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silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. There's only a couple spots left before we're done, although I hear from many of you that I am perhaps more knowledgeable about these things than y'all. I don't want this to stop you from making suggestions.]
Moore's Law suggested that the amount of transistors per square inch would double on the regular as time went by. Putting more silicon per square nanometer and packing circuits more tightly allows for more complexity of circuitry in the same space. What usually results from that is miniaturization. A smartphone contains processing power far in excess of the mainframes that took entire rooms to use and cool, and many of the desktops that I built myself when I was smaller. Mainframes became desktops became laptops because tablets, phones, and iProducts. Consoles, for the most part, stay about the same size and maybe get a little bit bigger as they become more and more like regular computers with custom operating systems. (Of course, with emulation, a Raspberry Pi can be several consoles' worth of software and hardware in a very small package, so size really is relative to power.)
Where things really become interesting is in the peripherals. Arcade cabinets have mostly been joysticks, trackballs, and buttons for their interface, with the exception of light gun games (which, depending on where you put your game history, a mechanical version of a gun game precedes even the first video game) and rhythm games with specific interfaces that resemble the type of instrument or idea that the game designer would like the player to play or otherwise engage with. Translating those ideas to console and home versions is sometimes relatively easy (the NES, after all, had the Zapper, which was used for the pack-in game that game with the Zapper, Duck Hunt) and is sometimes somewhat difficult to do, requiring the selling of a game with the controller needed to play it in a package deal, at least for the first game of that sort that a person buys. Sometimes, shifts in technology outside of the game consoles themselves can cause changes that have to happen in games. For light-gun games, shifts in television technology meant they have to do things differently in our current days of plasma and light-emitting diode (LED) televisions to achieve the same effect, rather than the way it could be done with cathode ray-tube (CRT) televisions.
Many games of the current era have settled on the idea that the specialized controllers are really just used to send button-presses to the game and that one could, once figuring out how to map it, play those specialized games using the standard controller. It might be terribly awkward to do so, based on the mechanics of the game in question, but it is possible. About the only exception to this is the Nintendo Wii, which decided that it wanted motion controls as the primary means of doing anything in any game. (So a game like Super Smash Brothers is the exception to the Wii software lineup, in that Smash Brothers can be played without resorting in any way to the motion controls.) And yet, thanks to various methods of connecting the various controllers and Sensor Bars and other such things, you can play Wii in emulation (and just about enay other system, too) using Wii controllers.
When designing a system, a controller, a peripheral, basically anything that has to be held and/or manipulated for the purpose of playing a game, there's a design consideration that probably gets a lot of thought in the design phase in the company and not as much outside of it, unless, of course, it turns out that someone has landed outside the boundaries of where the design decisions were made. Namely, how big do you make the thing? Which sounds like an easy thing to figure out from the outside. Except you have to start with a very important question - is your system or peripheral primarily intended to be for children, adults, or both? A child peripheral or system is necessarily going to be smaller to account for the reality that small humans are small. You can see this in apps designed for small children having large zones where something can be touched for effect. And while the idea of a fully functional controller that won't be much larger than an adult keychain might sound great, I think of it as something especially for small children or those with very small hands, because there's no way that I'm going to be able to hold that tiny controller in my hands and do anything useful with it. When I spoke at Open Source Bridge, one of the things I talked about in terms of principles toward universal design was the idea of "design for giants." The increased trend toward miniaturization is something that doesn't work particularly well for people who are bigger than the average, as a significant amount of my cursing at all of the touchscreen interfaces that I have had to interact with in my life. Many of them still work, because the touch targets are large enough to make work, but not all of them necessarily work, and some of my best applications, like Notepad++, are definitely optimized for using a mouse pointer and the precision available that way rather than expecting my large fingers to be able to make some pretty precise touches. I realize that I am an outlier, in terms of both having a large main grip and in being someone who is still interested in playing video games, but I would still enjoy being able to play the game.
