To you, Fruit Ninja Kinect might just be a flashy console adaptation of the addictively simple mobile game. To others, however, it represents one of the first motion-control titles for the Xbox 360 that is accessible for some incapacitated consumers. Use your arms (or feet, according to developer Halfbrick’s Executive Producer Duncan Curtis) to slice flying fruit and avoid bombs. Now consider how fundamentally simple those motions are, not just for the average player to pick up but also for gamers with certain kinds of disabilities. 

Microsoft first promoted the Kinect as a peripheral that would get people off the couch and put them in motion with an array of kicks, jumps, dance moves, etc. Those types of maneuvers aren’t the easiest for players who rely on wheelchairs or have other disabilities that limit their mobility, so to them, the device might have seemed pointless. About a year ago, four months before Microsoft launched the motion-control add-on, a company rep told Joystiq that, “Kinect can be used while sitting when an experience is developed with sitting in mind,” but then went on to stress that it would be “natural” for developers to make games with plenty of motion in mind. 

Fast-forward to the present, and we have a title like Fruit Ninja Kinect that isn’t designed with “sitting in mind,” per se, but is still considerably more accessible…regardless of the physical demands of dicing virtual produce. Obviously, it’s difficult for a game to be universally playable, but this certainly represents a step in the right direction. Marco Pasqua, a staff writer at AbleGamers.com (a website that caters to the disability community) who has a condition that affects his motor skills, put it like this: “I am still able to move my arms enough to make a 'slicing' motion. Because of this, I am able to interact, and I am not as restricted by my disability as I am with some other Kinect titles.”

And perhaps as a result of experiences like Marco’s, Microsoft is promoting Fruit Ninja Kinect as part of its Summer of Arcade program. Last summer, the company hosted an accessibility roundtable and picked the brains of various people, including some of the staff of AbleGamers. There, Microsoft employees listened to and discussed what worked with the Kinect's motion controls, what didn't work, and how developers could use that information to improve the reach of their software. Though AbleGamers Editor-in-Chief Steve Spohn couldn’t tell me precisely what Microsoft is doing in response to what they learned from the event, he assured me that it "made some impact, judging by the titles that were released at [this year’s industry trade show] E3."

Fruit Ninja Kinect may or may not be a direct response to the feedback from Microsoft's roundtable, but that almost isn't the point. Its ubiquitous gameplay proves that developers, while attempting to appeal to the widest array of consumers, might accidentally reach a specific demographic who, ironically enough, finds the Kinect a most inaccessible device. Good thing for everyone, then, that chopping fruit with your hands is a lot of fun. MTV Multiplayer's Russ Frushtick described it as "the best Kinect game of E3," and, given my recent hands-on time with the title, I'm inclined to agree.