Critic’s Notebook: Sizing Up the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One

Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe multipurpose concept advances: the Sony PlayStation 4, left, and the Microsoft Xbox One.

THE video game console is dead, and the body has been cold for a long time. Sure, Sony and Microsoft are releasing what everyone describes as new game consoles, but the term is a misnomer. The Sony PlayStation 4, released on Friday, and Microsoft’s Xbox One, due next Friday, are game consoles in the same way that the iPhone is a telephone.

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

Games first: the Sony PlayStation 4.

There hasn’t been a true game console under most TV sets for almost a decade, maybe longer. The aging Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, which begin their descent into obsolescence this week, do a lot more than play games. So does Nintendo’s high-definition Wii U, which was released a year ago.

You could watch National Football League and Major League Baseball games on the PlayStation 3. You could watch ESPN and HBO Go on the Xbox 360. You could surf the Internet, listen to music, connect with friends and feast on a buffet of streaming-video options — YouTube, Amazon, Hulu, Vudu and more — on both. Even the original Wii played Netflix.

The new machines — especially the Xbox One — accelerate this multipurpose evolution. They will compete with products like Roku and Apple TV in addition to the Wii U and the personal computer. Yet consoles face new competitors, too. There are now more places to play games than ever before: hand-held devices, computers, smartphones and tablets. New entrants like the independent console Ouya arrived this year, and Valve’s Steam Machines, living-room versions of the dominant PC gaming marketplace, are expected in 2014.

With this uncertain environment in mind, we put our hands on the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One this week. What follows is a preview of what they offer.

THE PLAYSTATION 4

In a world of Swiss Army entertainment devices, Sony is promoting the PlayStation 4 as something closer to a Swiss clock, elegantly designed for a single use. From the start, granted, its new console will include 11 entertainment applications — Amazon Instant Video, Redbox Instant, Netflix, Hulu and the like — with more to come. But Sony has pushed the new PlayStation as a games-first console that, at $399, is $100 cheaper than its rival.

The breadth of the price difference is deceptive. You have to buy a $60 camera to enable voice and facial recognition, or even just to play the three free mini-games that come bundled as the Playroom, a technical demonstration of how game designers might use two new features on the PlayStation 4 controller — a touch pad and a light bar that can change colors — to create new forms of play.

In one demo, a player can swipe the touch pad to make it appear on screen as if a small army of robots is being flicked out of the controller and into the living room. The camera acts as a sort of mirror, reflecting back an animated-robot-augmented version of the actual room. The robots waved back to a friendly hand gesture and were comically toppled by the cord from a set of headphones.

The PlayStation 4 controller is a significant improvement over the PlayStation 3’s, which had mushy bumpers instead of triggers on the back, making it inferior to the Xbox 360 controller for shooting games.

The importance of a controller to interactive entertainment is one way that new consoles are not quite the equivalent of innovations in movie theaters, like cup holders or stadium seating. A movie may be more enjoyable in a more comfortable theater, but the essential nature of the film doesn’t change with such perks. By contrast, the player’s relationship to the controller is at the very heart of interactivity.

Perhaps the most visible change on the PlayStation 4 controller is the removal of the “start” and “select” buttons that have been with us since the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the 1980s, in favor of buttons labeled “options” and “share.” Press share, and you can upload a screen shot of your game play to Facebook or Twitter, or a video to Facebook. (The system is perpetually recording the last 15 minutes of play. You can post the whole thing or quickly edit a snippet.) The PlayStation 4 also makes it simple to broadcast your play live on the services Twitch and Ustream.

The share button is part of a shift toward consoles as social networks, a transformation that began years ago with Microsoft’s Xbox Live and its friends list. More so than Xbox One, the PlayStation 4 is constantly notifying you what your friends have been doing with their consoles. And if players consent, the system will use their real names instead of the anonymous CB-style handles that, perhaps, encourage the culture of harassment and bullying that afflicts online play. In a notable change, the PlayStation 4, following the Xbox model, requires a subscription to compete with others over the Internet.

Chris Suellentrop, a former editor for The Times, and Stephen Totilo, the editor in chief of Kotaku.com, write about video games.

Critic’s Notebook: Unwelcome Innovation Earns Gamers’ Jeers

The applause was not only for Sony, which was promoting its forthcoming PlayStation 4 at an event on the eve of the three-day show. It was also a sign of growing resentment toward Microsoft, which was promoting its own new console, the Xbox One.

Microsoft has proposed limiting players’ ability to resell games that will be made for the Xbox One, due in stores in November. Companies that create games for Xbox One, Microsoft said, will be able effectively to prevent consumers from reselling the games by ensuring that the resold games no longer function on the console. No companies that create games have yet indicated that they will exercise this right.

This controversy led to the odd spectacle on Monday: At an industry event devoted to new games, there was raucous enthusiasm for the untrammeled right to sell and purchase old games.

Microsoft is promising new experiences with the Xbox One, which will require a constant Internet connection, because hundreds of thousands of machines in the cloud will enhance an individual console’s computational power. But players seem to be hearing only what is being taken away by Microsoft’s online monitoring of their gaming: the ability to resell or give away your games to whomever you choose, whenever you choose.

Microsoft says Xbox One users will be able to give away a single copy of each game to one other player, provided that player has been an Xbox Live friend for 30 days. Whether players will be able merely to lend games to one another, or to rent copies for a few days from a store, remains unclear.

Sony’s PlayStation 4, also scheduled for release later this year, is promising no such restrictions. And, for the record, Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of games like Super Mario Bros. and the Legend of Zelda for Nintendo, which makes the Wii U, said during an interview this week, “We would never create our system that way.”

