Comment by justin66
2 years ago
> objectively better
There actually was a time when computer scientists at Atari studied user interface stuff with game performance in mind. All that ended years before WASD, but it’s worth pointing out that WASD came about as part of a competitive process. It’s not like anyone’s being forced to use something that doesn’t work for them (except on consoles).
> stretch their pinky down to Left-CTRL for crouch boggles my mind. With ESDF, crouch is A!
Because those are the only two conceivable choices…
>computer scientists at Atari studied user interface stuff with game performance in mind
2600 and 5200 controllers say otherwise.
The point was that there is a way to do "objective" study of Human-Computer Interaction, with game controllers as well as everything else, and then there are random opinions offered as "objective" for no reason other than people not caring about what "objective" means.
But you're right about those controllers being somewhat shit. In fairness to the amazing Atari research labs that were used as part of a perhaps poor comparison, they had nothing to do with the design of those controllers and weren't around long enough to really affect much on the hardware side before their iteration of Atari died. For a couple of years Atari had some amazing researchers, but they would have benefitted from some amazing (or merely competent) senior management as well.
> part of a competitive process
Ehhh, sort of. I think people copied it from Thresh (a famous Quake player). It was better than the default, and "good enough" for competition. So a lot of people simply copied it and never thought about it again, especially after games started making it the default.
I don't believe that competitive players are unwilling to experiment with this stuff to get an edge. On the hand, if someone polled today's competitive gamers to see what they're doing with their keybindings, the results were not published in this article. The author might ascribe more importance to the defaults than is really appropriate.