A surprising amount of controllers and peripherals do not work well under the "design for giants" principle. Most standard controllers fit reasonably well, as do much non-reduced keybards, but it turns out that controllers that have programmable buttons on their undersides are not great for me, because my controller grip curls around sufficiently that I will end up touching those additional buttons when I don't want to. (Games that require multiple button presses, on the other hand, are a little easier to do, both accidentally and deliberately, because of the additional coverage.) So that's fun. The only control scheme that might be big enough for my hands to consistently put in the inputs that I want to have might be a fight stick (a joystick and enlarged buttons meant to replicate an arcade board's layout. For fighting games, that's a great idea. For games that require both analog sticks, not so much, unless there's a fight stick design that has two sticks on it (and a handedness switch with buttons that can remap or re-light themselves based on whether the player is using their left or right hand on the primary joystick, because that would be awesome. And probably expensive, because fight sticks are usually more expensive than standard controllers.)
With regard to rhythm games, as much as I love the Dance Dance Revolution games, and especially the arcade machine style items, there's a tiny problem with them for me. I have size 14 (US) feet, according to most shoe manufacturers, which are just slightly larger than the largest dude's shoes available in most shoe stores. Most DDR machines have the arrows for doing the dance game slightly recesssed from the regular stage. What that means for me is that if I play the game like I'm supposed to, where my step should have my arch (not that I have much of one) over the middle of the arrow to register the step, my toe will be on the square in front of the arrow and my heel will be on the square behind the arrow. My arch will be exactly above the arrow, but because the arrow is recessed, the step will not register. For the home versions, the pad sensors aren't recessed, but many of them were set so that there was both the left side (with the arrows) and the right side (with the letter or symbol buttons) are on the same pad, and well, nothing stinks quite like hitting the wrong input because your foot is technically on three possibilities and it's anyone's guess which one of them will register. So, because the control scheme is set up to reward precision in placement of one's feet (and, when things were in the big dancing rhythm craze, there were several different tiers of controllers, each more study and accurate than the last, for greater expense, unless one wanted to roll their own), I had to dance as if I were a digitgrade walker, using my toes. Which often caused balance problems for me for any situation where I had to move quickly. I never learned the style of dancing game where you lean against the back support and just move the feet far enough to touch all of the arrows, but I feel like the problem of my big feet would still have gotten in the way of that style. I am just now realizing that I probably would have rocked dancing games in heels. (Heels with good support, which is a contradiction, I realize, and that would have been relatively light, for an even further contradiction, while they helped keep my on my toes.) That's a fun thought to think about. Although perhaps not of the potentially rolled ankles that might come from stepping wrong and quickly.
Anyway, now that popularity has shifted toward the idea of rhythm games where someone uses a replica of a musical instrument for a rock band, it's a little easier for me to be able to make the game work. Almost. The guitar straps and microphone stands are adjustable, as are the drum kits, to a certain degree. I still have a little bit of hunching that I do when it comes to the drum kits, because I'm still a giant with long legs who sits high in their seat, but height can be adjusted with bricks or other sorts of things, and sometimes the addition that allows for cymbal hits, rather than having to use the inner toms, can make the game bearable and playable. Even if I don't actually have enough coordination between all the limbs of my body to actually play drum set particularly well. (But there ar emore than a few people playing these games who absolutely don't want to do drums. Having some amount of musical training means it's not scary and foreign to me, it's just a reminder that I would need a lot of practice (and usually, the game's tutorials about how to play drum set and/or guitar) to get good at it. And while gameplay with the guitar controllers is occasionally mocked by the Stop Having Fun Guys as not actually doing much for learning how to actually play an electric guitar (WE DON'T CARE), the drum set stuff is pretty close to learning how to play the real thing. Still needs more coordination than I actually have, because I suffer from the same problem I do when danmaku games start cranking up the speed, which is selective inattention - I can't chunk the bullets or the beats well enough by looking at them to keep track of everything. Once I have an idea of what the beats feel like, I can translate the visual into kinesthetic, but it's not something that comes easily to me for those instruments. (If they ever decide to do a game called Trombone Hero, I'll be juuuust fine.)