Microsoft’s problem is that it is heralding a fully digital, downloadable experience, but offering a game system that is powered only partly by the Web. Players will still have to buy and install game discs on their Xbox Ones.

We may be heading toward Internet distribution of all games, but we won’t be there in 2013. Disc-based games are here to stay, at least for a while.

Because they are such large digital files, games have been slower than books, music and movies to adapt to downloadable and streaming media. In the interim — and it could be a very long interim — Microsoft looks as if it were trying to place restrictions that are commonplace on the virtual Internet onto physical discs. People don’t complain about their inability to lend or resell their iPhone games, so Microsoft argues that its position has a precedent. But many gamers are responding as if Amazon tried to apply the rules for the Kindle to new hardcover books.

At some point, Microsoft is going to win this fight. Even Sony is not promising to let players lend and resell the downloadable games they purchase for the PlayStation 4.

What’s more worrisome to me, as a lover of games and a believer in their historical importance, is the possibility that Xbox One games are destined for oblivion when the inevitable day comes, 10 years or so in the future, when Microsoft stops supporting the Xbox One. I can still play games that were made for an Atari 2600 or the Nintendo Entertainment System as long as I have a working version of the hardware.

The Xbox One, on the other hand, demands a daily check-in with Microsoft’s servers. And it is a near certainty that one day Microsoft will turn off those servers. That means that most of the Xbox One’s games will be enjoyed only by the current generation of players.

Maybe that’s fine. Once upon a time, when a movie left theaters, you couldn’t see it anymore. When a TV show was canceled, it was gone forever. And when a Broadway show closes, you can’t expect it to reside forever in digital memory somewhere for your convenient retrieval.

Still, there is a downside to using the Web for instant access to books, movies and music: a sharp reduction in our ownership rights. In the world of new media, we’re all renters.

When it comes to novels, songs and movies, you can choose to rent, paying less for a service like Netflix, or to own, paying more for, say, Blu-ray discs.

When it comes to video games, the Xbox One will no longer offer that choice. That’s why players are responding as if they were being treated not like renters, but serfs.

Critic’s Notebook: Xbox, Nintendo and PlayStation Look to Next Generation of Consoles

It is the latest in a generational line of Xboxes, PlayStations and Nintendos to arrive in the past quarter-century. To dedicated gamers, each generation is as relevant and real a part of the calendar as an Olympiad or a presidential election cycle. Gamers argue about which one is the best.

But the previous generation has stretched on longer than those before it and segues into the next at a time when there might be a meteor in the sky. Serious people discuss whether these new consoles, facing competition from cellphones and tablets, might be endangered. Untethered from a television, mobile devices — which draw hundreds of millions of people to distraction with Angry Birds, Clash of Clans and Temple Run — make gaming more convenient. The home console’s appeal is dependent on the notion that gaming on a television still matters.

The industry is at the start of its eighth console generation: the Xbox One, Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Nintendo’s Wii U. The Microsoft and Sony machines are planned for release this year; Nintendo’s device shipped in November, for the 2012 holiday season. Generations typically last a half-decade and are preceded by the promise that the new, ever more powerful devices will improve the world’s youngest major creative medium, make their manufacturers a lot of money and in some way reconfigure living rooms across the world.

The point of an Xbox is to “bring the things you love to life,” Don Mattrick, Microsoft’s chief of interactive entertainment, said in an interview outside the Xbox One tent. “You love entertainment. You love TV. You love games. This is going to be the premium experience for enjoying those things.”

Mr. Mattrick’s challenge, like that of his counterparts at Sony and Nintendo, is to convince people that the game console and its ubiquitous controllers aren’t going the way of the landline telephone or, in a threat that hits closer to home, the arcade machine. Just a few decades ago the home console was an upstart. By the late 1990s it was unseating arcade machines, gobbling the public’s attention the way Pac-Man used to gobble all those dots (and quarters). Consoles like the Nintendo 64 and the Sony PlayStation brought the graphics and sounds of arcade-caliber gaming home and improved on them by offering richer, deeper worlds to play in.

The outgoing console generation started in 2005 with Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Sony’s PlayStation 3 followed a year later, as did Nintendo’s Wii, with a motion-sensitive controller that turned it into a cultural phenomenon. In an age when iPhones are displaced every year, 2005-era console technology is nearly Paleolithic. It’s a testament to the ability of programmers to squeeze performance out of an established hardware standard that new games on the Xbox 360 can still look and sound impressive in 2013.

Proponents of consoles argue that most mobile games, while increasing in appeal, lack key qualities of console gaming. “They’re very bite-sized, very light on the story, very light on the emotions and the different things that a proper sit-down-on-your-couch-with-a-50-inch-screen-and-surround-sound experience can provide,” said Scott Rohde, who leads the highly regarded in-house American game development studios for Sony PlayStation.

Microsoft’s vision for the Xbox One extends beyond gaming. It is designed to switch from playing games to showing cable television with a snap of the fingers. Older consoles simply played games, but newer ones are designed to play television shows and movies.

That shift in focus has been gradual but definite at Microsoft, which added one of its most popular features to the Xbox 360, the ability to stream movies through Netflix, in 2008. At the tent event Mr. Mattrick, a former video game designer, announced a deal with the N.F.L. that would empower the Xbox One to display an interactive fantasy league application on the right side of a TV while the left side displayed a live football game.

