Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Virtual knitting

I've read where some musicians are annoyed by the idea of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. The argument against the video games is why spend your time learning to play pretend guitar when you could pick up an instrument and develop a worthwhile skill. Fair enough, but I enjoy playing the game and wouldn't mind learning the guitar now.

I suppose I'm more sympathetic to their point having become aware of KNiiTTiiNG. The currently in-development video game uses the Wii remote and nunchuk to simulate knitting. The game could be a good tool for assessing technique, but I confess that my first reaction is that it wouldn't be worth playing when you could learn the real thing. Sound familiar? Then again, maybe this game is what I need to free me from always looking at what I'm knitting.

From what I can tell, if KNiiTTiiNG gets out of beta, it looks like something that would be a WiiWare download, not a disk that Nintendo packages and sells in stores. (The site specifies that they have no affiliation with the company and its game console.)

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4 Comments:

At 7:00 AM, Blogger Amanda D Allen said...

This whole thing just cracks me up, but I can't see it being very rewarding. Wii fit makes a lot of sense to me because poor alignment or unique technique is a bad thing that could actually cause you to hurt yourself, but uniqueness in knitting is inherent. While there may be two techniques (picking and throwing) the differences from knitter to knitter are still huge. The Yarn Harlot had a great essay about this in her most recent book.

An example is me and my husband. I taught him everything he knows about knitting and he picks 'just like I do.' I stretch the stitches out that I'm not working on along the entire needle. I try to keep them loose so they slide along as they get pulled into the working area. Hubby holds every stitch in his fist and uses his pointer finger and thumb to scoot each one into the working area and then tuck it into his other fist.

It completely changes his grip and how he holds the needles. How he transitions from k to p is entirely his own. So my prediction is that there will either be a 'right' way that is very unrealistic or it will have looser requirements and it won't much matter what you do with the remotes. Neither sound very good to me. And isn't the soft cushy fiber half the fun. ;)

 
At 8:16 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I went and looked at the game and I want to see video. Kudos to them for realizing they need to simulate wrapping the yarn, but rotating the joy stick with your thumb? Really? It almost looks harder to figure out than knitting itself because you won't actually see anything being created on your controllers as you perform the movements. That said, if it's free I still may download it. ;)

 
At 9:45 PM, Blogger the secret knitter said...

Amanda, I think your comment is longer than my entry. :)

 
At 6:56 PM, Blogger Amanda D Allen said...

hehe, I didn't even realize I had an opinion about it until I was done :P.

 

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