Control Issues

Remember this?

Control as a gamer is all important – oh, I’m not talking about self-control, whereby you force yourself to bed before your eyes heal shut, no, I mean the actual controls of a game.  With the potential to royally screw things up if not quite right, balanced controls are essential and thankfully, there seems to be a general uniformity of sorts.  (note: the Xbox360  is my primary console which is referenced here.)  Uniformity is good.

Perhaps some time in the distant past, a covert gentleman’s agreement was drawn up over sherbet Dip-Dabs and cans of Quatro regarding what would be considered acceptable as the norm and nowadays, the template (in my experience before the pedants flock) is usually: left thumbstick = move, right thumbstick = camera, right trigger = fire/attack, A button = select/interact, D-Pad = items/weapon/spell hotkeys.  From there on in, a few other givens aside, everything and anything else goes.  With this core drummed into us over countless games, gamers can easily pick up, adapt to, and play a new title with the minimum of fuss.

Aside from those titles which disregard convention and alter the mould, the biggest stumbling block with a new game can be your old game(s). Or more specifically, their controls (especially if they differ wildly or are more elaborate), since the hours, days, and even weeks or months poured into one title means that the controls and instincts become practically hardwired.

When I finally, reluctantly slipped Assassin’s Creed back into its case and moved onto Saboteur, this was never so plain.  For over a month, instead of using the right trigger for fire or attack, it had been reprogrammed in my brain and fingers to mean ‘run like buggery’ in ‘High Profile’ mode.  Thus, wading into the decadent streets of Montmartre in Saboteur, whenever I tried to sprint somewhere, I ended up pulling a gun and drawing shrieks of alarm from nearby Nazis.

Running up to a building and hitting ‘A’ still made me climb, but then I stopped.  No beautiful free flowing movement here like Altair swarming effortlessly up the side of a building.  No, Sean Devlin merely hung there like a slab of Irish beef until I hit ‘A’ repeatedly to force his jerky ascent.  I’d clearly been spoilt.  But then back in Assassin’s Creed, I’d had the same problem thanks to a hangover from Mirror’s Edge, whereby I would hold the right trigger after jumping, foolishly expecting Altair to gracefully curl his legs up and roll like Faith – instead I crumpled to the ground, died, or landed in an ungainly heap on outraged citizens.

Fairytale Fights recently threw a spanner in the works when, aside from being riddled with glitches, it presented me with some unfamiliar controls.  Unused to twin stick shooters, the right thumbstick was designated as ‘attack’ rather than ‘camera’ and one of the bumpers was assigned to ‘throw’ while the other was to ‘switch items’ from the paltry allowance of two. The number of weapons I haplessly chucked away or had explode in my face (or that of my co-op partner) was ridiculous when I was simply trying to either use them or switch them.

I suppose controls are something that we can take for granted; when they are good and seamless, we barely notice them, yet bad ones lacerate our nerves, sucking away focus and leaving a tide mark of stress behind.  It isn’t even always about unfamiliar controls either…I’m sure many folk will have run across plain bad ones.

Even with extra adoption time required for new games, this core muscle memory is invaluable and that was never clearer to me than when I was watching someone first embarking on a new console journey.  My sister was recently, finally forced into this generation when gifted with an Xbox360 after years of Sega and Ninty gaming and PC point ‘n’ clicks.  After firing it up and settling into Fable 2, I immediately noted her trouble.  Used, for far too many years to the Nintendo controls, the 360’s right thumbstick was completely alien to her.  She preferred instead, to rather awkwardly settle her right thumb on the A/B buttons, just like she always had in the past. This meant that the camera wasn’t controlled properly (or at all), presenting odd angles and perilous situations during attacks when she remembered (often belatedly) to move her thumb to the stick and jerk it around.  Admittedly my screaming “thumbstick, thumbstick!” repeatedly probably didn’t help her nerves, but it really brought home to me just how conditional game controls can become and how breaking in another template can be tricky.

Her frustration was obvious because due to her conditioning, the thumb on A/B was natural but to me watching, it was bizarre and made the game odd to play.  Rather than the camera swinging smoothly, arcing behind the character and swinging gently around corners on rails, it combated rather than complimented her character’s movement.

I gritted my teeth, commiserated, and vowed to keep my mouth shut in the end, since I’m sure it will come in time if she allows it.  She won’t ever realise until much later though that she has absorbed it and clicked, -we never do…one day, we look around and suddenly realise what we are doing and that the controls are flowing without so much as a second thought – automatic and natural, whether in a general sense or on specific titles.  I suppose this is why any unusual blips of change from game to game can send ripples of disruption through our muscles.  Still, gamers adapt.  Self-control on the other hand, well, I don’t think that gamers as a species have really quite managed to master that.  My ‘til 3am sessions of Dungeon Keeper, brought to an end only by frozen fingertips, are proof enough.

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