Science fiction author Neal Stephenson came up with a concept for a  fantasy sword-fighting game called “Clang” and successfully funded its development by raising $500,000 via Kickstarter.

But selecting a realistic controller was his main concern. “In our minds, a game was inseparable with a hardware controller,” he said. “It had to be shaped like the handle of a controller, and you had to move in intuitive ways to play.

“So we asked, what would it take to make the controller and make it cheaply enough to make it mass market? After playing around with a few ideas of our own, we became aware of promising technology developed by Sixense. The high-dollar solution was to use accelerometers.

“The Sixense people routed around that and came up with a much cheaper yet very precise way to do it using coils that can sense magnetic fields. That was a breakthrough.

It’s embedded in the Razer Hydra game controller. That gave us confidence that the hardware problem could be solved.”

To Stephenson, games are a good fit with what fantasy and science fiction writers do for a living. “The thing that differentiates us is the world-build aspect. That’s what science fiction and fantasy writers do. We don’t just create stories, we create a world. And then we write stories within those worlds.”