by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, then later BusinessWeek, under the title “Revolution Pressing the Right Buttons“.

There’s only so much you can do with a button. You press it, something happens. You don’t press it, something doesn’t. If it’s an analog button, and you press it even harder, maybe that thing will happen even more: maybe you’ll run faster, or you’ll punch with more vigilance. Maybe if you hold down a second button when you press that first one, something subtly different will happen. Instead of lashing out with a whip, say, the little man on the TV screen will throw a boomerang. Either way, he still attacks; the second button just changes how he does it. Those are more or less our options: do something, do more of something, or do a different kind of something. It’s all very straightforward. So too, then, is the history of game controllers.

Changing Shapes

Since 1985, the history of videogame controls is a history of finding new, creative places to put new buttons. The SNES introduced shoulder buttons, ostensibly to provide rotation controls for the system’s “3D” Mode-7 chip. The real advantage to shoulder buttons, as time has shown, has been in our natural grip reflex – making them perfect for held actions and state shifting (see option three, above). Shoulder buttons allow designers to map similar actions to the same button, doing away with clutter and keeping the player’s mind on the game instead of the controls. Though they’d existed for years, the N64 reintroduced analog controls to the formula, all the better to navigate 3D space. The difference for players was between sailing over a cliff and tiptoeing up to it as intended.

That was ten years ago, this year. Since then, the biggest challenge we’ve seen to the status quo is the GameCube pad, and the “home position” theory behind it. The GameCube gives us a huge “A” button for the primary action in every game (be it jumping, shooting, or what-have-you), and a smaller “B” one for any secondary action. Any less-critical tertiary actions (menus, smart bombs, toggling this or that) are assigned to less and less prominent buttons, further and further from the natural bend of the player’s thumb. The idea is, the primary actions available to the player in any game will always be readily available and obvious, making the basic action of playing as intuitive as possible.

The plan hasn’t worked out so well, in part because it doesn’t really address the problem it pretends to: that modern gamepads have way more buttons than they probably need, that developers don’t know how to design controls properly, and that, as a result, chances are the end user does not have an ideal experience. Instead, all Nintendo accomplished with the GameCube pad was universal confusion – developers, end users, and game journalists alike.

Legacy of The Wizard

What confused and even angered people – particularly the more hardcore of gamers – was the GameCube’s apparent disregard for “legacy”. People who like fighting games groused because it would be impossible to play Street Fighter on the pad. People who liked first-person shooters whined that the pad didn’t have enough buttons. Developers complained that the pad made cross-platform games (designed with the PlayStation 2 as the lowest common denominator) more frustrating than they needed to be. In short, everyone was annoyed that it wasn’t like Sony’s pad.

It’s a fair point. Sort of. The Dual Shock series, with its symmetrical design, twelve buttons, two sticks, and a D-pad, is one of the more versatile controller models out there. It has stolen from the best, and then – in most cases – doubled it. The SNES had two shoulder buttons? The Dual Shock makes ’em four. The N64 had one analog stick? Sony gives you two. The Dreamcast has analog triggers? Every button on the Dual Shock 2 is pressure-sensitive. Whatever you want to play, the Dual Shock will support, with some jiggerypokery. And hey, you can even balance it on your knee while you read a strategy guide! If you could just use it as a light gun, or maybe shake it to use as a virtual maraca, it would be the perfect control device. At least – historically speaking. So for Nintendo to subvert this perfection in the name of some vague pretension that nobody cares about anyway – well, the nerve of them! They deserve whatever they get!

Of course, actually, it’s not perfect. First-person shooters were never made to be played on a gamepad, so with any standard pad, any control scheme will be a compromise. Same for fighting games. Same for driving games. Come to think of it, any gamepad, even as sophisticated a one as the Dual Shock, kind of sucks for anything that wasn’t specifically designed for it – which is becoming increasingly rare, as games are developed with every platform and the toaster in mind. At best, even the best pad is merely adequate in most situations. And this territory is where the GameCube pad falls rather shorter than usual.

