Be Excellent To Each Other

Crikey, they all got new 360s!

Do these people own Wii's by any chance?

COD and Halo leave me cold, but I understand they are massive for lots of people.

I find Natal more interesting outside the casual games market they showed. I understand why they did that -- it's the most logical pitch -- but I really like the idea of using it for dashboard interface into things like Netflix. And I love the idea of an RPG that uses the pad for most interface work but Natal for inventory management, or Forza 4 supporting my force feedback wheel but doing head tracking in-game with Natal, not to mention having a far more useful tuning and painting UI.

i think Gears 3 multiplayer with bezzies will be great.

About 10 minutes into the 21st century it became a cliche to complain that all those old Hollywood dreams of spending the year 2000 zipping about on jetpacks and playing moon golf with robots were wild works of fiction after all. Now, 10 years on, the present is actually overtaking those movies. And it needn't have bothered.

Everyone remembers how astounded they were by the Nintendo Wii, right? You wave a stick around your living room and pretend you're playing tennis. Well at last week's E3 Expo in Los Angeles, Microsoft launched something called Kinect for the Xbox, which takes things one step further. Suddenly there is no stick. There's just you. You are the stick. Except they prefer to say, "You are the controller," because "stick" sounds a bit demeaning.

There's no pesky handheld interface at all with Kinect. You simply stand in front of your television sweeping your arms about like an unemployed conductor having a breakdown in front of daytime television, and the game reacts to your movements. It actually manages to make Minority Report look dated. Tom Cruise had to don special gloves to use his hand-waggling computer interface. Loser. What is this, 1976? Kinect lets you ride bareback.

And it doesn't just notice your hands, but your entire body. The most promising application was Dance Central, a dancing game from the creators of Guitar Hero. There have been dancing games before, of course, but they were rudimentary hopscotch affairs where you had to step on the right footpad at the right time. Dance Central tracks what your shoulders are doing and encourages you to correct your hips – just like the morning exercise routine Winston Smith had to perform in front of his telescreen in 1984, but with a Lady Gaga soundtrack and slightly less emphasis on dictatorial hectoring.

But wait: Kinect has ears as well as eyes. So as well as jigging around to impress in-game characters who aren't really there, you can also converse with them, thus enabling you to enjoy all the fun of a full-blown psychotic hallucination without feeling compelled to go out and stab someone afterwards. Unless that's the purpose of the game, of course, which it probably isn't, given the bad press that'd generate.

Instead it all looks rather twee: another centrepiece is Kinectimals, a virtual pet simulator which lets children play with cuddly imaginary tiger cubs and the like. You can talk to the tiger cub, tickle it under the chin, dance for its amusement, or hide behind the sofa and watch it whimper morosely until you jump back into view. You can do virtually anything with the cuddly not-there critter, apart from taking the only sane course of action: screaming "BEGONE, VILE WRAITH!" while stamping on its head. If you try that it'll just stare at you, blinking vacantly every 2.3 seconds as prescribed by its software, until you admit defeat and crumple weeping to the carpet – at which point it'll detect your despair and do a funny little handstand to cheer you up, and you'll catch sight of it and momentarily smile through your tears despite yourself and THUS KINECTIMAL IS THE VICTOR.

The technology behind Kinect should seem impossibly magical. A computer you can talk to, a computer that responds to your facial expression and tone of voice? So you're basically like Captain Wow issuing commands to his Plutobot 2000? The teenage me would've kicked himself in the balls with excitement. But now I'm so used to being dazzled by the white heat of technology, my eyes have grown accustomed to the glare. No longer blinded by progress, I see only drawbacks.

As Charles Arthur remarked in this paper last week, much of this technology only comes about about because of the "Star Trek effect" that turns sci-fi movies into self-fulfilling prophesies. A scientist sees a sliding door on the USS Enterprise, gets excited, tries to recreate one in reality, and before you know it you can't even enter your local Tesco without passing through at least two of the bastards. This phenomenon also explains the invention of Laser Quest, the iPad and Soylent Green flavour Pringles.

But movies often do things that work better in movies than in real life. Take talking to computers. The Kinect demonstration showed a man saying "Xbox, play movie" in order to make his Xbox play an HD digital copy of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. Then he said "Xbox, pause", and the Xbox paused it. Then he said "How cool is that?" and the audience took a while to respond, because there's no polite collective noise that means: "We appreciate the ingenuity, but CHRIST you look like a dick."

We've got buttons now. Buttons. If you want to play a movie, there's a button right there. You don't have to plead with it. Just press it. Shut up and press it.

Movies show people talking to machines for the same reason they'll still show the whistleblower turning up on the hero's doorstep to deliver urgent news in person, rather than sending a text: because it's more dramatic. It's also more cumbersome. Dancing software that rates your performance and turns exercise into a brightly coloured game: that's a step forward. Holding dorky conversations with your Xbox: that's a leap backward. Or to put it another way: no matter how far into the future we run, we're always lagging slightly behind.