Rare's Nick Burton

Something that has turned out to be a very shrewd move, and we can say this after the fact, is that we put things into user research very early, because we needed to see if anyone understood it. Once you say to somebody, "that's you on the screen" they realise it does what you do. If you show them a table tennis table and ball coming to them - even if it's a wireframe - they naturally move to hit it. It's in-built life experience. I think we've lowered the barrier because once a user sees himself on the screen having an effect in the world, it clicks. Sports is a no-brainer. You don't have to tell anyone how to play football.

Yes, so the challenge for us is to add plenty of gameplay and discoverability. Not necessarily gamey things to do, but you really can get better at the events, just the way you would in real life, although it's accelerated a bit. There's a difficulty curve and progression there, but I can also play it with my six year-old daughter. We could say the launch games are the obvious choices because they are so relatable but the thing we found was that of all of the different prototypes, people were gravitating to the sports ones. And should it be extreme skiing and mountain climbing or should it be bowling and track and field events?

All of the first-party groups worldwide have all worked together, more so than we've ever done before. And we're like the alpha testers for Kinect with third-parties as the beta testers. I wouldn't say we're the biggest advocates but we're the one's who have done the most work with it so far. Because we've got such a new thing here everyone has got to answer some of the fundamental questions. You don't need to share the code a lot of the time, it's just the concept of how things like throwing and jumping work.

So let's go from the top. Lag is not an issue, at all. It could have been. It's something that we've worked to make sure it's minimised, you can never eliminate it of course. We've got it to the point of less lag now than most games with a joy pad. The interesting thing I do notice is that some people don't get their own biological lag. Move your hand and the avatar will copy you, no problem. But if you're running for hurdles, I've got to set up to jump before I get to the hurdle. In a normal game I can press a button right before I get to the hurdle because it's just a tiny little movement with my thumb. If I've got to stop, set and jump, there's thinking time and the biological process of my brain is much slower than technology. I've got to plan what I'm doing. That involves planning ahead, but if you're playing the old Hyper Sports game you're just pressing a button, you don't need to plan to take a stride. Kinect Sports is exactly the same in that way, but it is your biological lag, not the system. If we had lag the table tennis wouldn't work because you need that hand to eye co-ordination. But that's part of the gameplay, it's learning to play the game. But it's perfectly right for people to question if they're playing the game and doing the work then it has to copy what they are doing.

It's possible. Kinect recognises gestures. We have a skeletal system and sign language requires very subtle movement of the fingers so you would have to be very close to the sensors. But it's all software based so there's no reason it couldn't be done. There's absolutely no reason why not. Give a couple of developers with computer vision experience 6-12 months and they'd be able to do it.

I would say it's about the same. Kinect Sports is a fully-featured game. The Kinect titles have been through the exact development process apart from there's a whole new part of the interface. And there's so many inputs on this thing that we're only really just scratching the surface.

It depends what you mean by hardcore. Wait until people have played Sports with their family. There's definitely meat on the bones of this thing. It's a proper game. Judging by the stack of prototypes that we've still got lying around and the crazy ideas we've been thinking about recently we could do some really, really hardcore experiences.

Bear in mind a lot of concepts were just a few days work, there were a lot created by small teams of one or two people. The whole idea was quick, short, sharp experiences. We had the seagull game, a horse racing game, alternative reality stuff, platforming games, object digitisation... we've still got a stack of stuff and more crawling out of the woodwork now. We've probably only scratched the surface when it comes to ideas as well.

It's our focus at the moment. We're still excited about Kinect and it still offers a lot of possibilities. There's a whole potential for having Kinect with joy pad if you want that, or you could have one game with different interfaces.