Is the consumer his own product?

So here’s a little story. After a long day of working you are looking forward to going home and playing your xbox console, in order to relax and escape from your busy life. You enter your home and the controllers are nowhere to be found. You are going crazy. Where on earth had you put the controllers and now it is impossible to play without these magic objects that control your TV? But hold on, you are an xbox360 kinetics owner. You don’t need any controllers; you ARE the controller!

Ever since video games were invented, it has been inevitable to ignore their popularity and fast innovation. The first home video game console was released in 1972, so just under 40 years technology moved from simple-controller based consoles to no-controller-needed-at-all consoles! Pretty impressive if you ask me. However, the point I will make today follows, is technology innovating towards making the consumer his own product?

I’m sure all of you have by now heard the new xbox360 kinetics, where the consumer is the controller of the console. No additional accessories are needed, just the box and yourself. The xbox is able to recognise the player by natural user interface using gestures and spoken commands. Take a look at the link below.

What is kinect?

By making the audience the controller of the game, they are involving them within the digital technology by adding a literal meaning into interactivity. Quoting from an abstract from ‘Design Driven Innovation’, game consoles were considered entertainment gadgets for children who ere great at moving their thumbs; they offered a passive immersion in a visual world. Moving from that, what game consoles have aimed to do is to make the consumer more active towards the product, inserting an element of physical entertainment. Game console companies took a shot on radical innovation with the ‘disappearance’ of controllers and getting the consumer involved.

Although a great majority of consumers find this fascinating, I think it is working towards making the consumer lazier and less sociable. For example, the kinect home exercise.. Is it really worth running on the spot, pretending to exercise when you can go run outside and possibly socialise with friends while doing it? The consumer becomes drawn to the product because of the endless choices of interactive tasks included. If you like animals don’t pretend to stroke and play with an interactive one; go buy a pet!

Of course there are plus points to the innovative technology, such as it kills boredom to a greater extent than normal consoles do and it is more physically interactive in cases of bad weather. And even though it is aiming to make the consumer more active, I believe it is making the consumer more passive, in the sense that it is subconsciously pulling them into believing that they are part of the technology themselves.