Mr. Rohde and Mr. Mattrick may be rivals in the current console generation, but they are joined by colleagues on both sides who argue that the increased horsepower and technical flash of new consoles can make video game characters appear to be more realistic and increase a player’s emotional engagement. They suggest that better technology enables greater aesthetic achievement in their medium. This is by no means a settled point, nor even a universally shared belief of what it takes to advance the artistry of games. That view was in fact recently mocked at a recent conference for game creators by the independent developer Chris Hecker, who played a reel of proclamations by top console game developers who claimed that more powerful technology would beget more emotionally sophisticated gaming.

Stephen Totilo is the editor in chief of the gaming site Kotaku.com.

Critic’s Notebook: ‘All My Children’ and ‘One Life to Live,’ on Hulu and iTunes

Yes, jumping into the new versions of “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” is not easy if you missed the first 40-some years.

These two soap operas were among the longest-running shows in television history when ABC canceled them in 2011. On Monday the production company Prospect Park, amid much anticipation from the faithful, brought them back, not on TV but on the Internet, via Hulu and iTunes, using a mix of actors from the network versions and new faces.

Soap operas, once a staple of daytime television, became an endangered species as prime-time television adopted many of their themes and plotting devices, and more women went into the work force. Who had time to block out a couple of hours in the middle of the workday to keep up with the daily machinations of a bunch of fictional families?

The Internet removes a significant obstacle faced by the network versions of the shows; now fans can watch them any time and, with the right technology, any place. That flexibility opens up a whole new world of potential viewers, but are the reboots going after them?

No. At least, that’s how it looked to this potential viewer, one of the vast millions who never watched the original shows because they had jobs. The new “One Life to Live” and “All My Children” did not, from this week’s episodes, seem to be trying to make themselves welcoming to the uninitiated. If anything, the opposite was true. Every minute or so, it seemed as if the shows were throwing up a neon sign that said, “Reference Understandable by Longtime Fans Only; Others Should Turn Back Here.”

One scene in “All My Children” can serve as representative of what it’s like trying to crack into these shows. Some people whose relationships to one another are still unclear are gathered.

“How is Bianca?” one says.

Miranda, a young teenager, answers: “She’s O.K. I mean, as O.K. as she ever is since the night —— “

A J, a second teenager, interrupts her: “Can we let it go, people? It happened, it’s over, we need to move on.”

It did? It is? We do? And who the heck is Bianca?

Such maddening vignettes came along at regular intervals in both shows. So did characters whose surprise-it’s-me appearances were calculated to thrill the fan base but were just annoying for newbies. A woman is in a public establishment when a man, his face hidden by a newspaper, addresses her. They trade a few words. The man lowers the newspaper to reveal himself. A beat to allow for recognition. Then a cutaway to a new scene. Repeat endlessly.

Sure, if you stuck with the episodes for the week, you could begin to pick up some of the dynamics and back story and discern some plotlines that might be interesting. On “All My Children,” someone’s daughter is kidnapped. On “One Life to Live,” Dorian Lord, a United States senator, gets herself into a vaguely defined scandal that has something to do with C.I.A. black ops.

And yes, there are fan sites and Wikis with laboriously written-out story arcs for each and every character, so theoretically the newcomer could spend hours plowing through them and get up to speed on who impregnated whom in the distant past, who tried to kill whom back in the 1980s, and so on. The real question is, Is it worth the effort?

And the answer, again, is, no. Unless you’re into camp, why put in the time it would take to decipher these shows when there are much, much better ones beckoning? The new versions have been promoted as racier than their predecessors, but there is more skin in prime time and much more skin on pay cable; the most the reboots offer is a very occasional curse word. Although both shows had groundbreaking moments during their long network runs — a lesbian relationship, themes involving drugs and rape — it seems unlikely that the reboots will hold many in the anything-goes age.

The acting ranges from mediocre to outright bad, especially on “All My Children.” Any scene involving a couple over the age of 50 has the treacly gloss of a Viagra commercial. Any young characters are played by actors far too old for the roles. Any parent with a teenager is clueless about how to communicate with him or her. And the writers do not always seem up to the task of giving the actors signature moments. Fan boards were full of complaints when, on “One Life to Live,” Victor apparently came back from the dead, and the other characters seemed only vaguely surprised.

Shows like “Downton Abbey,” “Revenge,” “Scandal” and even “Game of Thrones” are in essence soaps — lots of characters, intertwined story lines that evolve over entire seasons — and they’re far better written and acted than the new “All My Children” and “One Life to Live.” They’re no easier for a newcomer to decipher, but they haven’t been on for four decades, so through DVDs or downloads it’s still possible go back to the beginning and get on board.

The new soaps do have the advantage of offering daily bite-size episodes, each about 25 minutes long. They’re short enough and mindless enough to make the train ride to work pass more quickly. For a newcomer, perhaps it’s best to think of them as you would a learn-a-language tape: Listen often enough and eventually, say in a year, you might be able to converse in soap-opera-ese.

Critic’s Notebook: SimCity From Electronic Arts, Plagued by Server Problems

Like its predecessors, the new SimCity lets players lay down roads; zone homes, businesses and factories; place parks; and provide government services and more to manage a simulated metropolis. Players see their cities primarily from high above and are alerted to citizens’ complaints as traffic clogs roads, schools crowd classrooms, and the fire department ends up a truck short of putting out a blaze.

All of these issues can be fixed through careful, real-time virtual urban planning. Even the tax code can be tweaked from the series’s longtime default “999” tax plan, which, technically, has nothing to do with the former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain.

