(Sooo, it looks like WordPress changed a few things, and now my text won’t paste with the color and font settings I wrote it with, so I’m sorry about the inconsistency; maybe I’ll bother solving it at some point.)
To many people, Sony represents the cutting edge of consumer electronics and entertainment, with it’s high end televisions, video game systems, and dvd players, not to mention the fact that it is one of the largest publishers of both music and movies in the world. Sony even helped usher in the new age of optical disc storage devices, Blu Rays. Although, on a personal note, I feel as if Blu Ray’s victory over HD DVD had less to do with politics and more to do with the effect its language has on its auditor: the mental image evoked by the term ‘Blu Ray’ is something colorful and high tech – a beam of radiant blue light, whereas the term ‘HD DVD’ elicits… nothing. If anything, it conjures the mental image of just another plain DVD. What would you be drawn to? But, this is besides the point; what I really want to bring up are two poor design choices I see in the controls of Sony’s Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable.
Sony was one of the first to release a controller with dual analog sticks. These sticks not only offered players more precise control over anything a D-Pad would be used for, but the fact that two were added, one in addition to the D-Pad and a second to the right side of the controller, opened up a whole new range of inputs players were capable of; it essentially added more functionality and it expanded the potential complexity of games. (We should also note that Nintendo was close to offering two analog sticks with it’s 64 controller; instead, it had a D-pad and a single analog, but they were oriented in such a way that really only rendered one usable at a time, and, if a game were to allow a player to use both, they’d need to sacrifice usage of the main buttons, unless, of course, Nintendo expected players to twist their right thumb at an odd angle. Also, Nintendo was even closer to offering dual thumbsticks with the release of its Gamecube, although the little yellow C-Stick was hardly a fine tuned analog – it was clumsy and offered about as much control as if a small mammalian teet had been placed there instead.) But, one of the most important changes Sony’s twin analogs made to the interface between player and game world was bestowing the player with the power to dynamically control the camera.
Before these double sticks, the level of control a player had over their perspective on their game world was very limited, and there were two distinct ways designers would handle the camera. There were either fixed camera positions on the world – much like surveillance cameras, whose field of view a player could move around in, that, should the player move outside the realm of, would change orientation, or the other option was to have a camera following the player’s avatar. With this, there were a handful of views a button press could cycle through. Although, there were some games that enabled the player to move their view around 360 degrees with control of either the D-Pad or a single analog stick, but doing so would usually require the player to temporarily stop moving, as movement had almost always been controlled with that single D-Pad or analog. It was as if the player had just put a quarter in one of those pivoting telescopes you find on top of skyscrapers and other tourist locations, you know, the ones that give you just about enough time to find your focus before switching off. Regardless, the addition of the analogs, specifically the right one, freed players of their oppressed perspective and allowed players to position the camera nearly wherever they want (within limit), and, most importantly, they could do so without relinquishing control over their avatar’s primary movement.
It was a major step for gaming, as these analogs enhanced the intimacy between a player and his/her illusory world; examining virtual spaces became one step closer to feeling more like the way we move through and inspect our surroundings organically.