The problem is that, as clever as it is, the GameCube is just a palliative. It’s trying to lessen the pain of the last twenty years, when most people who already give a damn about videogames aren’t really hurting. 1985 to 2005 is history, and if you look closely enough you can even imagine there’s been some progress since Super Mario Bros. By and large, the people who already buy videogames like the way things have been done over the last two decades, simply because that’s what has been done; that’s what people recognize. And fair enough. There’s no reason paying customers shouldn’t get what they want. Of course, if all you do is cater to the crowd… well, no good can ever come of that.

Shadow of the Conundrum

So the GameCube is confrontational, without much of substance in its defense. The trouble is, it’s still thinking about buttons; all the GameCube does is move them around a little, and take away a couple that people are used to. What alternative, then, might it have offered? The better question, I think, is what do current controllers lack? What are the limitations of buttons? What can’t players, or developers, express with buttons alone?

Let’s go back to what buttons do offer. They act as direct verbs, for the player: do this, do this to this degree, or do this particular variant of this. As I said, it’s all straightforward. So, therefore, are contemporary videogames, usually relying on blunt action on the player’s part (usually violent in nature). There’s not a lot of room for subtlety or nuance. The most subtlety you can get comes from analog control and state-shifting, and both of those are just jury-rigs to the system. Analog control doesn’t expand the player’s options, and state-shifting is limited both by the number of available “switch” buttons and by the layer of complication it adds to every action. Beyond that, you’re still just pressing buttons on a pad – which, considering the steeper learning curve and chance of confusion for every extra button you add, are hardly ideal.

So what is ideal? Just for the sake of discussion, let’s accept that videogames could be more subtle than they are now, and that were players given a more refined level of interacting with them, videogames could be designed to respond on equally as refined a level. If buttons can’t offer that kind of control, then what can? Well, clearly not another overt device, tacked onto a gamepad; what we’re looking for is something more intuitive – ideally something that barely involves any conscious input on the player’s part. And by now, you probably know where I’m going with this discussion.

Wake up (It’s 1985)!

Reading about the Revolution, I have quickly become bored of the constant suggestions people offer, trying to justify Nintendo’s bizarre new idea of a videogame system. If I see one more article about light saber battles, I… well. I’m just disappointed, is all. It’s like everyone is going out of his way to think up the flashiest tech demo in town, when the actual benefit of the system and its controller comes not in the amazing new gimmicks it will facilitate, or in anything that will ever require the player to flail his arm around the room. All the Revolution does, really, is add a new layer to our existing idea of game controls. Or to be more specific, to the NES pad: to the core that all current pads are built upon.

You know the basic story of how the Revolution works: the pad detects when and precisely how it’s moved, and knows its precise position relative to the television screen. Holding the pad as you normally would, in a single hand, there’s just the one button and one trigger available to you, in addition to the traditional cross-shaped Nintendo D-pad. It looks like a TV remote – or, if you prefer, an NES controller turned on its side. Indeed there are another couple of buttons way down on the other end of the pad, presumably for just that purpose.

The thing is: if you don’t prefer, the controller really doesn’t look or feel like a gamepad. In effect, it’s the archetypical modern controller, defamiliarized for people who traditionally have been intimidated by videogames. The message is, hey, on a basic level this is all you need. This, plus the magic ingredient we’re adding. Nintendo’s doing two things here. One, it’s a symbolic gesture. The Revolution is a revolution in the sense that it goes all the way back to the beginning: we’ve been through the gauntlet and this is round two at designing a gamepad. Two, it serves to show how superficial all of the additions of the last twenty years have been. As if to drive the point home, the pad is expandable. What, you want twenty more buttons? A nunchuck? A sleeve that turns the controller into a vorpal sword? Here, have them. Go wild. Play your first person punching whatevers. Just know that whatever you tack on, it’s no more than an expansion to the basic design – just as every other controller you’ve touched was to our first pad. Kind of ballsy, though hey. They do have a point.

So even ignoring that “magic ingredient”, Nintendo sort of has something going: keep it simple, yet let every special case be met as it dictates. This is compared to your typical gamepad, that doesn’t really satisfy anything asked of it unless the game was specifically designed for that pad. This is sort of interesting; of course, we’ve got to wonder just how many add-ons Nintendo will ever release and how much they’ll cost. However, since Nintendo seems to be shooting for as low a price point as possible for this system, you can bet the dongles won’t break anyone’s bank. And Nintendo has already announced a “classic” shell, that presumably will allow people to play GameCube, N64, and SNES games without a hitch. And we’ll get get back to that point in a moment.