So, in the "Design for giants" department, there isn't a whole lot going on that helps me out. There's one system of this generation, however, that seems to have put a lot of its design decisions in the idea of children and people with tiny hands as being the people who are going to play it. The Nintendo Switch's Joy-Con controllers are a nightmare for me. The Switch wants to transition seamlessly from handheld console to TV console and back again, and so its decision to have small controllers that can be detached and reattached to the main console makes sense, in the idea of making the whole thing have a small form factor and be easy to carry around. (It fits in a cargo pants pocket.) The Joy-Con controllers are passable in a form where I have two of them to work with, one for each hand, but trying to use them as a single controller with a joystick and four buttons with two buttons on the top? Lolno. I cannot find sufficient real estate on the Joy-Con to hold it in two hands on its side without immediately having the problem of one of my hands resting on the buttons that would be on the top of the controller if it were being held upright. For a game like Smash Brothers, where all of the buttons are important to making things work, this often means that my character is doing things I definitely did not want them to do, because I'm resting my hands on buttons and I haven't remembered to keep the controller in my claws instead of letting it rest comfortably in my hands. It's been very instructive in the Smash Brothers sessions with the teenagers that my skills get way better when I'm not fighting the controller that is completely not designed for me.
I haven't always been aware of how much I have been compensating for the size of controllers all my life, mostly because I've been doing a lot of keyboard and mouse gaming in my life. Someone else recently pointed out that the way I hold the mouse is not the same as they might, because, well, if I hold a mouse like I want to use it, the back of the mouse rests comfortably on my metacarpophalangeal joints. If you're looking at the back of my hand holding the mouse from above, the back of the mouse is resting comfortably on the line moving through the first set of ridges underneath the fingers on the hand. I can click fine that way, but I'm told that the mouse is supposed to be the size of the hand, such that the back of the mouse should be close to the wrist, rather than not making it to the middle of the palm. But again, designing for giants isn't necessarily a thing that happens. After all, big and tall stores exist, too.
I realize there's no ideal size for a controller, and that a game design company is probably designing around the average hand size of the player, but it would be nice if in addition to the miniature forms that are possible when the actual electronics involved are a lot smaller than the size of the controller, we could have some jumbo-size controllers that aren't fight-sticks and that will work for bigger hands. All of that ergonomic research doesn't do squat for you if the controller is the wrong size for your hands, after all.
Moore's Law suggested that the amount of transistors per square inch would double on the regular as time went by. Putting more silicon per square nanometer and packing circuits more tightly allows for more complexity of circuitry in the same space. What usually results from that is miniaturization. A smartphone contains processing power far in excess of the mainframes that took entire rooms to use and cool, and many of the desktops that I built myself when I was smaller. Mainframes became desktops became laptops because tablets, phones, and iProducts. Consoles, for the most part, stay about the same size and maybe get a little bit bigger as they become more and more like regular computers with custom operating systems. (Of course, with emulation, a Raspberry Pi can be several consoles' worth of software and hardware in a very small package, so size really is relative to power.)
Where things really become interesting is in the peripherals. Arcade cabinets have mostly been joysticks, trackballs, and buttons for their interface, with the exception of light gun games (which, depending on where you put your game history, a mechanical version of a gun game precedes even the first video game) and rhythm games with specific interfaces that resemble the type of instrument or idea that the game designer would like the player to play or otherwise engage with. Translating those ideas to console and home versions is sometimes relatively easy (the NES, after all, had the Zapper, which was used for the pack-in game that game with the Zapper, Duck Hunt) and is sometimes somewhat difficult to do, requiring the selling of a game with the controller needed to play it in a package deal, at least for the first game of that sort that a person buys. Sometimes, shifts in technology outside of the game consoles themselves can cause changes that have to happen in games. For light-gun games, shifts in television technology meant they have to do things differently in our current days of plasma and light-emitting diode (LED) televisions to achieve the same effect, rather than the way it could be done with cathode ray-tube (CRT) televisions.
Many games of the current era have settled on the idea that the specialized controllers are really just used to send button-presses to the game and that one could, once figuring out how to map it, play those specialized games using the standard controller. It might be terribly awkward to do so, based on the mechanics of the game in question, but it is possible. About the only exception to this is the Nintendo Wii, which decided that it wanted motion controls as the primary means of doing anything in any game. (So a game like Super Smash Brothers is the exception to the Wii software lineup, in that Smash Brothers can be played without resorting in any way to the motion controls.) And yet, thanks to various methods of connecting the various controllers and Sensor Bars and other such things, you can play Wii in emulation (and just about enay other system, too) using Wii controllers.
