Gaming needs a new controller

I’ve played games across every conceivable platform - from classic TV sports consoles in the late 70s and early 80’s, and the beginnings of home computer gaming with the Microbee, Vic20 and C64, through numerous nintendo and sega consoles, to my modern custom built pixel-hurling, tweaked and modded PC rigs and current generation media-centre consoles. (not to mention soft-core gaming on smartphone and tablet)

 

But from this diversity and history I have to come to a conclusion. Console Control pads are an abomination and the keyboard and mouse has nothing more than a niche future. 

 

Video gaming needs a new controller.  

Lets be clear - the console Gamepad is just plain WRONG and it is holding gaming back in a lowest-common-denominator mire of tedium.

The modern gamepad really offers nothing more than the arcade joy-sticks of old. Conceptually it has progressed game immerisve control not at all. of course, the joystick was once-upon-a-time the perfect control solution; but its simplistic elegance was tied directly to 2D top-down and side-scrolling interfaces. By extension the gamepad is a perfectly viable choice to control racing games, isometric and 2D games but for 3D perspective games, it is entirely clumsy and absurd. It’s position as the default interface for the modern console was arrived at simply through habit and legacy, NOT from any form of design solution process. Not from a considered investigation into what might be a logical and effective way to control a gameplay point of view in a 3D space. 

 

This is not a PC vs Console nerd-argument but a simple fact; keyboard and mouse following the classic WASD configuration is far and away the most accurate - and indeed logical - way to manipulate first or third-person perspective in a 3D virtual game space. Certainly we can give numerous reasons for this but its easiest just to point to all the 3D game mechanics that are needed by, and exist only on consoles, which are nothing more than desperate attempts to work around the short-comings of clumsy and inaccurate gamepad manipulation.

 

Cover-based shooting, for example, is entirely unnecessary on a PC with mouse and keyboard. Cover-based shooting was developed as way to make shooter action coherent and physically feasible to less than expert players using a gamepad. Cover-based shooting means the player does not have to manipulate the unwieldy and clumsy pair of sticks in opposing spatial constructs just to be able to see and shoot. Cover based shooting dilutes 3D shooters from spatial navigation and immersion, to the banality of an arcade pop-up duck-shoot gallery.  

 

We might also look at aim-assist and target lock-on which are also concepts that virtually did not exist on the PC but which are absolutely necessary to make a first-person shooter on console even remotely enjoyable. Aiming a cross hair with a thumb movement in a half-inch high joystick is the very epitome of tedious - an epic failure of design to fulfil a function. 

The history of 3D gaming also tells us much about the more organic and intuitive nature of keyboard and mouse control over gamepad. Consider that the modern 3D era arrives with the seminal First Person Shooters such as Doom and Wolfenstein. The natural and original home of these games is on the PC with keyboard and mouse. The first person shooter was specifically designed for keyboard and mouse control. The success of this WASD paradigm was that it understood that, despite 3D game space, the controls themselves still needed to operate on 2D planes in order to function on a 2D screen. Controlling FPS POV is the self same control as manoeuvring a mouse pointer on screen in Windows whilst adding a horizontal plane with through WASD.

 

I have several times run classes on games and gaming for non-gamers - introducing game genres, mechanics and narratives to digital-immigrants who have never really played before. The evidence for the absurdity of the gamepad for 3d games is evident in these scenarios where total newbies could go some way to effectively manoeuvring first and third person games on PC in the space of a less than an hour. But doing the same on console was impossible, demanding many more hours just to be able to coordinate two thumbs to move and look independently.  

 

From it’s birth on Keyboard and mouse  3d gaming took off in popularity and the consoles of course wanted in. But here in lies the problem. Whilst Mouse and Keyboard is by far a superior control mechanic for 3d games either first or third person - more fluid, more logical more subtle and more accurate, you do have to be sitting at a desk…!

 

The console lives in the living room, is more physically social, and you can chill on your couch. It’s a more relaxed and inclusive form of gaming and hence the PC gamer being regulated to a hardcore niche whilst the console dominates the mainstream. 

 

Despite the obvious failings of the console game controller for many contemporary game forms, the answer is alas, Not to bring keyboards and mice into the lounge room if you want a better, more accurate and immersive gameplay experience. You can’t use a keyboard and mouse on the lounge. But the gamepad is surely not the answer either. 

 

The gamepad as we know it is a great big boat anchor around games and game innovation. The keyboard and mouse gave games precision and spatial dexterity. The gamepad traded these in for lounge room real estate and a casual experience. Neither is satisfactory and neither is helping gaming develop.

 

Many in the games industry seem to think motion controls are the solution to the two problems - the insularity of the Keyboard mouse and the clumsiness of the gamepad…. But im highly dubious of motion controls as they currently stand.

 

I find myself in whole-hearted agreement with yahtzee of Zero Punctuation who observes that whilst motion controls can be fun, popular and social they are NOT (as too often championed) more ‘immersive’. In fact quite the opposite. Immersive means to feel immersed in a fictive situation (the game) to the point where your awareness of the real space you are in and it’s real world distractions are temporally suspended. To be immersed is to forget yourself and your surroundings.

A Wii controller being swung, friction and weightless, in your living is the opposite of immersion. They remind me constantly of the room i am in, they take my mind out of the game and into the room where i am playing the game. This is NOT immersive.

What we need is something else. The gamepad is clumsy and awkward, keyboard and mouse is niche and isolating. Motion controllers negate what is, for me, the very reason to game - to be lost in a world and escape to another place.

I don’t know what this new controller looks like or how it works. someone one day will. In the meantime I will continue to play most 3d games for a truly immersive game experience on PC and live with my isolation from the living room.

 

 

Comments

[Russell]

As a flight sim enthusiast, there is tremendous immersion by using a joystick and trackIR which lets pilots look all around the sky by small movements of the head while flying and fighting using the stick. I believe some fps games have support for trackIR too.