Confession of an Xbox Owner

I’ll be up front and admit I don’t own an Xbox One….yet. I’m still using my Xbox 360 presently.

The reason I don’t own one yet is down to a couple of factors… I just bought a flat so money is tiiiiiiight. As such I’m waiting for pay rises and price drops to reach a point where I can afford to have one skint month and splash out on the Xbox One.
The other contributing factor is that I’m holding on till the TV system’s kinks have been worked out for the UK as once I have the XBox One I’d like to be using it’s TV integration all the time.

That being said I still have very strong views on why the Xbox One should always be sold with the Kinect.

What makes the Kinect great

The new Kinect is incredibly powerful and capable. It can tell your heart rate, facial expression, weight distribution across your limbs. That is an amazing feat along with it’s video and skeletal tracking.
It can also do all of this across a much wide range of lighting set ups than the previous version.

Where some users seem to be failing to see the potential though is that they are thinking about the current paradigm of maybe using a kinect with a dance game, or playing a kinect game like Kinect Adventures or such where the activity has been designed to change the gaming experience to one of physical participation.

Thinking outside the XBox

However if you think outside the box for a moment and imagine you’re playing a HD graphics zombie game. As you play the game it guages your heart rate and notices you are particularly exhilarated by a certain type of zombie or situation. It tweaks it’s algorithms and so you are taken thru more, similar situations. The game has become personalised to you, and the experience has become augmented by playing off you as an individual.

You could also imagine a game scenario where every time die at a certain stage of a game the kinect notices your unhappy face and body position, after a tailored amount of times the game makes that section easier to allow you to proceed. Suddenly a game you might have given up on and traded in you are now playing in it’s entirety.

There are a million different scenarios where using the many sensors in the Kinect the gaming experience can be uniquely tailored. However in order for games manufacturers finding this a worthwhile enough venture to invest time and money in they need to know that the audience is there.
If they know that everyone with console X definitely have the sensors they need, they know there is a market worth investing in.
If their efforts are going to be wasted on users without a Kinect then why bother.

As a result of this dichotomy the result will be games that are Better with Kinect and have features gludged on to make this so.

He’s the (not) Greatest Dancer

Yes you might be a hardcore gamer who plays FPS and what would you need a Kinect for, you’re not going to be dancing in your living room, you’re going to be maming, but what if the number of enemies that the game threw at you depended on how fast your heart was beating. What if your presence not being detected in a game depended on keeping your heart rate calm and steady and not moving a muscle?