When designing a system, a controller, a peripheral, basically anything that has to be held and/or manipulated for the purpose of playing a game, there's a design consideration that probably gets a lot of thought in the design phase in the company and not as much outside of it, unless, of course, it turns out that someone has landed outside the boundaries of where the design decisions were made. Namely, how big do you make the thing? Which sounds like an easy thing to figure out from the outside. Except you have to start with a very important question - is your system or peripheral primarily intended to be for children, adults, or both? A child peripheral or system is necessarily going to be smaller to account for the reality that small humans are small. You can see this in apps designed for small children having large zones where something can be touched for effect. And while the idea of a fully functional controller that won't be much larger than an adult keychain might sound great, I think of it as something especially for small children or those with very small hands, because there's no way that I'm going to be able to hold that tiny controller in my hands and do anything useful with it. When I spoke at Open Source Bridge, one of the things I talked about in terms of principles toward universal design was the idea of "design for giants." The increased trend toward miniaturization is something that doesn't work particularly well for people who are bigger than the average, as a significant amount of my cursing at all of the touchscreen interfaces that I have had to interact with in my life. Many of them still work, because the touch targets are large enough to make work, but not all of them necessarily work, and some of my best applications, like Notepad++, are definitely optimized for using a mouse pointer and the precision available that way rather than expecting my large fingers to be able to make some pretty precise touches. I realize that I am an outlier, in terms of both having a large main grip and in being someone who is still interested in playing video games, but I would still enjoy being able to play the game.
A surprising amount of controllers and peripherals do not work well under the "design for giants" principle. Most standard controllers fit reasonably well, as do much non-reduced keybards, but it turns out that controllers that have programmable buttons on their undersides are not great for me, because my controller grip curls around sufficiently that I will end up touching those additional buttons when I don't want to. (Games that require multiple button presses, on the other hand, are a little easier to do, both accidentally and deliberately, because of the additional coverage.) So that's fun. The only control scheme that might be big enough for my hands to consistently put in the inputs that I want to have might be a fight stick (a joystick and enlarged buttons meant to replicate an arcade board's layout. For fighting games, that's a great idea. For games that require both analog sticks, not so much, unless there's a fight stick design that has two sticks on it (and a handedness switch with buttons that can remap or re-light themselves based on whether the player is using their left or right hand on the primary joystick, because that would be awesome. And probably expensive, because fight sticks are usually more expensive than standard controllers.)
With regard to rhythm games, as much as I love the Dance Dance Revolution games, and especially the arcade machine style items, there's a tiny problem with them for me. I have size 14 (US) feet, according to most shoe manufacturers, which are just slightly larger than the largest dude's shoes available in most shoe stores. Most DDR machines have the arrows for doing the dance game slightly recesssed from the regular stage. What that means for me is that if I play the game like I'm supposed to, where my step should have my arch (not that I have much of one) over the middle of the arrow to register the step, my toe will be on the square in front of the arrow and my heel will be on the square behind the arrow. My arch will be exactly above the arrow, but because the arrow is recessed, the step will not register. For the home versions, the pad sensors aren't recessed, but many of them were set so that there was both the left side (with the arrows) and the right side (with the letter or symbol buttons) are on the same pad, and well, nothing stinks quite like hitting the wrong input because your foot is technically on three possibilities and it's anyone's guess which one of them will register. So, because the control scheme is set up to reward precision in placement of one's feet (and, when things were in the big dancing rhythm craze, there were several different tiers of controllers, each more study and accurate than the last, for greater expense, unless one wanted to roll their own), I had to dance as if I were a digitgrade walker, using my toes. Which often caused balance problems for me for any situation where I had to move quickly. I never learned the style of dancing game where you lean against the back support and just move the feet far enough to touch all of the arrows, but I feel like the problem of my big feet would still have gotten in the way of that style. I am just now realizing that I probably would have rocked dancing games in heels. (Heels with good support, which is a contradiction, I realize, and that would have been relatively light, for an even further contradiction, while they helped keep my on my toes.) That's a fun thought to think about. Although perhaps not of the potentially rolled ankles that might come from stepping wrong and quickly.