This type of city management, which can be tedious or stressful in real life, is enjoyable as a video game — if the game works. In the days following Electronic Arts’s early Tuesday release of the PC-only SimCity, the game barely worked, although there were signs of improvement by week’s end.

Lucy Bradshaw, general manager of the Electronic Arts games development studio, Maxis, described the release as “challenging.”

She said that thousands of players had gotten access to the game, though she acknowledged that many others had not.

“Our priority now is to quickly and dramatically increase the number and stability of our servers and, with that, the number of players who can simultaneously access the game,” Ms. Bradshaw said late Thursday by e-mail.

Unlike its predecessors, the new version requires an online connection, even for the private, single-player mode. Electronic Arts’s servers couldn’t handle the immediate influx of players, sticking gamers in queues to wait to play and eventually blocking them altogether.

Hours after the introduction, the company indicated that the problems were affecting “a small percentage of users.” Yet as the situation worsened, the company began to take down servers for maintenance, promising improvements by the end of the week. On Thursday the company turned off “noncritical gameplay features” to ease server load.

Fans fumed. A single, cheerful post on Electronic Arts’s official SimCity Facebook page on Tuesday was greeted by midweek with more than 3,000 mostly irate comments.

“I paid 120 dollars for two copies of the game and cant play either of them,” one commenter wrote before raising his volume to all caps: “DONT SELL A GAME THAT YOU CANNOT HANDLE WHEN WE PLAY!”

A playful poll on that page from a few days before the game’s release asked players to decide how best to supply power to one of the game’s cities — buy coal, harness the wind or import energy from a neighbor. One commenter’s response after the server problems: “the power to allow people to actually play the game.”

To play games is to perhaps unwittingly become a lab rat, often for large corporations. The cheese is the pleasure of a good game. The path to that evolves as publishers concoct new ways to charge for games and adapt to a market that is as unsettled now as music was before Apple decided that songs should cost 99 cents. Creators see their games pirated. They see enthusiasm waning for many $60, 20-hour games as the world falls in love with inexpensive or free ones like Temple Run or Angry Birds. This breeds many economic experiments.

Some games are still sold for a flat $60. Some are free but then cost players dollar upon dollar to unlock extra levels, new costumes or other perks. Some games run on a monthly subscription fee; others cost a dollar.

It’s increasingly common for a $60 game to include a multiplayer component that, if the game is picked up used, won’t work unless the player pays the publisher a one-time fee of $10. Other full-priced games receive a year’s worth of downloadable expansions at $15 or so each. Electronic Arts has tried all of these techniques to reach customers and to get them to pay for these expensive productions.

It is unclear what problem Electronic Arts was trying to solve by requiring SimCity to work only if the computer running it was online and connected to its servers.

The game’s designers have said in the past that the online play would allow the new SimCity to feel more connected. And when it works, it does, transforming the classic experience of laying down roads, managing crime and dealing with air quality into a series of social concerns. Pollution wafts into neighboring cities. Commerce crosses borders. The construction of a hospital or expo center in one player’s city benefits those of neighbors.

Stephen Totilo is the editor in chief of the gaming site kotaku.com.

Critic’s Notebook: A Museum’s Games Are Not on Pedestals

The defining feature of video games is interaction, the three-way conversation among designer, machine and player. “Applied Design,” a new installation at the Museum of Modern Art — and an important one because it is the first time the museum has displayed the 14 video games it acquired in November — attempts to isolate this relationship. The games on view, from Pac-Man to Canabalt, are naked, without their packaging or other nostalgic trappings. There are no arcade cabinets on view, no outmoded consoles or computers to gawk at.

Instead, each game is austerely contained on a screen set against a gray wall, with a joystick or other controller resting on a spare platform beneath it. The installation is “an experiment to isolate the experience of the interaction itself,” said Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of the museum’s department of architecture and design, comparing her decontextualized approach with Philip Johnson’s in his 1934 “Machine Art” exhibition at MoMA, which set things like propeller blades against white museum walls.

This philosophy is markedly different from the one that motivated the Museum of the Moving Image’s “Spacewar!” show, which closed Sunday. That exhibition, which presented a more focused argument, refused to separate the interactive experience of playing a game from the object it first appeared in. An iPad game would be played on an iPad, and Space Invaders and its ilk were on view, and playable, in their original stand-up cabinets.

MoMA’s installation is also less didactic, and more modest, than the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s show “The Art of Video Games,” now visiting the EMP Museum in Seattle. Chris Melissinos, who organized that exhibition, wanted to make a case for the evolution of video games as a new art form that combined older forms like painting, sculpture and storytelling. So he relied on text and images, as well as video footage of gameplay and interviews with important designers, at the expense of interaction with the medium itself. Only five games are playable at “The Art of Video Games,” although one of them, Myst, is included at MoMA in an unplayable version.

Like the movies, video games can include elements drawn from older media — plot, character, animation, music, illustration, dialogue, even descriptive and expository writing — without being ruled by them. A video game can include very little that we regard as essential to motion pictures and videos and still be identifiable as a game. (Will Wright’s SimCity 2000, part of the MoMA installation, is a fine example.) Similarly, much of what we associate with nondigital games — competition, scoring, victory, defeat — can be removed from a video game without rendering the form unrecognizable.

But remove interactivity, the ability of the player to communicate with the machine (and by extension the designer), and you no longer have a video game. That’s why it’s disappointing that only 9 of the 14 games included in “Applied Design” are playable: Pac-Man, Tetris, Another World, Vib-Ribbon, Katamari Damacy, Portal, flOw, Passage and Canabalt. The other five — Myst, SimCity 2000, The Sims, EVE Online and Dwarf Fortress — are displayed as video demonstrations. (There is, perhaps, an excessive aversion to combat and violence in these selections, as well as the more than 20 others — Street Fighter II notwithstanding — that Ms. Antonelli has said she would like to add to the collection.)

