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- Joined: Dec 30, 2005
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Smooth Moves: In Defense of Really Elegant Button-Mashing
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Oct 25, 2007 23:03
Here' s how to do an " Ollie" on a skateboard:
Pump your rear foot down hard on the tail of the skateboard, while rapidly lifting your front leg up to your chest. Then jump upward on your rear leg, while sliding your front foot forward along the board. Presto: The board will jump upward with you, and you' ll be standing level on it, hovering briefly in the air.
OK, now how do you do an Ollie in a skateboarding videogame? In a Tony Hawk game -- the defining series of the genre -- you hit the A button, if you' re playing on an Xbox 360. If you want to pull off more-complex tricks, you add ever more Byzantine button combos. For example, pulling the left trigger, while hitting the A button, followed by the X button plus the D-pad, will execute a " pressure flip." To " wallride" ? Hit Y, A, up on the D-pad -- and then A again.
Got that?
This leads us to the big critique of controller schemes: They' re too artificial. Game designers take organic, fluid, physical real-life movements and turn them into random, opaque button combinations. This drives newbies away because they can' t penetrate the button-combo thicket.
Indeed, this is precisely why critics have been slavering over the Wii for the last two years. Swinging your arm around is a more " realistic" holodeckian control scheme, so it is fated to eventually replace the crude, artificial controller. The controller is the ancient past of games; " sensing" your physical movements is the future. Right?
Maybe not. I' m beginning to think that the hoopla over the Wii is a bit misplaced. Because I' ve been playing Skate, a skateboarding game that seriously rethinks the way you use a controller -- and I think it produces results that are not only better than the average controller, but better than a Wii.
Here' s how you do an Ollie in Skate: You pull the right thumbstick down, then abruptly shove it upward. It' s an attempt to emulate -- with your thumbs -- the sense of leaning backward and forward on your skateboard. To do a " pop shove-it" -- in which you Ollie upward while flicking the board in a 180-degree spin beneath you -- you spin the thumbstick, bien sur, 180 degrees. To brake, you pull back on the thumbstick, which leans your avatar backward, scraping the tail of the skateboard along the ground.
In essence, Skate transforms the button pushes. They are no longer random hits, but little metaphors for the swoop of an entire body.
The thing is, it works. At first, I found it hard to get used to, because I' m so accustomed to Tony Hawk-style button-mashing. Skate tricks require more-careful timing, so the first half-hour of playing the game was a frustrating montage of watching my avatar smash face-first on the ground, over and over again.
But then I stumbled into a big half-pipe, and whoa: It all came together. As I flew up the edge of the pipe and launched into the air, I found myself " leaning" my fingers in precisely the direction I wanted my avatar' s body to move. When I wanted to spin in midair, I' d lean the left thumbstick the way I felt I ought to be leaning, and bingo: It' d work. Basically, I began intuiting how to perform tricks.
In a Tony Hawk game -- indeed, in almost all non-Wii games -- this is impossible. You can' t infer how to do a new move, because they' re all assigned to essentially random buttons. You either stumble upon a new trick through trial and error, or you consult a FAQ. But with Skate, there' s a language built into the movements, an internal consistency based on the internal consistency of how a physical body actually moves.
Which brings us to the Wii. Sure, Nintendo' s beloved console aims at capturing this sort of natural feel in its movements. But the truth is that it often fails, because it winds up being artificial, too. In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, you swing the Wiimote back and forth to " slash" your sword -- but your physical movements do not really resemble what happens on screen at all. You can' t really control the angle of your sword' s attack, for example.
Swinging the Wiimote is just as artificial as using a regular controller -- and maybe even more annoying, because you expect that your real-life arm, swinging away in the air, ought to map directly onto the onscreen activity. I actually gave up on Twilight Princess because of precisely this problem.
And indeed, I often find myself in the middle of a Wii game wishing that the designer had simply used a regular button-and-thumbstick controller. Because while old-school button combos are artificial, they' re also delightfully economical. It' s like learning the piano -- hard at first, but once you' re comfortable with the abstract movements, you' re flying: effortlessly running backward while tossing grenades in Halo, or bouncing sideways off nine opponents' heads while readying a skull-splitter attack in Ninja Gaiden.
This, ultimately, is what' s so brilliant about Skate: It perfectly splits the difference between the Wii and a regular controller. It retains the useful abstraction of classic Tony Hawk-style play -- yet infuses it with a Wii-like sense of one' s natural body movements. It borrows the best of each control scheme, and avoids the worst.
All of which makes me think, hey, maybe we ought to cool down the rhetoric proclaiming the death of the controller. If controllers are too hard for newbies, maybe the solution is for designers to rethink how they' re used. There' s plenty of life in the old thumbstick yet.
LINK Interesting read.
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