Following a choice few salacious details in an interview a few weeks ago with Penny Arcade Report’s Ben Kuchera, this weekend is rife with news, courtesy of TheVerge’s Joshua Topolsky, that Valve may indeed have a Steam-based piece of hardware in the works. If they don’t name it after Daft Punk’s Steam Machine, or at least use that track for marketing, they’ll be obliging me to call it something that isn’t its name for time immemorial.
First off, the key quote from Valve’s Gabe Newell during his interview with Kuchera:
“You know we did a ton of work on biofeedback, on biometrics, and [...] from our point of view we were like “okay, this is all sort of proven out” and we’re just sort of scratching our heads trying to figure out the best way to get that hardware out to customers [...]
It’s not a question of whether or not this is going to be useful for customers, whether or not it’s going to be useful for content developers, you know, it’s figuring out the best way we can get these into people’s hands.”
Then, in the midst of all this will-they-won’t-they console hubbub is a patent screenshot in Topolsky’s article from yesterday. The patent, it seems, is for a controller with interchangeable modules that would allow it to be deployed for use in a variety of gaming platforms. Potentially you could have a game that needs more buttons than movement methods, so rather than use two analogue sticks, one of those could be changed into perhaps an extra set of four buttons. The possibilities are interesting, at the very least.
It bears a striking resemblance to Microsoft's Xbox 360 controller, too.
If all of this comes together, it’s painting a very interesting picture for the future generation of consoles. With Microsoft pushing Kinect integration into their triple-A titles, and Valve possibly involving biometric data, such as our heartbeats indicating how excited or afraid we are, the next generation of gaming could be a startlingly futuristic cyberpunk experience, an integration of organic with synthetic. Get ready to scream ‘I never asked for this!’, only to then realize that you’re merely upset because you didn’t think of it before anyone else, and not because your entire body has just been assimilated into a life-changing game à la The Lawnmower Man.
[Via Penny Arcade Report, TheVerge]
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