The modern day thirteen button, multi-joysticked and d-padded controller is a complex beast of pressure sensitive triggers, start buttons, L2′s and R3′s. The higher level of control the gamers (and console makers) have always sought to aspire to has come at a price. The once simple controller, designed to give us control, now represents a barrier for gaming newcomers. Something that reminds me of this fact is when friends, who are not lifelong gamers, come round and play on my consoles.

I forget that when someone says “hit the X button” to me, I can do it instinctively, on two different types of controllers, (and across two or three generations of consoles) where as my friend has to pause for a second to look at the controller and find out what button it is. In one play session he got so frustrated with people yelling buttons and instructions at him, he gave up playing and has not played ever since. The very same guy bought a Wii for him and his wife though and they bought a Wii Fit too.

A fact often forgotten, but this hobby that we are all so passionate about may be called the gaming industry but it is a very serious, very big, and potentially very profitable business. Like any other business it looks to expand as much as possible and may well have to expand past the number of people who can use a increasingly complicated controller. That is not because these companies are greedy (even if they often are) it is just the necessary function of a big business: expand or die.

Microsoft’s Project Natal does interest me a lot more than Nintendo or Sony’s motion efforts. The Ricochet game demoed at E3 is of little interest to me and the ‘minority report’ style moving menus with your hands and the painting elephants with hand gestures both look like not much more than a nice gimmick. However, it is the slightly creepy, but very intriguing, Project Milo that gave me the most hope for the future. Like I said I have no real interest in jumping around my lounge but if you can integrate the Project Natal technology alongside the use of a traditional controller then that is something I can see a use for.

Even for the most accomplished of gamers and even for those of us with the most finely honed control pad skills, face a problem going forward. Controllers can not get that much more complicated than they already are. The original Xbox pad proved that a larger controller and the addition of extra buttons (in this case the Black & white buttons) is not the way forward. Almost every conceivable space on a modern controller is full, with buttons and joysticks capable of multiple inputs and even now reaching all the buttons when needing to control two analog sticks can be all too much of a challenge at times. We should not be wrestling with our controllers so much that  they are thrown across the room in frustration — they should be empowering us to realise our dreams, not creating a nightmare of knotted knuckles.

Like I said, I do not need to be leaping around the living room and I very much do not want to see controllers become a thing of the past, but if I can use Project Natal speech recognition to talk to NPC’s in a Role Playing Game, then that could free up buttons for a wider variety of other interactions, while actually leading to a greater level of immersion. Likewise, I can see the visual recognition, ability to recognize pictures and reach out and touch in game objects, all as excellent tools for an exciting range of new levels of interactive puzzle solving through controls.

Whether you agree with me, whether you are still scared of losing control or whether you already fully behind Nintendo’s early foray into the world of motion control, I do not think it really matters what we think. The future is out of our hands. We have lost control.

My thanks to Wikipedia, Giant Bomb, Gamespot, Kotaku, the Atari Museum and some dudes selling stuff on ebay for some of the  pictures and fact checking within this article. If it’s wrong you know who to blame!

Oh and thanks to the always great Matt Groening‘s ’contribution’ to the above image.