Games that require deep commitments of time, or years of cooperation with other human players, can’t be captured in a museum setting, Ms. Antonelli suggested. But playing the falling-block puzzle Tetris on a three-minute timer, as it is presented here, doesn’t exactly allow for a visitor to commune fully with that game either. Nor does picking up a story-driven game like Portal or Another World in midgame, with the ability to restart from the beginning disabled.

More important, “Applied Design” is not merely an installation about video games. Most of the objects that aren’t games emphasize function in a way that clashes with the games’ dedication to recreation as its own virtue. An earthquake-proof table, a mobile homeless shelter made of gold polyester, a hybrid energy source that looks like ivy, not to mention chairs and lamps and even the @ symbol — these are elegant solutions to the problems the world presents.

But playing an emulation of the original black-and-white Tetris, made entirely from the characters on a computer keyboard (the walls consist of exclamation points and greater-than and less-than signs; the blocks are built from brackets) solves nothing other than boredom.

“This kind of indifference to direct functionalism that video games have is what makes them dear to me,” Ms. Antonelli said. “They are pure experience.”

Not all games resist function. Like any medium, games can be used to persuade and educate. But perhaps it’s time to devote a permanent space — it could be small and provisional, like this one — solely for MoMA visitors to interact with games as an exciting, unpredictable, purposeless mode of pleasure.

“Applied Design” is on view through January at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

Critic’s Notebook: Nintendo’s Wii U, With New Touch-Screen Controller

Instead, the Wii U feels like an accommodation to the new mode of living that Apple’s iPhone and iPad have introduced. That lifestyle was evoked by a New Yorker cover this summer that featured family members posing for a beach vacation snapshot while engrossed in their personal devices.

The Wii U, which is to be released on Sunday, works with the motion-control remotes you probably already own from the original Wii, and it plays most of the original games. What’s new — beyond high-definition graphics and some Internet-enabled features that won’t be turned on until Sunday — is the Wii U GamePad, a roughly 10-by-5-inch touch-screen controller. With a six-inch display surrounded by thumbsticks, buttons and triggers, the GamePad is the offspring of an iPad Mini and a traditional video game controller.

In its marketing buildup to the Wii U introduction, Nintendo emphasized the benefits of two-screen gaming, particularly competitions in which the player with the GamePad sees something different from what the other players watch on the television. In so doing, Nintendo played down a simpler concept, one more easily understood by casual players and Apple fans: the touch screen.

By merging touch-screen gaming with a video game system that is designed to live next to your TV set rather than be carried around in your pocket or purse, Nintendo is not merely acceding to the cultural tide. It is also trying — valiantly, perhaps quixotically — to stem it. After creating a world in which we are no longer bowling alone (because we are all Wii-bowling together), Nintendo is seeking to invent a new way for us to commune with our screens. The company’s hope is that the Wii U will bring families together in their living rooms for touch-screen gaming rather than leave them isolated with their tablets and smartphones.

Touch has always been a part of gaming, of course, because the physical interaction between player and device is central to the medium. But in recent years the growing complexity of the standard controller has become an obstacle for new players who did not grow up adapting to each iteration: the shift from one button to two buttons to four, or from one joystick to a directional pad to two thumbsticks and a directional pad — not to mention triggers and bumpers and start and select buttons. Easy, right?

Simplicity was a large part of the broad appeal of the first Wii, and though playing with the Wii U is not quite as uncomplicated as standing up and waving your arms around, the touch screen is straightforward compared with the controllers used with an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3. Selecting songs in Sing Party, a karaoke game published by Nintendo, is done by swiping through tiles on the GamePad’s touch screen and then tapping the song you want. The same goes for Ubisoft’s Just Dance 4, with the added wrinkle that a player can use the touch screen to choose dance moves, midsong, for the other players to perform.

In Balloon Trip Breeze, one of the mini-games bundled on the Nintendo Land anthology that comes with the $350 Wii U deluxe edition, the player uses a stylus to make quick swipes — familiar to anyone who has played Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja — to make a character pop balloons on the television. In Takamaru’s Ninja Castle, another Nintendo Land game, similar swipes hurl martial arts stars at cartoonish cutouts. In Pikmin Adventure, from the same disc, enemies are defeated by tapping on them as they appear on the GamePad screen. In Yoshi’s Fruit Cart players scrawl a path on the touch screen and then watch a character follow it on television.

The touch screen also allows the GamePad to morph swiftly into a TV remote control; you can adjust the volume on your set or quickly check the score of a football game without reaching for a separate device. And if you like what you see on cable, or if you want to allow someone else to watch TV in the same room, you can switch from playing a game of New Super Mario Bros. U on television to watching it unfold on your GamePad.

As that last trick indicates, the GamePad is more than just a touch screen, and Nintendo Land provides a sketch of other possibilities. The camera inside the GamePad is used in the game Octopus Dance to project the player’s genuine, human face onto the television, a merger of the virtual with the corporeal that goes by the name “augmented reality.”

Lightly blowing into the GamePad’s microphone in Donkey Kong’s Crash Course turns a windmill that moves a cart skyward. The GamePad can be used as a viewfinder in Metroid Blast and the Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest to target enemies for destruction. And in some other Nintendo Land games, characters can be moved by turning or tilting or lifting the GamePad into the air, another technique borrowed from mobile and tablet gaming.

