Convincing people to embrace new control methods is hard.
Just ask Nintendo. Sure, here at CDM we talk about making music with a
graphic tablet input, sock puppets — you love that. But the gaming
market is conservative; many still don't get the inclusion of a stylus
on the Nintendo DS.
And that, friends, has made Nintendo go completely insane and turn into high-art interactive artists:
Exhibit A: touchingisgood.com
— Nintendo is making arty films about why hand input is a good idea,
and for a while was even giving away surplus disembodied mannequin
hands so you could completely freak out your friends. (Now you have to
settle for a PDF hand — damn.)
Exhibit B: ElectroPlankton
— Nintendo's even making experimental electronic music art. It's not
too surprising that the Japanese market would go for algorithmic
generative music involving surreal animated plants that's not even
game; this is Japan, after all. But they're importing it to the US?
Quick! While Nintendo is in this experimental mood, can
someone get them to release their SDK to the digital music community?
And music developers, why haven't you figured out that stylus input
would be an insanely cool way of controlling envelopes and oscillators
(witness today's NoteGraphica)? Come on, what was the last gear to use this — the Fairlight CMI?