Critic's Notebook: Less Flailing, More Precision: The Joy of Joysticks

It looks good in commercials and appeals to the millions who want nothing to do with standard video game controllers, those complicated contraptions covered in buttons and joysticks.

But there are players who have resisted touch-screen and motion-control gaming, preferring the precision of two-handed controllers, first on Ataris, then Nintendos and today on Xboxes and PlayStations. And the start of the next gaming-console generation, kicking off later this year with Nintendo’s Wii U, may give these players something to cheer about: Nintendo, which stripped down the controller by introducing the one-handed Wii remote in 2006, will feature a more conventional two-handed device called the GamePad. Even without Nintendo’s move, though, game creators have come to recognize that despite all of the futurist buzz about motion-control gaming, there are some things the old standard controller does better.

Drew Skillman, who makes motion-controlled games for the Microsoft Kinect system at Double Fine Productions in San Francisco, readily acknowledges the virtues of the controller. It is preferable, he said, “if your definition of a good game is one that is incredibly responsive and fast-paced and lets you directly — from your brain through your hands — direct a character to make it do very precise motions.” All those joysticks and buttons are good for that.

The controller, Mr. Skillman said, is the violin for “gaming’s real virtuosos.”

To devotees of the controller, many of the popular new gaming models are celebrations of slop. And they’re right. Finger swipes, hand waves or voice commands are less precise. They are video gaming’s version of steering a car by tilts of the driver’s head and being able to accelerate only with vocal commands to “speed up.”

Unlike, say, reading a book, in which the mechanics of tracking your eyes across a page of printed words has generally been accepted as the ideal from the beginning, in gaming it’s an open question as to which way is better for the player to interact with the virtual world created. (The controller fan’s lament, for example, echoes earlier complaints by computer-game players who scorned game systems and their controllers, instead championing the precision offered by a mouse and a keyboard.)

But an increasingly complicated controller has become as intimidating to those who have neither the time nor the zeal to learn to play it as an actual violin is to nonmusicians. A modern controller is made to be held inside a gamer’s loose cradle of thumbs, forefingers and middle fingers, all poised to respond rapidly. A newcomer could be forgiven for looking at it and not even wanting to touch it.

“If you put a controller and a tarantula on a table, and you ask my mom to pick one up, I’m not sure which one she would choose,” said Nathan Martz, one of Mr. Skillman’s colleagues at Double Fine.

Both the Wii system with its elegant remote and Microsoft’s more recent no-controller Kinect have sold tens of millions, largely to casual players. A problem, however, is that the motion-controller revolution has been accompanied by a paucity of excellent games.

The best-reviewed games have been those that require standard controllers, like Batman: Arkham City from last year and the old classic Super Mario Bros., with bad guys and obstacles that require players to react at the speed of thought. A player with a controller can easily understand what he or she has done wrong when pressing a button too late.

Motion-control games, meanwhile, have tended to be jolly, party-oriented amusements that register a dance step or an arm wave. A player has a hard time telling why that hand wave wasn’t picked up by the sensor. Was it too slow? Too fast? Not high enough?

“In the current state of motion-control gaming, I don’t even know if it’s fair to say you have the ability to create games that rival what you might do with a controller-based game,” Mr. Skillman said, though he added that future iterations of systems like the Kinect should allow for more precise control. He and Mr. Martz have found success by gearing their studio’s Kinect games — the “Sesame Street”-based Once Upon a Monster and the goofball Happy Action Theater, for which a sequel is being made — toward children and, to be blunt, people who may have had a bit to drink.

Such audiences don’t mind slightly delayed response times if they can control a game by flailing around. The games de-emphasize winning and losing and instead encourage physical playfulness.

There is something to be said for technology that allows different people to wave their hands differently rather than forces everyone to press a button the same way. On the other hand, it’s also good to have a violin that plays the string you bowed and not the one next to it.

Gamers and game makers have found that precision still has its value. It’s an idea that Nintendo seems to have come back around to. When the Wii U is released in late 2012, it will support motion-controlled Wii remotes. But its centerpiece controller, the GamePad, has a large touch screen surrounded by 2 joysticks, 10 buttons and 4 triggers. It’s a spider. The controller, ever so slowly, is crawling back.

Stephen Totilo is the editor in chief of the gaming Web site Kotaku.

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