So, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. You know this to be true, because you experience it in every movement that you make. You move, some force responds. This has been ingrained in your understanding of the world around you well before you were aware of the concept.

The issue I have with the Revolution’s controller is that it abstracts this concept in a way that is actually quite difficult to understand. Because Nintendo’s attempting to target “non-gamers,” I think this will present them a substantially larger problem than they think.

If you’re swinging a virtual bat, in a baseball game using this positional sensor, you might believe you could have a reasonable baseball-playing virtual experience. However, there is no ball. You will never feel the impact of the swing. The bat has no weight, no inertia. You can’t see it, the way you can see a normal bat.

Now, seeing your player on screen respond to that input may still be entertaining – but it’s abstract. It requires you to learn the correlation between your actions – swinging this controller – and your on screen avatar’s response. It’s not 1:1, it’s 1:! – sort of the same, but also sort of different, and if you didn’t know that ! was on the 1 key, it’s quite hard to understand. I expect that to the casual players that Nintendo’s trying to appeal to, that level of abstraction is actually not terribly different than hitting an A button to swing the bat. In fact, it may be more difficult, because it may attempt to “be more realistic” to appeal to people who know what swinging a bat is *actually* like. How can you judge the position of the bat in space, when it doesn’t actually exist?

Again, *I* can say that I can make the correlation between my onscreen avatar’s bat position and where my hands are positioned, but I don’t think that “casual” gamers will, to be perfectly honest. And I think that that’s a *critical* failing on Nintendo’s part. On the DS, I can poke my Nintendog, and understand that poking it interacts with it, because the feedback is immedately at the end of the stylus I’m using to poke with. On the Revolution, I’m interacting with nothing, essentially – I’m poking … nothing. And my feedback’s on a screen some feet away. Though you can *learn* to understand how one responds to the other, I don’t believe it’s as accessible as Nintendo, and most gamers, may think.