but that bit them back in the end.