Equally promising, if not more so, are the possibilities the GamePad presents for intensive, single-player gaming. In Ubisoft’s ZombiU, the GamePad transforms, if not eliminates, some of the metaphors gamers are accustomed to: The map is no longer a tiny icon in the lower-right corner of your television, nor a menu that must be reached by punching a sequence of buttons. It is something you hold in your hands and look down at, something that draws your attention away from the world (of zombies) around you.

Your inventory — the items you carry — also becomes less abstract as you peer into your GamePad to see what’s in your backpack and then physically move, say, a pistol into your hand by sliding it with your finger into an open slot. Similarly, digging through lockers, file cabinets and suitcases in the game world becomes closer to a genuine interaction.

Then again, when the first Wii console felt new, as with Microsoft’s Kinect more recently, many decreed that motion controls would be swiftly and widely integrated into long, narrative games. Surely the intuitive interface of Wii Sports would be merged with storytelling ambition. By and large, that didn’t happen. So, spoiler alert: I have no idea what the Wii U augurs, or whether it will permanently alter how we play, alone or together.

But it’s a pretty nice present.

Reporter’s Notebook: At Times, Obama And His Cyberself Differ on Tactics

Speaking to 1,400 supporters at a high school here, President Obama voiced his familiar lament that “there is so much negativity and so much cynicism” in politics that he could understand if voters tuned out the election. Minutes earlier on Twitter, he had written, “Why Mitt Romney’s end date at his buyout firm matters,” linking to a blog post about the tempest over his Republican challenger’s departure from Bain Capital.

Mr. Obama’s Twitter account is maintained by his campaign staff, which makes clear that only posts signed with the initials B.O. are actually written by him. That’s fairly obvious, given that on Thursday, in between pounding Mr. Romney for perceived discrepancies in the Bain story, “Barack Obama” tweeted: “Stickers! Get them here.”

But it underscores the vivid contrast between what Mr. Obama says, and what is often said in his name. The president did not address the questions about Bain Capital in his stump speech. In his first stop of the day, he even left out a line he has used about how Mr. Romney’s buyout firm was celebrated as a “pioneer” of outsourcing.

As a busy day of campaigning unfolded, however, Mr. Obama shrugged off his reluctance to talk about Mr. Romney and Bain. The line about Bain being an outsourcing pioneer reappeared later in a speech in Hampton. And in an interview with a local TV station, WJLA, Mr. Obama said that Mr. Romney ought to answer questions about his relationship with the firm after he left in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics.

“Ultimately, Mr. Romney, I think, is going to have to answer those questions because if he aspires to being president, one of the things you learn is, you are ultimately responsible for the conduct of your operations,” he said.

The Romney campaign did not give Mr. Obama any quarter either. Mr. Romney welcomed the president to Virginia with an open letter in The Virginian-Pilot, in which he said, “Your insistence on slashing our military to pay the tab for your irresponsible spending could see over 200,000 troops forced from service.”

Virginia, a once reliably Republican state that Mr. Obama became the first Democrat to win since 1964, looms as one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds in 2012. The president acknowledged its potentially decisive role, telling an overflow crowd in Hampton before his speech, “If and when we get Virginia, we will win this election.”

“Virginia, the reason I ran and the reason you supported me wasn’t just to get back to where we were in 2007,” the president said. “The reason we came together was to restore that promise for middle-class families, and all who are striving to get into the middle class. That’s what we’re fighting for, and we’ve got a lot more work to do.”

Time to Talk Coaching

Mr. Obama’s advisers say he savors unscripted encounters with voters, and occasionally these moments can be revelatory.

Dropping in for a beer last week at Ziggy’s Pub and Restaurant in Amherst, Ohio, the president found himself explaining to a table of curious school administrators why the White House was waiving states’ compliance with the No Child Left Behind law. Moments earlier, he had an intense exchange with Art Davis, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who complained about delays in processing disability claims for veterans.

But then there are encounters like his kitchen-table conversation with a Cedar Rapids couple, Jason and Ali McLaughlin. Though avidly promoted by the campaign, it got off to a desultory start, with Mr. McLaughlin and the president comparing notes about how they coach girls’ sports teams (“Now, they run plays!” Mr. Obama marveled about his daughter Sasha’s team). Neither said a word about middle-class tax cuts — the ostensible subject of the meeting — until after the reporters had been ushered out.

Help for Veterans

Mr. Obama has assiduously cultivated military veterans, giving tax credits to employers that hire returning veterans and extracting pledges from companies like Procter & Gamble and Tyson Foods to hire 100,000 veterans and their spouses. He also brought home the last soldiers from Iraq and is winding down the war in Afghanistan.

The Romney campaign, however, is determined to sour any affection these voters have for Mr. Obama, warning that the automatic cuts in Pentagon spending that are part of the White House’s budget deal with Congress could undermine the military-dependent economy in Virginia, with its large bases and shipbuilding industry.

“Virginia is probably going to be more devastated than any state in the union by this,” said John F. Lehman Jr., a secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and foreign-policy adviser to Mr. Romney, on a call organized by the campaign. “The president just doesn’t understand defense. He just doesn’t understand how it works.”

On Friday, Mr. Obama stopped at a smoky Veterans of Foreign Wars hall here and had lunch at Rick’s Cafe with three wives of servicemen. “I love the fact that this administration is focusing more on military families,” said one, Jennifer Farlin. “Prior to this, we felt lost.”

