According to some leaked box art, the next edition of Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon series, due in 2012, will be Kinect enabled – “better with Kinect sensor,” to be precise (Xbox360Achievements.org via That VideoGame Blog). This juicy info confirms some rumor-mongering from last year, that the Kinect functionality would be optional, used for things like hand signals that would translate into game commands.

This seems to me to be an excellent use of the Kinect’s impressive technology to augment the player’s relationship with the controls, a way to sort of combine the precision of buttons and sticks with the added dimension of body movement. There’s no reason the Kinect can’t be used with a game that still requires a player to hold a controller. In fact, I could see that being the future of this technology. For now, I can imagine a seated player using arm signals to command AI allies, or perhaps to avoid the need to speak via headset in multiplayer, something they could design to be audible to nearby human opponents.

In the future, I can see how a game could operate with a player standing and using entire body motions, while still operating buttons, thumbsticks, and triggers in each hand like the Wiimote + Nunchuck or the PlayStation Move stuff. This advancement would seem to me to be a necessary one, since Kinect’s  full abilities – while technologically impressive – are hard to extrapolate into games beyond the minigame compilations currently available.