Motion Plus Saturday, July 11, 2009 : 11:00 PM PST By: Chris

Ruffling through a drawer - it's what you might do when looking for a spare battery or some paperclips. However, I see this simple activity as a useful metric for judging the state of interactivity in games. Think about it, it's a simple enough, even mundane task, but there's complexity and freedom in it. You're dynamically manipulating a number of objects as you please towards whatever goal you like.

Perhaps the longest standing tradition in games is for the player to press an "action" button near a graphic portrayal of a drawer in order to trigger a text message informing whether something useful is or isn't present within. The seminal classic Shenmue is the game that stands out in my mind as a an astounding advancement in virtual drawer rummaging. For the most part, Shenmue let you snoop through any random cabinet or drawer you came across. The beautiful thing is that often there was no point to actually doing so other than making the main character, Ryo, the most nosey and creepy man in town. Unfortunately, the whole thing was a largely visual experience and you couldn't do much with whatever your prying eyes uncovered.

Flash forward to present day. Specifically, let's look at the upcoming Wii title Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Here's a game that seeks to make everything tactile. Frow what we've seen, if the player wants to see what's on shelf, they have to manually pick up and manipulate the objects on it (and it's physics-driven). They've certainly got the right idea in terms of the drawer-ruffling-game-interactivity-litmus-test. But the Wii's cursor can only do so much. Namely, it's good for dragging and flinging objects. Granted, some people may go through their drawers in such a manner. Nevertheless, subtle manipulations aren't the Wii remote's strong suit. Hopefully, with the introduction of the MotionPlus, digging through a drawer can truly mirror real life. Then I will have to choose another asinine benchmark to judge game interactivity by.