On Thumbsticks

(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.

Now, the dual thumbstick control layout has been standardized to some degree – not with regards to their orientation in relation to each other, but just the fact that two exist on the controller. Each of the main home gaming consoles have it – the Xbox 360 has it, the Playstation 3 has it, and even though the Wii doesn’t offer two thumbsticks per se, the nunchuck’s analog in tandem with the Wii mote’s multi-direction functionality can be used to create a very similar control scheme as its competitors. This standardization is of no surprise; as we’ve mentioned above, it was these controls that have acted as the framework for immersive controls and game mechanics to be built off of for fully navigable 3D worlds; but, what is a surprise, is Sony’s failure to include a second analog on its PSP.

The PSP was released long after the introduction of dual analog controllers, so what could possibly be the reason for Sony’s exclusion of it for their handheld gaming platform? Of course, the system itself hasn’t failed miserably because of it; the PSP has been very successful, even outselling the DS at times in Japan, but I’m curious how much more appealing and capable the system would be if a second analog had been included.

Even if you were to create an atari controller with a screen and market it as a modern portable gaming console, developers would still do their best to create fascinating and alluring games of nearly every genre, and it’s been no different for the PSP; game development studios have done everything they can to ensure that every demographic and flavor of gamer is covered, but it’s obvious how many games would have benefit from the added control, first person shooters and third person action/adventure/platformers especially. On the PSP, shooters feel contrived; they’re more like a 3D Galaga or a glorified Doom, with players strafing around, clumsily acquiring and dispatching targets. (As an aside, shooters on Nintendo’s DS play much better than any on the PSP. The use of a stylus to aim functions in a very similar manner to an analog, and that in tandem with a D-Pad makes for a similar layout to the PS3 or 360, of course, minus all the extra buttons and triggers.) Adventure games work to some degree, as many games in that theatre work with set camera positions or with environmentally adapting over the shoulder cameras; some even allow players to orbit the camera around clockwise and counterclockwise with use of the triggers. But, I’m not here to outline the games that work and the games that don’t for the PSP, and I’m not saying that games can only hope to offer loose controls at best in the absence of a dual analog set up; there are plenty of great games out there that perform beautifully without them. What I simply mean to bring attention to is the lost potential of the PSP. In its current incarnation, the PSP is like a souped up game boy, but, if only it contained a second analog stick on the right, it would be more like a dumbed down Playstation or Xbox, and I’d much rather have one of those.

As for Sony’s PS3, the issue I see with the dual analog thumbsticks (they’ve remained the same since the original Playstation) is simply their positioning. It seems as if where they exist right now does not place the thumbs in a realm where we have the greatest range of motion or level of fine motor control. If you hold your hands out in front of you as if you were gripping a controller and position your thumbs so they extend out away from your hand at about ninety degrees and begin to move them around, you might notice a certain rigidity – a kind of jerkiness. If you don’t understand what I’m referring to, you may notice it better if you bring your thumbs back to where they rest naturally, at about a forty five degree angle from the hand. If you move your thumbs around then, you may notice how much more fluid their motion is and how much more control we seem to have over them. This is due to a combination of muscle memory (our hands and thumbs are much more accustomed to this kind of movement) and hand anatomy – our thumbs naturally rest there for a reason.

Besides forcing our thumbs outside of their natural habitat, the analogs have one other inherent problem: the fact that their positioning allows for the occasional interference between thumbs. Thumbsticks aren’t intended to be manipulated with our fingertips – proper placement of the analogs lies between the tips of our thumbs and the joint, right on the fleshy pads of the digits that have distinguished us from apes and that have enabled us to wield and create such things as video game controllers, and, with any game that maps movement to the left thumbstick and aiming to the right, strafing right while looking left could cause a player’s thumb tips to bump into one another. Now, I certainly don’t think this is a personal problem, because I by no means have extra large hands. I’m of average hight, approximately 5’11″, and my hands have been considered dainty and feminine, but I ‘m positive I can still wield a BK Burger, should I desire such empty calories.

Sony’s playstation controller is simply an example of poor design. The designers must have been more concerned with creating something symmetrical and visually appealing than something well thought out and functional. Maybe Sony will learn a few things from Microsoft.