Controller Evolution

[Rayne870]

and God forbid the Tutorial isn't 100% skippable or "hardcore" gamers are garaunteed to pitch a fit about it - as though it's inconcievable that people without their specific prior experience might want to play, too

What? You make it sound like there's something wrong with wanting a skip button, Bob. I have to disagree strongly: a skip button is what makes everyone happy.

If the tutorial is mandatory for everyone each time you start a new game, people who already know what they are doing are going to find it annoying.
If the tutorial doesn't exist, no players are going to get frustrated and turn the game off.
If the tutorial is there, but you can choose to skip it, experienced players can skip the tutorial and just play, while new players can take the extra time to pick up the basics.

With a skip button, everyone is happy. Every game tutorial should be skippable. It's just something that should be in every game these days, like an option for subtitles, and an in-game brightness adjuster so we don't have to change our TV's or monitor's settings if one game decides to be too dark or too bright by default.

Gears of War 2 Handled this very nicely with choosing to take Carmine out on a patrol or not, I took him the first time for the conversation elements. But yeah you are right on what the industry needs to do. And with RPGs they can go with the model of starting you with the basics and you building your character into more complex tactics.

 

[MaximillionMiles]

I agree with Yahtzee almost everytime... except now.
-snip-
Granted there are levels of entertainment but do not confuse quality with target audience.

Uhh... That's kinda what Yahtzee said.

The point I suppose we dance around here is that gaming is multifaceted enough that it can cater for a wide range of people with varying ideas of entertainment. Motion controls are akin to playing cricket on the beach with your family at Christmas (in Australia, that is, southern hemisphere lovely weather year round ha ha), while a game like SH2 controlled with button controllers from a prone, inactive, sofa slump position is more like settling down to read a good book. I prefer the latter, and motion controls will never improve that experience. It just won't.

So... Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

But about controllers and complexity... I think MovieBob's concern is more valid than we know. Sure, game-savvy kids adapt well to modern games, just like the kids in the 80'ies or 90'ies adapted well to their games. But without a doubt the more accessible the game's controls are, the bigger is the potential audience. This is not something even worth questioning.

This is why Wii sports is so popular, this is why browser puzzles and games with low action content (ie. not demanding lightning reflexes) and accessible content are so successful and so well played. That is why causal games and social games work.

There is nothing wrong with controllers remaining complex. But don't expect a game with complex controls to be truly popular. It's just not going to happen, no matter how good the game is. Some people just won't be able to learn, or won't be willing to even try. Which is a shame, but that's how it is.

 

[TheRealCJ]

I think part of this whole controller stagnation thing is that every game ever usually have the same basic controllers. It's not a bad thing, control schemes have reached a point that they're both at maximum utility and maximum simplicity.

Take a PC FPS, for example, WASD is the forward/back/strafe buttons, the mouse is the 360 look/attack controls. R is reload, Space is jump etc. If someone goes around changing it just to be different, you end up with people hating the game because they can't immerse themselves in the story, settings, etc. because they're too busy looking down at the keyboard and trying to figure out why "crouch" is mapped to the F7 key.

Motion controllers have the same problem. Because of the current lack fluidity in the sensing of motion, players end up watching what they are doing much more than they are watching the result of what they are doing. What are supposed to be "natural movements" become stiff and robotic, because if you actually move naturally (like in a game like Just Dance on the Wii), you end up failing basic moves in-game due to the fact that you were ten degrees off the proper position.

If and when motion controls get to the point where even the most natural movements are correctly interpreted as controls, I will have no problem with the whole "lack of immersion" thing. But until then, I'm inclined to agree with Yahtzee.

 

[airrazor7]

although I usually agree with him, I have to disagree with Yahtzee on considering the toy guitars that started the music gaming genre as nothing more than glorified controllers. Essentially anything you may use to play a game is a "controller" but I believe the point is the approach to interacting with it differently, probably the point James was trying to make about the stylus. It isn't about just what it is or was at its present time but what it can lead to. Look at the games The Gig and Rock Band 3. The "controller" has evolved in such a way that now anyone who picks up those games and their peripherals have chance to come from the experience as novice or average guitar players on a real guitar.

I think the debate over controllers needs to encompass more than just the current standard for immersion and veteran gamers vs newcomers. When controllers are discussed, especially this rise in motion gaming that we live in, it should be discussed how the new controllers are currently changing gameplay and immersion, how they may change these aspects in the future and what new "controllers" will they usher in next.

I also feel the need to add this next bit. Yahtzee always defaults to SH2 and it inspired a thought: imagine if you had to play horror house simulators like SH: Shattered Memories and similar games with the running pad from the NES days along with a standard controller or motion controller. Basically, imagine playing any game that causes you to run from or to something frequently, you would use the your choice of main control for interaction and direction of movement while the actual movement and pace between walking and running was determined by your pace on the running pad. What different/new kind of immersion would that create for those games and if successful, where would that go to next?

