Mission: Control

One of the most frustrating things in games, and also in life, is the inability to do something just because of bad interface.  You know what you have to do, you know what you want to do, but you just can't get your limbs to go.  Sometimes gaining the skill to stop fumbling is part of the game itself (case in point), but in this case my kids really want to play Minecraft on their own and spinning around looking down is not quite what they had in mind.

So what happens when you give a 5 year old a first person shooter interface for the first time?  A couple of things:
- They tend to twist the mouse instead of slide it.  It seems G views the mouse as an avatar of herself so when she wants to turn, she turns the mouse.  Oddly enough looking up and down is an easily grasped concept but...
- They tend to shift their view down.  Once G was walking along outside I noticed that she slowly slid her view downwards to the point where she was basically looking at the ground, and she was ok with that.  When I reminded her to look up she stopped, looked slightly up, and noticed she almost ran into a pig (to which she said "Oh, a pig!"
- You realize that the natural motions of the human body are fascinating.  Instinctively G seemed to view the computer screen as a window, or possibly a projection of her vision, because at times I caught her moving her head to try and see around things that were in front of her.  It is clear that we need an Oculus in this house (or possibly some other non-Facebook branded VR).

In the end, G was able to do some navigation on her own and was telling me she wants to learn how to fight monsters.  For a first try I think it was a success and we need to see how try 2 goes.  Now I have yet to experiment with the 3 year old (especially because he says he want's to play now too), but I expect the results would be worse.

I find myself trying to remember how did I learn to masterfully prance around a 3D landscape?  Thinking back I remember that the first time I thought "That is a pain in the ass," was when I made the first shift from Wolfenstein 3D and Doom 2 to Quake.  Looking up and down is hard.  I then think further back and remember that circle strafing was a revolutionary point in my battles against the demon horde (and helped me to learn how to use the mouse better).  Will the 16 Bit Mom support my desire to train my 3 and 5 year old with battling demon Nazis?  Probably not but maybe if I install the Barneystien mod.

The alternative is to make a new type of controller.  I'm just thinking this up as I type this so bear with me.  Addressing the issues shown above, maybe I need to find some way to isolate X and Y movement into two controls (the kids don't need to move fast, they just want to have fun).  That should be easy enough with taking apart an old school ball mouse and would solve two problems (twisting and head going down)...I think I know my project for this weekend.

I should also mention that I don't think the 16 Bit Mom is going to like giving up the laptop for a Minecraft machine, so I think I will be spending some time this week trying to set up Minecraft on my Raspberry Pi.  Maybe the mini arcade machine I planned before is going to turn into a Picraft machine for my kids.  I wonder how a track ball would work for Minecraft...