Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
Joke aside, such game mechanics, albeit with cursor gesturing rather than hand gesturing, have been tried many times before. See Arx Fatalis, Black & White, etc. Jonathan Blow has a pre-Braid prototype about that as well that he shows in some detail in a talk he gave.
The reality is that sure, it sounds cool when you describe it like that, but there are many design issues to contend with:
- how does the player remember all these obscure symbols ?
- how do you deal with the frustration when a symbol isn't recognized? When it's confused by the system with another symbol?
Etc. On top of that, there is the fact that drawing squiggles to cast spells is not a game mechanic that is inherently extremely fun. Why are people going to the bother of doing that vs pressing a button?
It's all a lot of work to make it make sense, and there is little reason to believe that gesturing with your hands instead of your mouse would solve some of the more fundamental problems.
Without a keyboard, it's cumbersome to switch between a bunch of spells. Gestures are both more immersive and functionally better. Maybe most people wouldn't memorize hundreds of spells, but a couple dozen are certainly feasible. There could be a spell "language," where the initial part of the gesture could correspond to the category of spell. Fireball, fire wave, etc...can start with the same basic gesture. All wave spells can end with the same gesture. Hundreds of spells can be constructed from permutations of 20-30 foundational gestures, kind of like how a core group of trilateral roots in Arabic and Hebrew can construct a much larger set of words (sometimes without previous knowledge of a specific word/permutation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_root
The grenade example is a good one, because throwing/flicking doesn't require much feedback, unlike say rotation or fine grained manipulation. Of course the interaction would feel nicer if you could feel the weight of what you're throwing - the physics of throwing objects always feels kind of off in VR games - but it still works well enough. Note that many games did this with the Wiimote, and there is nothing about that interaction that is singular to VR.
However, the moment you lose that affordance based in a real world object, and ask your user/player to make gestures in mid air based on recollection, things really do start to fall apart. There is a host of HCI literature/projects around this - e.g. check out papers/demos from the Kinect era. An RPG game like the one you describe could be made with Kinect, and I vaguely recall a few in development - but Kinect demonstrated well that the only kind of gestural interaction that works in long term sessions is dancing.
Btw, this is why if you go to e.g. the VR center in Tokyo, almost every booth has physical props for you to hold/grip/sit on while you're fishing/golfing/shooting a gun/riding a bike in VR.
The use of gestures has to appeal to hardcore gamers (in this case). The motion tracking needs to be sufficiently advanced. There can't be a swifter, dopamine enhancing alternative (like mashing buttons on a keyboard). A critical mass of developers need to make games with gestures as a core mechanic. Etc...
I offer Pavlov VR as an example. Pavlov is like Counterstrike, except many of the mechanics are gesture based.
- You grab your gun off your back
- You actually need to look through the scope for zoom, physically bringing your head and hands into alignment
- You have to reach over your left shoulder to activate the walkie-talkie for remote communication
- Reloading is a multi-step process and varies from gun to gun
You might say that I'm proving your point about gestures mapping to real-life, but that's not why I bring up Pavlov. I'm using it to illustrate the aforementioned emergent properties, because all of those gestures add up to something unexpected: even with subpar graphics and a low budget, it is fun. Not only that, but it is fun in an unexpected, novel way for FPS games. Suddenly, your kill count, headshots, etc...don't matter as much. The immersion as well as the social element of the game are huge. You are so zoomed in, so in the moment, when you are in a firefight, poking out your head out to snipe the sniper before rushing back below the barrier, in a way that you wouldn't be in a 2D game.
Microsoft could technically have made a Pavlov Kinect, but who would play it? Almost no one. People would complain that traditional controls make much more sense, and they would have a point. It's simply awkward to squirm around in front of a 2D screen. There's a disconnect between the input modality (3D gestures) and the display modality (2D screen) when using the Kinect. In VR, both the input and the display are in 3D harmony.
The issue is that “gestures” are not a binary thing that you do or not; they live on a continuum. What is waving vs raising your hand to swat a fly? Categorizing these “gestures” in a meaningful way and layering effective gameplay on top of it is the challenge, that pretty much no one solved despite the huge incentives.
Gestures on two-dimensional multitouch screens are not what we’re talking about here (and even then, you can’t expect people to remember much more beyond the 5/6 core ones).
Drawing squiggles isn't inherently fun. But dancing your spells now that's hecking fun.
Human culture already uses lots of weird hand symbols to cast all sorts of spells. You can say "hello" with a hand gesture. You can cast teh "I'm sorry spell". There's a great "I need your attention" spell, another for "I can't understand/hear" ... and let's not forget the wonderful repertoire of spells for "You're an idiot"
Hand and body gestures are a fantastic user interface. Computer recognition might not be quite sophisticated enough yet.
Games can ask players to do almost anything as long as they’re having fun in return - but that means that the more outlandish things you ask them to do, the more fun they must have.
This is true, but not in a a way that maps directly to the gesture. For example, reloading in Pavlov is not fun in isolation. It’s a relatively tedious process that mirrors reloading in real life. It is rewarding to successfully reload while you’re taking fire and then proceed to kill your enemy. As a result, reloading gesture > reloading button, even though you need to memorize a different reloading action for each gun (it becomes muscle memory).