I'm not saying that my idea is a great one but like I said before, I think that this was the direction of James' responses; that we need to consider new and different types of control for a widen variety of gaming experiences and evolutions. Maybe even bring things back like the joystick for more mech games and flight simulators or flight combat games.
Hmmm...what if we had two joysticks used simultaneausly? Okay, I'll stop now cause I'm just rambling

 

[eharriett]

Yahtzee makes an interesting point. Gaming is the biggest form of entertainment today. Those who don't get it will simply die off. For those who are not "hardcore" they will simply understand gaming as one skill along with many others. Think of comics and the revolts of the 1950's by people who didn't get it. This is kind of the same thing. Comics were a way of storytelling, the controllers to games are one way of interacting with a computer. Those that don't understand it will feel alienated.

 

[Korne]

Bob brought up that GH might not even work if it didn't have the controller. I disagree with this. Harmonix had made 2 fantastic rhythm games before Guitar Hero using basically the same highway of notes (Frequency and Amplitude). Everyone that I have showed the games to have become immediatly hooked, since they are really fun games (just like Guitar Hero). What the guitar controller did was serve as a hook and took out the foreign nature of a video game controller (people kinda get the guitar motion).

 

[mjc0961]

Gears of War 2 Handled this very nicely with choosing to take Carmine out on a patrol or not, I took him the first time for the conversation elements. But yeah you are right on what the industry needs to do. And with RPGs they can go with the model of starting you with the basics and you building your character into more complex tactics.

Like Gears of War 1 and 2, which both let you skip the tutorial or go through it? (and not through a menu but with dialog for each choice to boot?)

Yep. The Gears series is a great example. I used them as an example in another thread where we happened to be discussing things every game should have.

It was also suggested that they make them unskippable because newbies might skip them and then whine when they don't know the controls, so I suggested an alternative. Games already have a habit of locking us out of the hardest difficulty until we beat the game once. Why not lock us into doing the tutorial until we beat the game once? Then, after that, we are given the option to skip it in any future new games we start, because we clearly know what we are doing if we've already beaten the game. And it will just be an option, so if it's been a while we can still take the tutorial as a refresher if needed.

Also, Moviebob needs to stop using caps in every post. I CAN READ IT WITHOUT CAPS, it's kind of annoying, even though earlier today I made a post with too many caps. I won't do that again, I usually don't.

Perhaps he can swap out his use of caps for the use of a spell checker? That part I copied for the quote caused my browser to light up with piles of wavy red underlines.

 

[Korne]

Hmmm...what if we had two joysticks used simultaneausly?

You would have Virtual On, or actually... Steel Battalion... what a mess.

 

[Anacortian]

I would just like to cast my vote in favor of continuing this series. An expert opinion is great, but an expert discussion is greater still.

 

[airrazor7]

Hmmm...what if we had two joysticks used simultaneausly?

You would have Virtual On, or actually... Steel Battalion... what a mess.

Yeah, I actually thought about that when I was typing and you've got a point(although I haven't heard of the Virtual On, I'll have to look that up). Still, it would be neat if developers continued to make attempts at different styles of gameplay, even when they sometimes fail (which they will) in order to create new experiences. Heck, that basically sums up my arcade experiences. While everyone else was beating the crap out of people on arcade sticks (my non-gamer girlfriend beat me on a Tekken 5 arcade cabinet, I think my ego is still sore) I was climbing into racing simulators, blasting away at different rail gun shooters and relishing in the experiences that could not be had on a home pc or console. For example, one of my favorite arcade experiences is climbing into a life sized pod racer with the appropriate hovercraft styled controls for a Star Wars pod racing game. I know gaming experiences like that can't be created on a pc or console, but it would be nice if in the years to come the classic controller would merely be an option out of several control schemes.

 

[Easton Dark]

Oh dear...

Console gamers already see PC games being brought over to their platform being 'dumbed down' because of the constraints of the controllers. If the industry tries to cater to the novice to expand the market, won't they be simplifying the controllers even further if the current ones appear 'daunting' to a rookie?

Start a new gamer onto S.T.A.L.K.E.R SOC and just wait a few hours.

Heck, even I get flustered by the number of hotkeys sometimes. Can't remember what's bandages and what's medkits.

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

OT: Have to agree with Yahtzee that game controllers will just become something people grow up understanding how to use, just as like a TV/DVD remote for today's youth (if you don't understand what I mean go watch your mum/dad/elderly neighbour/stalking victim attempt to play a DVD)

I've got to agree with Yahtzee also. Watching my dad try to operate our new television is just painful.

Games are so ingrained in our culture now, they're just a part of growing up. It won't be long until everyone knows how to at least operate a controller.