What about that special je ne sais quoi, though? The quality that’s getting IGN and 1up and everyone else to throw up articles on what the Revolution can, maybe do for you? It’s nothing much, really. It’s just that subtlety we’ve been missing. And you know where it comes from?

That Special Something

Over Christmas, while I fretted over various things I should have been doing instead of enjoying myself, I chanced to look over an old photo album. Several pictures in, I spotted a pair of snapshots of a girl, aged perhaps four or five, trying to play Super Mario Bros. And you know what she was doing with the controller. That’s not a question; you know what she was doing. She was jiggling all over, wrenching the controller in the direction she wanted Mario to jump. The film speed wasn’t fast enough to catch her. You know you’ve done this. If you don’t do it now, it’s by training. And golly, what a waste – that your energy didn’t do any good, I mean. And that you’ve probably programmed it out of your system by now. Because, heck. There’s no way a button could capture what you wanted to do. If only tilting the pad a little further could have made that jump for you. If only twisting it around at the right moment had let you dodge that projectile. If only…

Well, heck.

Try this on for size. Imagine pressing “up” on the D-pad makes your character walk upward. Now imagine if pressing “up” and tilting the controller forward makes your character run. Tilting the controller back and pressing “up” will make your character tiptoe. If your character is running, and you bank the controller left, your character will feign to the left, while still going as full-tilt as he can, forward. And you do this all without pressing more than a single button.

Example two. Let’s say that big, honkin’ A button makes your sweaty man-warrior lash out with his arm. Hit it, he punches. Hit it and flick the front of the controller up slightly, he does an uppercut. Hit the button and rock the controller to the left, he does a right hook. And so on. Getting the picture a little?

What the Revolution does, on a hardware level, is basically the same thing that Katamari Damacy and Rez do and, to an extent, something like Ico does, as software: it strips everything down to the barest minimum, so it can add nuance: substance, context, meaning. So it can show how poignant how little can be, such that in the future someone else can build on this foundation and do something even greater. Now think about that for a moment. Imagine playing Rez with the Revolution controller. Or Katamari Damacy. Or heck, on the stupidly obvious level, try Super Monkey Ball. Even – now think deeply for a moment – how about Ikaruga? Eh? While you’re here, you effectively get a light gun and a flight yoke in the same package. Talk about legacy.

Legacy

Actually, yes. That’s a good idea. Let’s. The interesting thing is that the main issue that people are getting worked up about, with the Revolution, is this perception that it’s breaking ties with everything that’s come before, just so Nintendo can wave around its new gimmick and try to attract non-gamers with shallow, arm-tiring mini-games. I mean hell, how can you play Gran Turismo on the Revolution controller, never mind that Gran Turismo is Sony’s own personal series? And… never mind the expandable nature of the pad? And… stuff? Heck, doesn’t Nintendo care at all about what’s been accomplished over the last twenty years? About the kinds of games that Real Gamers like to play?

Well, yes. That’s why the system’s due to be backwards-compatible (one way or another) all the way back to the NES. And there’s even talk that Sega wants in on the service. I’ve no doubt Nintendo will screw up the download service somehow, just because that’s the way Nintendo does things. Still, hypothetically speaking – that’s something, isn’t it? If you want to play old games (and there’s nothing wrong with that) you can in effect sample from the entire mainstream history of videogames (Sony and Microsoft aside) since Nintendo’s last revolution. And with all of that at your disposal, just maybe you’ll notice that things… really haven’t changed that much at all – aside from getting more and more inbred. And maybe, just maybe with all of history before you you’ll become a little curious about what else might be done that hasn’t been done before. And maybe you’ll be a little less desperate for the next iteration of Mario Kart, when you can download the twenty-seven previous ones for a few dollars – which, frankly, is a challenge I’d like to see Nintendo live up to.

Because if the last fifteen years of history has shown me anything, Nintendo more than anyone could use a revolution about now.