One of the big stories to come out of this year’s E3 is Microsoft’s “Our Wii Is Bigger than Yours” throwdown to Nintendo in the form of Project Natal. Stealing the idea from Sony’s EyeToy failure, Project Natal is a camera that claims to offer full-body motion-tracking, as well as facial and voice recognition. So now instead of just waving your arms around to play games, you can jump around and flail your whole body! Awesome!

To highlight the advantages of the system, they produced a highlight video starring folks from the same stable of zero-acting-ability Old Navy-model rejects that Nintendo always uses, living in one of those Ikea-furnished houses no one actually has. The whole video is a gamer’s nightmare, but there are some fantastic standouts, including Dad doing a horrendous version of a pit stop, a little Hanson kid playing Monster (watch for the roar), and the lifeless conversation between Daughter and her ethnic friend about dress choice. You watch that and tell me it doesn’t beat using twin thumbsticks to shoot zombies in the head.

Here’s the thing, and maybe this is just me, but I don’t want to move around while I game. I’m quite content to place my ever-expanding ass on the couch and move no more than my thumbs while my character runs and jumps and swims and shoots and does whatever hell else I tell him to do while I remain perfectly stationary. If I want to perform a 360 nollie highside laser flip (or whatever) on a skateboard, I’m fine doing it with a combination of the right stick and left shoulder trigger. I don’t need to actually jump into the air in my living room. Likewise, I don’t need to actually kick my foot to kick a virtual soccer ball. Seems to me that if I were going to do that, I’d, I dunno, actually go outside and kick a friggin’ ball.

So please, game companies, stop with the “revolutionary” new ways for us to game. We don’t play with our families. We don’t have the necessary room to do all this thrashing around. And we really don’t want to move. You want to do something cool with game control? Put a button on the controller that automatically orders pizza. That I would use.