On Monday, Leap Motion wowed technology enthusiasts with a video of its new gesture-control platform. The video showcased a system of incredible speed and precision, but controlled demos can sometimes oversell a technology’s real-world capabilities.

Would the Leap 3-D gesture device disappoint us during a real-world hands-on? No — far from it. We were somewhat surprised to discover the Leap is everything portrayed in the Leap Motion video. You can see everything we observed in our own video below.

Games are made of verbs. Run, jump, punch, crouch. Hand held controllers are able to simulate the input of the player to use those verbs in a rather precise way, be it on/off or analog. And as developers, designing around verbs is a pretty straightforward affair which we have been doing since the first game was played. But when it gets to adverbs, the emotional variables of a verb, neither the controller or developer seems to be aware of what to do with them beyond pure visuals.

Enter motion controls. While initially it is the verbs we assign to the gestures, such as swing a sword, we quickly find out that they just don’t quite match up the crisply defined input of a controller.  Motion Controls also lack a tactile sense of feedback in many cases, making all those verbs feel hollow when we don’t feel the physical reaction. It is a fun gimmick, but we quickly grow tired of the theatrics and plug our plastic hands back into the machine.

So if verbs aren’t best used for motion controls, how can we use them as adverbs and adjectives?