Anyway, now that popularity has shifted toward the idea of rhythm games where someone uses a replica of a musical instrument for a rock band, it's a little easier for me to be able to make the game work. Almost. The guitar straps and microphone stands are adjustable, as are the drum kits, to a certain degree. I still have a little bit of hunching that I do when it comes to the drum kits, because I'm still a giant with long legs who sits high in their seat, but height can be adjusted with bricks or other sorts of things, and sometimes the addition that allows for cymbal hits, rather than having to use the inner toms, can make the game bearable and playable. Even if I don't actually have enough coordination between all the limbs of my body to actually play drum set particularly well. (But there ar emore than a few people playing these games who absolutely don't want to do drums. Having some amount of musical training means it's not scary and foreign to me, it's just a reminder that I would need a lot of practice (and usually, the game's tutorials about how to play drum set and/or guitar) to get good at it. And while gameplay with the guitar controllers is occasionally mocked by the Stop Having Fun Guys as not actually doing much for learning how to actually play an electric guitar (WE DON'T CARE), the drum set stuff is pretty close to learning how to play the real thing. Still needs more coordination than I actually have, because I suffer from the same problem I do when danmaku games start cranking up the speed, which is selective inattention - I can't chunk the bullets or the beats well enough by looking at them to keep track of everything. Once I have an idea of what the beats feel like, I can translate the visual into kinesthetic, but it's not something that comes easily to me for those instruments. (If they ever decide to do a game called Trombone Hero, I'll be juuuust fine.)
So, in the "Design for giants" department, there isn't a whole lot going on that helps me out. There's one system of this generation, however, that seems to have put a lot of its design decisions in the idea of children and people with tiny hands as being the people who are going to play it. The Nintendo Switch's Joy-Con controllers are a nightmare for me. The Switch wants to transition seamlessly from handheld console to TV console and back again, and so its decision to have small controllers that can be detached and reattached to the main console makes sense, in the idea of making the whole thing have a small form factor and be easy to carry around. (It fits in a cargo pants pocket.) The Joy-Con controllers are passable in a form where I have two of them to work with, one for each hand, but trying to use them as a single controller with a joystick and four buttons with two buttons on the top? Lolno. I cannot find sufficient real estate on the Joy-Con to hold it in two hands on its side without immediately having the problem of one of my hands resting on the buttons that would be on the top of the controller if it were being held upright. For a game like Smash Brothers, where all of the buttons are important to making things work, this often means that my character is doing things I definitely did not want them to do, because I'm resting my hands on buttons and I haven't remembered to keep the controller in my claws instead of letting it rest comfortably in my hands. It's been very instructive in the Smash Brothers sessions with the teenagers that my skills get way better when I'm not fighting the controller that is completely not designed for me.
I haven't always been aware of how much I have been compensating for the size of controllers all my life, mostly because I've been doing a lot of keyboard and mouse gaming in my life. Someone else recently pointed out that the way I hold the mouse is not the same as they might, because, well, if I hold a mouse like I want to use it, the back of the mouse rests comfortably on my metacarpophalangeal joints. If you're looking at the back of my hand holding the mouse from above, the back of the mouse is resting comfortably on the line moving through the first set of ridges underneath the fingers on the hand. I can click fine that way, but I'm told that the mouse is supposed to be the size of the hand, such that the back of the mouse should be close to the wrist, rather than not making it to the middle of the palm. But again, designing for giants isn't necessarily a thing that happens. After all, big and tall stores exist, too.
I realize there's no ideal size for a controller, and that a game design company is probably designing around the average hand size of the player, but it would be nice if in addition to the miniature forms that are possible when the actual electronics involved are a lot smaller than the size of the controller, we could have some jumbo-size controllers that aren't fight-sticks and that will work for bigger hands. All of that ergonomic research doesn't do squat for you if the controller is the wrong size for your hands, after all.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 07:37 am (UTC)And if for adults, what size and shape hands do "adults" have?
As I'm sure you're aware, from the perspective of roughly half the white population, technology (including chairs and tables and kitchen benches) already is "designed for giants", and it's worse for people from shorter demographics.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 07:59 am (UTC)