Ernest Adams on The Act

The Act - Emotion Control with Single-Knob Gameplay is a piece by Ernest Adams on Gamasutra about a coin-op game called The Act.

While I think that the principles behind it are an excellent idea, will such a one-trick pony have long-term appeal? Also, I can imagine that a player is going to spend an awful lot of money simply getting used to the way that the input works, the amount of twisting of the knob they need to get the reactions they desire and so forth.

Wouldn't it be better to include something like this as part of a bigger whole so that you might have action, exploration and puzzle-solving and use this for when you interact with the characters in the game? This way the player would get the feeling that they were still in control, yet have a richness to the gameplay that doesn't exist at the moment.

I also can't help but think that the costs of the multiple animation "routes" will make the animation budget pretty prohibitive if applied to a long game.

It will be interesting to see how this develops.