While the president is likely to make inroads with veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, the broader military vote seems destined to stay in the Republican column. According to a Gallup poll conducted in April and May, 58 percent of veterans said they favored Mitt Romney, while only 34 percent supported Mr. Obama.

Music to Suit the Crowd

As Mr. Obama’s campaign rallies settle into a routine, so, too, does his choice of music: a mix tape released by the campaign that runs the gamut from Arcade Fire to REO Speedwagon. The president usually takes the stage to U2’s hit “City of Blinding Lights,” as he did in 2008. The opportunities for creativity, such as they are, come at the end of his stump speech, when Mr. Obama shakes hands and poses for pictures.

Then, the campaign seems to tailor its music to local tastes. Mr. Obama greeted auto workers in Toledo, Ohio, and veterans in Virginia Beach to the thumping chords of Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar anthem “We Take Care of Our Own.” In Cedar Rapids, the artsy city in Iowa where voters have known Mr. Obama from the earliest days of his first campaign in 2007, the soundtrack was U2’s “Even Better than the Real Thing.”

In Sandusky, Ohio, the local organizers chose a tune not on the playlist: “Only in America,” the politically androgynous country hit by Brooks & Dunn that has been a standard for years at Republican and Democratic rallies.

Reporter’s Notebook: At Times, Obama And His Cyberself Differ on Tactics

Speaking to 1,400 supporters at a high school here, President Obama voiced his familiar lament that “there is so much negativity and so much cynicism” in politics that he could understand if voters tuned out the election. Minutes earlier on Twitter, he had written, “Why Mitt Romney’s end date at his buyout firm matters,” linking to a blog post about the tempest over his Republican challenger’s departure from Bain Capital.

Mr. Obama’s Twitter account is maintained by his campaign staff, which makes clear that only posts signed with the initials B.O. are actually written by him. That’s fairly obvious, given that on Thursday, in between pounding Mr. Romney for perceived discrepancies in the Bain story, “Barack Obama” tweeted: “Stickers! Get them here.”

But it underscores the vivid contrast between what Mr. Obama says, and what is often said in his name. The president did not address the questions about Bain Capital in his stump speech. In his first stop of the day, he even left out a line he has used about how Mr. Romney’s buyout firm was celebrated as a “pioneer” of outsourcing.

As a busy day of campaigning unfolded, however, Mr. Obama shrugged off his reluctance to talk about Mr. Romney and Bain. The line about Bain being an outsourcing pioneer reappeared later in a speech in Hampton. And in an interview with a local TV station, WJLA, Mr. Obama said that Mr. Romney ought to answer questions about his relationship with the firm after he left in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics.

“Ultimately, Mr. Romney, I think, is going to have to answer those questions because if he aspires to being president, one of the things you learn is, you are ultimately responsible for the conduct of your operations,” he said.

The Romney campaign did not give Mr. Obama any quarter either. Mr. Romney welcomed the president to Virginia with an open letter in The Virginian-Pilot, in which he said, “Your insistence on slashing our military to pay the tab for your irresponsible spending could see over 200,000 troops forced from service.”

Virginia, a once reliably Republican state that Mr. Obama became the first Democrat to win since 1964, looms as one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds in 2012. The president acknowledged its potentially decisive role, telling an overflow crowd in Hampton before his speech, “If and when we get Virginia, we will win this election.”

“Virginia, the reason I ran and the reason you supported me wasn’t just to get back to where we were in 2007,” the president said. “The reason we came together was to restore that promise for middle-class families, and all who are striving to get into the middle class. That’s what we’re fighting for, and we’ve got a lot more work to do.”

Time to Talk Coaching

Mr. Obama’s advisers say he savors unscripted encounters with voters, and occasionally these moments can be revelatory.

Dropping in for a beer last week at Ziggy’s Pub and Restaurant in Amherst, Ohio, the president found himself explaining to a table of curious school administrators why the White House was waiving states’ compliance with the No Child Left Behind law. Moments earlier, he had an intense exchange with Art Davis, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who complained about delays in processing disability claims for veterans.

But then there are encounters like his kitchen-table conversation with a Cedar Rapids couple, Jason and Ali McLaughlin. Though avidly promoted by the campaign, it got off to a desultory start, with Mr. McLaughlin and the president comparing notes about how they coach girls’ sports teams (“Now, they run plays!” Mr. Obama marveled about his daughter Sasha’s team). Neither said a word about middle-class tax cuts — the ostensible subject of the meeting — until after the reporters had been ushered out.

Help for Veterans

Mr. Obama has assiduously cultivated military veterans, giving tax credits to employers that hire returning veterans and extracting pledges from companies like Procter & Gamble and Tyson Foods to hire 100,000 veterans and their spouses. He also brought home the last soldiers from Iraq and is winding down the war in Afghanistan.

The Romney campaign, however, is determined to sour any affection these voters have for Mr. Obama, warning that the automatic cuts in Pentagon spending that are part of the White House’s budget deal with Congress could undermine the military-dependent economy in Virginia, with its large bases and shipbuilding industry.

“Virginia is probably going to be more devastated than any state in the union by this,” said John F. Lehman Jr., a secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and foreign-policy adviser to Mr. Romney, on a call organized by the campaign. “The president just doesn’t understand defense. He just doesn’t understand how it works.”

On Friday, Mr. Obama stopped at a smoky Veterans of Foreign Wars hall here and had lunch at Rick’s Cafe with three wives of servicemen. “I love the fact that this administration is focusing more on military families,” said one, Jennifer Farlin. “Prior to this, we felt lost.”

