The Motion Control Trend, How Does it Affect People With Disabilities?

The Motion Control Trend, How Does it Affect People With Disabilities?

The release of the Wii brought with us the current trend of motion controls and currently Sony and Microsoft are making their own versions of it. While the motion controls for the Wii have given us several great tools to use in our lives like the Wii fitness which helps people get in shape, how does the trend of motion controls impact the part of society that has some form of disability?

Now this does not have to be a severe disability but could just be something in the line of arthritis, before people suffering from arthritis could still play the Wii (granted the arthritis was not severe enough) because the Wii remote register the way you pointed your remote, not how you swung it and thus only small movements of the remote was needed. But now the Wii motion plus have arrived which negates this and you now again (like in the promotional videos for the Wii) have to swing your entire body the hit that golf ball or swing that sword.

This has made the Wii eliminate the entire community of gamers who are suffering from some form of disability. But this is not a huge problem considering that they had two other video game consoles to choose from, namely the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. These consoles uses the traditional control instead of motion controls (minus the sixaxis in the PlayStation 3 which in almost every case can be turned off) and things were going fine.

But the motion controls of the Wii were a huge success and so Sony and Microsoft felt threaten by the Wii and decided they are going to make their own version of the hugely popular motion control and considering how these work they too would alienate the community of gamers with disabilities. Now this is not a huge problem considering that these will be addons to the consoles instead of mandatory and thus not every game will need to use these controls. But what happens if they find that the motion controls are extremely popular and make the mandatory for their next consoles?

I think you know were I am going with this so I am going stop and let you think about it yourself. Hopefully, you will have some great ideas about the subject after a while.…