 

[NaramSuen]

I usually find myself in agreement with Bob, at least in principle if not in practice, but I think that his "cloud gaming" idea is overly optimistic. I agree with him that it would make games more accessible to younger/newer gamers and they would seek them out like 13-year-old me renting 2001 on the advice of my alcoholic uncle. However, "cloud gaming" would decimate one of Bob's boy Nintendo's marketing strategies, repackage old stuff on new consoles. What is everyone excited about for the 3DS? That's right Ocarina of Time, a Nintendo 64 game that had been previously ported to the Game Cube. Now, I realize that it will be in 3-D, but that is part of my point, re-release the game with enhancements and upgrades. Also, Nintendo is the inventor of region codes, so would they really let anyone from any region download region-specific titles? I have my doubts. It is an awesome idea in theory, but one need only look to the disparity in Nintendo's Virtual Console release titles to see how this might play out in a larger market.

 

[Hungry Donner]

I hate gamepads, not only do they make my hands hurt after half an hour or so but they always feel very clunky. However I don't think motion control is the savior here, it's great for some games but it severely limits your options unless also combined with a control.

 

[Daveman]

I think Bob vastly underestimates the improved level of control that dual analogue sticks gave us only in the last generation essentially. Controlling the camera this way in not just FPS games but also most modern platformers has given rise to greatly increased intuitivity (is that a word?). I mean look at goldeneye, a fantastic shooter by all rights, but when placed in the hands of a modern gamer it is incredibly hard to control. This could be argued as that they haven't learned this controlling method but then I think they are just underestimating how easy it is to conceptualise your movements based on the two stick control system, even offering you the option to inverse it for what makes more sense to you. In old games on the N64 the analogue stick controlled movement and buttons controlled looking. Anyone who has ever played with a mouse and keyboard can tell you this is the wrong way around to do things.

In fact if we take a look at the Xbox controller more closely we can actually see it is designed to near perfection. They fixed the issue with the last controller of requiring huge hands to operate it, they added shoulder buttons because your fingers spend more time looped round the back there and you can easily control more than just two triggers. They stick to the standard layout of 4 buttons on the right which aides those familiar veterans with learning controls and a D-pad thrown in in the corner for easy access though it does not require a great deal of use due to the dual analogue controls. These two sticks are at different angles so in your mind they are much less likely to get mixed up due to the angle at which you hold it. These two thumbsticks have also evolved from dual joysticks as the joystick reuires much greater movement which is slower to respond which leads to frustration.

Basically, modern day controllers are actually pretty damn awesome and user friendly, having evolved from simple controllers, which only allowed simple gameplay, to more complex ones allowing a range of gameplay styles to be accomodated.


Also I think the DS is seriously missing a trick by not having games like Angry birds etc developed for it. That level of precision is MADE for the stylus control, not big, greasy, chunky fingers.

p.s. I'm loving this discussion thingy. Any chance of an actual audio conversation though? I just prefer discussions that way (says a regular forum goer), plus we'd get way more cock jokes out of Yahtzee.

 

[ReiverCorrupter]

As I said in the last thread on this topic, I think think games offer two major types of experiences: games in the proper sense of the term, and virtual reality.

Wii sports are more like VR; you're actually playing tennis etc. except you do it in the comfort of your own home with your friends. That's where a lot of motion controls are going towards, but not all of them.

Here's how I see it:

VR allows people to do things bodily; there is no avatar, just the player. It's about taking part, doing it yourself. In this sense the player is taking part in a virtual reality themselves.

Games involve the player being suspended from the action, it's more like watching a movie. I don't think I'm going to far to say that most people don't want to take part in a slasher film, but they're more than happy to watch it. I think the same thing goes for shooters. Just because I like playing CoD, it doesn't mean that I want to play paintball in my own house.

There are even genres where the gamer doesn't have an avatar, like RTS games. Saying an RTS gamer wants virtual reality is like saying a chess player wants to joust. The RTS player is immersed in the competition of the gameplay, they don't want to suspend disbelief and jump into another reality.

Thus I think the game community will be split, with VR simulators like the Wii becoming very popular, but with traditional consoles clinging on for those who enjoy classical gaming. There's nothing wrong with either. I just think companies should realize that they are two markets so that they don't try to serve both in one system and therefore sacrifice the quality of both in the process. They should realize that people who are attracted to VR aren't necessarily going to like more traditional games.

 

[Varya]

YAY! Extra Consideration is a feature! Now I can go to sleep happy.
Great discussion, looking forward to future glories.

 

[Dastardly]

Extra Consideration: Controller Evolution

This week, MovieBob, Yahtzee, and James Portnow discuss the evolution of the controller and the difficulty in bringing non-gamers up to speed.

Read Full Article

Diggin' the column. It's a long read, but none of it wasted.

