Should we be looking at screens while we game? Or each other?

Speaking at the Playful 2012 conferance, Hide&Seek development director Mark Sorrell, put it to the audience that we shouldn't be looking at the screen when we play games, but at each other. He called this type of game “computer mediated,” and said it was the wave of the future.

Pointing to games like the casual ones introduced with the Wii as an example of baby steps towards this type of gameplay, he said that games should be able to be learned by simply watching other players. One example of the type of game he's talking about was highlighted by Wired: Johann Sebastian Joust. This game uses Sony's Move Motion controllers, but players look at one another constantly throughout ‘gameplay.' The object of the game is to make one of the other players jostle their controller with a frantic move. At the same time you have to protect your own, all while only moving as fast as the tempo of Bach's music allows.

It sounds like a strange principle as it perhaps better represented by this video: [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUzIhFHxJ5Q']

Of course this had been around for a while so you may have already seen it, but it raises interesting questions about the nature of gaming. Traditionally games were about people interacting, using the board or ball or whatever equipment to allow for different kinds of interactions. Have we lost track of this trend because of video games and their virtual worlds?

However we can have somewhat of a crossover. Going a little more technical is Danish game Searchlight that charges players with crossing a section of floor, collecting blocks along the way. The challenge is to do so without setting off the projector “searchlight” that is controlled by a Kinect motion tracker.

KitGuru Says: What do you guys think of these types of games? Is this something that we can look forward to in the future, or do you think it's a nice side experiment that wont' last?

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