Controllers Control Everything

This is Game Maker's Toolkit, I'm Mark Brown. Does the controller put a limit on the imagination of game designers? I mean, this weird mess of buttons and sticks and bumpers is going to impact the sorts of games that developers can feasibly make - and you only have to look to the controller's history to see what sort of games the pad has evolved to facilitate. Back in the day, arcade games came with their own set of controls that perfectly suited the game so Pong had dials, and while Dig Dug only needed one joystick, Robotron required two for its twin-stick robot mayhem. Meanwhile, Marble Madness used a trackball.

But when consoles came onto the scene, they needed universal controllers that could be used with every game. This led to solutions like the iconic Atari 2600 joystick and the far less iconic Atari 5200 phone pad - but Nintendo set the standard with its NES controller. This thing is perfect for controlling characters on a 2D plane, like in Mario and Zelda. But it did make some types of games unfeasible. Marble Madness and the Robotron sequel Smash TV felt awkward on NES, and we'd have to wait until the Super NES controller, with its extra buttons to get anything close to the twin stick thrills of Robotron.

When games went 3D, the d-pad was no longer fit for purpose, as seen in clunky PS1 games like Tomb Raider. Nintendo again set the standard, this time with the analog stick on the N64 controller which made it effortless to move Mario about in a 3D world. Sony struck back with Dual Analogue controller (which was quickly replaced with the DualShock), which had two analog sticks. But this second stick wouldn't actually be used for much, outside of swinging your net in Ape Escape, for a good few years.

Then, developers realised it could be used to control the camera, and that soon led to fluid first-person shooters like Medal of Honor Underground and Alien Resurrection - though, it took a while for players to get used to them: Gamespot said the now-universal twin stick control scheme made Alien "almost unplayably difficult to control" in its 2000 review. And so that's how we got to today's pads, which have a fossil record that shows how these controllers have evolved to play games where characters move about a space - and, surprisingly, let you aim a crosshair with some amount of accuracy, no small thanks to liberal auto-aim and slow combatants.

But many other types of interaction just don't work on this thing. Real-time strategy games, which require lightning fast access to any part of the screen, have famously been awkward fits on console, outside of games like Overlord and Pikmin where - you guessed it - you move a character about a space. If you're unfortunate enough to have experienced Duke Nukem Forever you might remember trying to draw on this whiteboard with a marker and realising just how crummy an analogue stick is for fine motor movements.

So if you took a game like Trauma Center, which is about quickly making precise incisions in your patient, and tried to play it on an Xbox you'd probably end up with a game that looks more like the clumsy, bumbling Surgeon Simulator. Trauma Center is better left on the Wii with its motion-sensing remote or the DS with its touchscreen. And because of these unique input methods, these consoles are stuffed with innovative games that simply wouldn't be possible on a controller.

The DS touchscreen gave us Elite Beat Agents, Kirby Canvas Curse, Cooking Mama, and Drawn to Life - and more modern touch devices have produced touch-sensitive wonders like Fruit Ninja, Flight Control, Blek, Eliss and Cut the Rope. And the Wii has games where you hold a sword or swig a drink or point a flashlight or swing a tennis racquet - and you do all that by manipulating the remote in the same way as the character on screen.

These control schemes are direct and intuitive, which means anyone can understand how to play - if you've ever seen a grandma play Wii Sports or a toddler operate an iPad you'll know what I mean. But traditional controllers are abstract input methods. So to swing a tennis racquet in an Xbox game, you have to press an arbitrary green button. This means that every game has to explain to the player what every button does - and that has some major consequences.

For one thing, this means that developers are going to be biased towards games and genres where the controls are already known by most players. And so, with so many first person shooters using the exact same controls for aim, fire, crouch, reload, run, and melee, it's no wonder that we so many of these games on consoles. But, that being said, developers can use this player expectation to their advantage as seen in a game like Portal which uses the conventions of a first-person shooter to deliver a non-violent puzzle game.

The other consequence of an abstract interface is that games can only offer mechanical sophistication over a tiny handful of different interactions, or you'd need a tutorial every time you try to do something new, and the player would have to remember dozens of special case controls. What I mean by this is that Call of Duty gives you an unbelievable level of precision in how you aim and fire a gun but in this cemetery scene you can only "hold square to pay respects".

That's not to say that Advanced Warfare would be improved by letting you manually move the character's hand onto his friend's coffin. And there is, of course, incredible elegance to be found in games designed around a single mechanic or a pair of verbs. But because these one or two interactions must be repeated thousands of times over the course of an entire game, some verbs - like punch, slash, shoot, drive, and jump - are going to be more suitable for repetition than others and so hi, welcome to video games.

We shoot things. There are games that feature characters who do lots of different interactions - like Life is Strange where Max can play a guitar or water a plant or take a photo - but because these actions are all activated through simple, contextual button prompts, they lose out on the fact that directly controlling the action can be tactile and playful, or lead to challenge and mastery. Games like Monument Valley and The Room on iPad, with their more direct interfaces, show how fun it can be to do lots of different things as you poke and prod and pull and twist bits of the game world.

And that's why I'm excited about VR controllers like the Oculus Touch, the Vive controller, and the PlayStation Move. Not only do these controllers support fresh types of gameplay, like in Giant Cop where you pluck criminals off the street, but games such as I Expect You to Die and Job Simulator use the intuitive interface to let you do all sorts of interactions - not with contextual button prompts or dedicated buttons you have to remember, but just by letting the player reach out and grab, pull, and poke things.

VR games that use these controllers are largely about sitting in a chair or physically walking around in the tiny constraints of the Vive's tracking zone because unlike the PS4 pad these controllers aren't very good at moving a character about space. And I don't think this is the solution. So different controllers are good at different things, and it's up to developers to make games that work to the strengths, and shy away from the limitations of the input device.

Though, designers should be careful to not fall victim to convention because amazing games can be made by ignoring expectations altogether. Skate, for example, says goodbye to buttons and instead makes you wiggle the right analogue stick to perform ollies and flick tricks. This is great: it adds to the grounded realism of the series, and brings you closer to the character on screen as you're both performing a tricky motor movement.

And Skate's inventive input means you need genuine skill to unleash the most advanced tricks. Elsewhere, Grow Home use the triggers to mimic grabbing with your left and right hands. The Fight Night games let you throw punches with the analogue stick. Katamari Damacy uses both analogue sticks at the same time to mimic pushing a gigantic ball of garbage with two hands, and Brothers lets you control two characters at the same time, one with each analogue stick.

That game also manages to tell a genuinely impactful story about siblings entirely through the controller and the fact that an iOS port with touchscreen joysticks exists makes me very sad inside. Playing Brothers on your phone is like watching Citizen Kane in the form of 1,000 different Vines. So while controllers do dictate what sort of games are possible, and the abstract nature of the pad limits the imagination of developers further, plenty of subversive games are finding new ways to have fun by reinventing the wheel. Or the analogue stick.

And if a game simply isn't suitable for the traditional pad, other input methods might work better - whether that's a motion-sensing remote, a multi-touch touchscreen, Valve's mouse-mimicking Steam controller, or whatever the Nintendo NX pad will look like. Thanks for watching! I want to know more about games that offer unique gameplay through creative use of the controller, or by using a completely different input device - so leave your suggestions in the comments below. Game Maker's Toolkit is made possible by everyone who funds the show on Patreon, including these top tier supporters.