And it's a perfectly valid discussion, from more than just a control perspective. This is a generation of games made by gamers, for gamers. Everyone involved has been intimately involved in gaming since adolescence. There's a certain body of requisite knowledge that is just plain assumed.

(Even if there is a tutorial, it's usually just an on-screen notice that says, "Push W to move forward." Okay... but why? And what about something that provides a little more practice? A couple flash cards do not a tutorial make.)

Some of the current innovations really could go a long way to making things more accessible... but only if our innovations get over this tendency of being so scattershot. Most of them are about novelty, which serves to draw our attention to the controller. That's not improving accessibility. That's really only workable through ergonomics--drawing attention away from the controller.

I'm not convinced motion controls are the secret to that, really. They're not as intuitive and natural feeling as we're led to believe. Without adequate force feedback, they don't convey any sense of distance or effort or mass to any of the actions.

Like 3D movies/television, they're trying to deepen the experience by more fully engaging the senses. More accurately, by more fully engaging one sense. Even more accurately, by more fully engaging one portion of one sense. But rather than more fully engaging that sense, this tends to isolate that sense from the others and pull you out of the experience.

For the future of motion controls, we're only focusing on one side of the coin: movement. But the ease and fluidity of our movements are entirely based on the tactile information they provide. The way I move through water is different from the way I move through air--not because of something I know, but because of something I feel. That move-feel-adjust-move feedback circuit is broken if there's no response from the environment. Like a deaf person's speech, our movements are less clear and fluent because we lack the other side of the exchange.

Voice controls? Those aren't much better. Until voice recognition improves and true natural speech recognition becomes a reality (in which your machine can recognize the same command phrased in different ways), voice commands are really just a set of "verbal buttons." They provide a convenience that is necessarily when you need to keep your hands free or be moving about the room... but video games don't quite require that freedom just yet.

EDIT: What does this have to do with the topic? Well, I'll tell you...

If we move toward innovations that engage both aspects of our senses, we can get into control schemes that really are more natural and intuitive. Currently motion controllers are just experiments going in that direction, but tactile feedback is needed to complete the circuit.

Arbitrary button arrangements aren't going to be the ticket for much longer, methinks. In the end, most of them are based on convention and habit anyway, like QWERTY (which had its purpose, way back when), but the console world is becoming more and more "fractured" (as Moviebob put it), so they don't benefit from the ubiquitous nature of QWERTY's now-arbitrary arrangement.

 

[AmzRigh]

I want to share two opinions on the things they discussed.

1. Motion controls. I think they, or at least the wii, was an absolutely worthwhile experiment. It might have ended up being the best thing that happened to gaming. It wasn't. Far from it. Motion controls, frankly, suck and BADLY. We need to drop them. They're a waste of time as far as I'm concerned.

I don't think you can justly dismiss an entire classification of control when the technology is still in its infancy, especially when said technology, while imperfect, is an overwhelming financial success. What exists of motion controls are, by no means, the pinnacle of what motion controls are capable of; to abandon a technology before it's fully developed is to waste was was learned from it.

2. Cloud Gaming. I'm not huge on this either. I've used digital distribution services like steam and frankly I much prefer having a physical copy of my games. It's not just me liking "having" things either. Valve goes out of business, steam's servers go down, and I lose access to my games that I paid for. The same could be said for Onlive or any other similar service. I don't like that idea. I understand many game's online multiplayer will go down in the future but to lose access to the game entirely for similar reasons is a scary thought. I don't like that. I'd much rather just get a disk.

A physical copy is at least as, if not more, vulnerable than a cloud copy. Physical copies (be they disc, cartridge, card, etc.) can be lost, damaged, or otherwise rendered unplayable; it's still lost access to a game that you paid for. Granted, it is still, in most cases, something that the player has some degree of control over. You might say that's a fair risk.

However, physical publication comes with its own costs: manufacture and shipping. This cost accounts for a significant portion of the price passed on to the consumers. To cling to an old idea with significant problems, rather than seek a new solution, is, again, quite shortsighted.

For example: an independent validation source. Perhaps some sort of platform-specific (or even platform independent, if we could swing that degree of cooperation) "key" -- a physical or digital item that would store verification of ownership for all an individual's digital acquisitions, not in the possession of the publisher or platform, but in the possession of the end user or a third party (perhaps a dedicated validation firm). Of course, redundancy is the best insurance against losing data, so the software distribution platform should keep record of this, as well; both are insurance against a loss of the other.

 

[Formica Archonis]

<IMG SRC="http://s91291220.onlinehome.us/formica/allisonsmash.gif" align=right>

I watched two people fall in love over a game of Dance Central.

WHAT?

I'm hoping it wasn't the artist and the talking guy; that might get awkward come the following Extra Credits...

Well, it's so obvious. She depicts herself as so kind and approachable.