While the president is likely to make inroads with veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, the broader military vote seems destined to stay in the Republican column. According to a Gallup poll conducted in April and May, 58 percent of veterans said they favored Mitt Romney, while only 34 percent supported Mr. Obama.

Music to Suit the Crowd

As Mr. Obama’s campaign rallies settle into a routine, so, too, does his choice of music: a mix tape released by the campaign that runs the gamut from Arcade Fire to REO Speedwagon. The president usually takes the stage to U2’s hit “City of Blinding Lights,” as he did in 2008. The opportunities for creativity, such as they are, come at the end of his stump speech, when Mr. Obama shakes hands and poses for pictures.

Then, the campaign seems to tailor its music to local tastes. Mr. Obama greeted auto workers in Toledo, Ohio, and veterans in Virginia Beach to the thumping chords of Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar anthem “We Take Care of Our Own.” In Cedar Rapids, the artsy city in Iowa where voters have known Mr. Obama from the earliest days of his first campaign in 2007, the soundtrack was U2’s “Even Better than the Real Thing.”

In Sandusky, Ohio, the local organizers chose a tune not on the playlist: “Only in America,” the politically androgynous country hit by Brooks & Dunn that has been a standard for years at Republican and Democratic rallies.

Critic's Notebook: Less Flailing, More Precision: The Joy of Joysticks

It looks good in commercials and appeals to the millions who want nothing to do with standard video game controllers, those complicated contraptions covered in buttons and joysticks.

But there are players who have resisted touch-screen and motion-control gaming, preferring the precision of two-handed controllers, first on Ataris, then Nintendos and today on Xboxes and PlayStations. And the start of the next gaming-console generation, kicking off later this year with Nintendo’s Wii U, may give these players something to cheer about: Nintendo, which stripped down the controller by introducing the one-handed Wii remote in 2006, will feature a more conventional two-handed device called the GamePad. Even without Nintendo’s move, though, game creators have come to recognize that despite all of the futurist buzz about motion-control gaming, there are some things the old standard controller does better.

Drew Skillman, who makes motion-controlled games for the Microsoft Kinect system at Double Fine Productions in San Francisco, readily acknowledges the virtues of the controller. It is preferable, he said, “if your definition of a good game is one that is incredibly responsive and fast-paced and lets you directly — from your brain through your hands — direct a character to make it do very precise motions.” All those joysticks and buttons are good for that.

The controller, Mr. Skillman said, is the violin for “gaming’s real virtuosos.”

To devotees of the controller, many of the popular new gaming models are celebrations of slop. And they’re right. Finger swipes, hand waves or voice commands are less precise. They are video gaming’s version of steering a car by tilts of the driver’s head and being able to accelerate only with vocal commands to “speed up.”

Unlike, say, reading a book, in which the mechanics of tracking your eyes across a page of printed words has generally been accepted as the ideal from the beginning, in gaming it’s an open question as to which way is better for the player to interact with the virtual world created. (The controller fan’s lament, for example, echoes earlier complaints by computer-game players who scorned game systems and their controllers, instead championing the precision offered by a mouse and a keyboard.)

But an increasingly complicated controller has become as intimidating to those who have neither the time nor the zeal to learn to play it as an actual violin is to nonmusicians. A modern controller is made to be held inside a gamer’s loose cradle of thumbs, forefingers and middle fingers, all poised to respond rapidly. A newcomer could be forgiven for looking at it and not even wanting to touch it.

“If you put a controller and a tarantula on a table, and you ask my mom to pick one up, I’m not sure which one she would choose,” said Nathan Martz, one of Mr. Skillman’s colleagues at Double Fine.

Both the Wii system with its elegant remote and Microsoft’s more recent no-controller Kinect have sold tens of millions, largely to casual players. A problem, however, is that the motion-controller revolution has been accompanied by a paucity of excellent games.

The best-reviewed games have been those that require standard controllers, like Batman: Arkham City from last year and the old classic Super Mario Bros., with bad guys and obstacles that require players to react at the speed of thought. A player with a controller can easily understand what he or she has done wrong when pressing a button too late.

Motion-control games, meanwhile, have tended to be jolly, party-oriented amusements that register a dance step or an arm wave. A player has a hard time telling why that hand wave wasn’t picked up by the sensor. Was it too slow? Too fast? Not high enough?

“In the current state of motion-control gaming, I don’t even know if it’s fair to say you have the ability to create games that rival what you might do with a controller-based game,” Mr. Skillman said, though he added that future iterations of systems like the Kinect should allow for more precise control. He and Mr. Martz have found success by gearing their studio’s Kinect games — the “Sesame Street”-based Once Upon a Monster and the goofball Happy Action Theater, for which a sequel is being made — toward children and, to be blunt, people who may have had a bit to drink.

Such audiences don’t mind slightly delayed response times if they can control a game by flailing around. The games de-emphasize winning and losing and instead encourage physical playfulness.

There is something to be said for technology that allows different people to wave their hands differently rather than forces everyone to press a button the same way. On the other hand, it’s also good to have a violin that plays the string you bowed and not the one next to it.

Gamers and game makers have found that precision still has its value. It’s an idea that Nintendo seems to have come back around to. When the Wii U is released in late 2012, it will support motion-controlled Wii remotes. But its centerpiece controller, the GamePad, has a large touch screen surrounded by 2 joysticks, 10 buttons and 4 triggers. It’s a spider. The controller, ever so slowly, is crawling back.

Stephen Totilo is the editor in chief of the gaming Web site Kotaku.