Having throughly enjoyed the Patapon experience (though somewhat bemoaning what I see as the game's limited replay value) I recently picked up the-other-cute-PSP-game: LocoRoco, for more of the similar. I have no idea why I held out on this game for so long! LocoRoco cracks me up and it's a freakin' brilliant, brilliant game.

But, cuteness aside, these two games have drawn my attention to another brave stroke in both their designs: the games' controls, or rather, what it means to be in control in these games, or rather, the indirect control you have in these games.

What I mean by this is that in both LocoRoco and Patapon you do not directly control the characters. You do not use the directional buttons or the analog stick to move the game's title characters forwards or backwards or whatever. Instead, you indirectly control the movement and behaviour of the characters, more so in Patapon than in LocoRoco. With LocoRoco, you control the planet that the LocoRoco are on, and you tilt your surface one way or the other to get the little globs of jellied cuteness to roll this way or that. In Patapon, all you can do is play rhythms on your drums, and the Patapons will respond accordingly, but only to certain drum beats played at a consistent, patient rhythm.

This lack of direct control comes most to light when the title characters are in danger. When a Moja swoops in to eat your LocoRoco, you can't immediately make the LocoRoco run away; you have to tilt the planet away from the menacing Moja so your guy (or gal) can roll off--hopefully, fast enough, or you can use the two shoulder buttons at once to create a minor seismic tremor, firing your little spheroid friends at the Moja like rubbery cannonballs. And when a Dodonga opens its smelly maw to scarf up a foolhardy Patapon, you can't immediately draw the one-eyed guy back with the analog stick. Instead, you need to--steadily, calmly--pound out the PON-PATA-PON-PATA call to "Run away!", and wait for your little cycloptic friend to make fast tracks on his own lest he pay an intimate visit to the monster's digestive tracts.

It's just an intriguing--and slightly masochistic--concept. I mean, we typically play video games so that we can control the action, so that we are a part of it. That why I often prefer games to movies, at least. But when we play games like LocoRoco and Patapon that innovate on degrees of control, we are complicit in allowing those game to restrict how much influence we actually have. I mean, imagine an FPS where you didn't actually control the movement and aiming of your character, but instead directed his action by, for example, somehow altering his moods or calling specific details to his attention. Imagine a sports game where you controlled the fans, rather than the players, and the degree to which your fans chanted and lauded their team--possibly carried out as sets of mini-games--would determine how well your team would fare. What kind of response would these games garner from players? And where would the limit lie? How far would we be willing to give up control for the sake of new gaming experiences?