Following the Motion

The Wii controller was the moment when everyone admitted they’d run out of ideas. Nintendo made this little white remote that actually did something different—you’d swing it around for tennis, aim like a gun, whatever the game needed—and suddenly Sony and Microsoft realized they’d been stuck making the same controllers for a decade, just refining them into slightly nicer shapes.

Sony announced the PS3 controller was getting motion sensing. Peter Moore at Microsoft said basically the same thing for Xbox 360. Neither company had actually thought about what motion control meant for their own systems, their own games. They just saw what Nintendo did and decided that was the thing to do now. It was the clearest possible admission that they didn’t have anything original to say.

I don’t know. There’s something deflating about watching massive corporations get caught that flat-footed, realizing they had nothing while a competitor figured something out. They could’ve gone anywhere, pushed into their own weird territory, but instead everyone just started copying. It made the whole industry feel smaller.