Funny story, and this isn’t Kinect’s fault in any way as much as it is trying to integrate its capabilities into your game so consider it a cautionary tale.

My friend Mark and I are doing a run through of Dead Space 3 in Co-op mode. Mark and I have been playing multiplayer co-op games on PC and console for a decade or more.  We’ve got our routine down pat.  It’s not uncommon for us to revert to verbal shorthand in fact when gaming, something like this:

Me: Health here.

Mark: Ammo here.

Me: Low on health.

Mark: Low on ammo.

etc. etc.

So we’re playing Dead Space 3 over Xbox LIVE and having a terrible time. Every few seconds the narrative is ruined by popup toasts that say “Your partner needs health” or “You have accepted your partner’s ammo!”  This would happen during firefights or plot scenes, etc.  We were really getting frustrated with it.

We finally figured out that since Dead Space 3 is Kinect enabled for voice commands, and we both have a Kinect, our own shorthand for communicating over our microphones to each other what we needed or what was going on matched the game’s Kinect commands and was auto-executing them.

We had a much more immersive time when we turned the Kinect commands off.

(note that in Single player I love Kinect commands in games like Halo etc.  This was just unusually funny because we could not figure out why the game was interrupting us all the time with things we didn’t think we were initiating.)