StoryPhil Harrison, outgoing exec at Sony's worldwide studios, and Peter Molyneux, boss of Microsoft's Lionhead studio, have both agreed that home console controllers are too complex and put new users off playing videogames.
"You hand somebody a game controller and it's like you've handed them a live gun or a hand grenade with the pin taken out," commented Harrison during GDC last week.
"We don't use half the buttons on the 360 controller,” admitted Molyneux, "simply because the whole dream I've got is that someone will sit down to play Fable 2 who has never played a game before and they can play with someone who's played games the whole of their lives.
"I wish there wasn't so many buttons on the controller. You have to approach that in design terms by thinking you've only got one button," he added.
Harrison praised Nintendo's Wiimote for being a "non-game centric device" which has bought an element of "democratisation" to controlling videogames. He was also impressed with Apple's iPhone for appealing to a user's natural instincts.
"I saw this first hand a few weeks ago where a two year old was playing with an iPhone and he knows how to get the pictures up of mum and dad. The two year-old then intuitively thought that all electronic devices worked like that," said Harrison. "He's pressing the TV to change channels."
"He's right and the rest of us are wrong – that should be applied universally. Apple should be applauded for that innovation," he added.
Funny he went with the iPhone comparison and not DS.
The reason I posted this is not for the article itself, but for the reactions to it I'm seeing in various forums. Gamers are being elitist. The amusing part being these are elitist console games. But they are forgetting that all these complicated games we play are only playable because we are used to the complexity. Me personally, I grew up with the gradual progression of controllers. I had the joystick and one button, the dpad and 2 buttons, the SNES pad, and then the PSX pad. Now, though, gamers (or potential gamers) are presented with pads with 10 buttons, a dpad, 2 sticks, and 2 triggers (looking at my 360 controller).
People are taking this as simple controls = simple games, which doesn't have to be the case. Look at Gears of War. They could have made the game very complicated, given you a jump button, a "cover" button, etc. Instead they made the A button a context sensitive action button. It worked well and all the various moves could be preformed with one button. Its like the Relic guy said in the GDC podcast: there is a difference between complexity and depth.
A perfect example of a hardcore game with simple controls: Geometry Wars. All you need are the 2 sticks and one button. While GeoWars is also a fairly simple title, I can see a more complex game without making the controls any harder. A top-town shooter with levels and goals. The single button doesn't fire a screen clearing bomb, but it becomes context sensitive like Gears. You can have objectives to reach and use.
And then someone brought up the board game Go. All you have to do is select a point on a grid and hit a button to place a stone there, and all of a sudden you have one of the easiest to learn and hardest to master games ever. You literally could do it on the joystick with one button.
Outside of the controller issue, its odd seeing gamers react negatively to games that try get more people into gaming. This ain't no country club. So a game comes out that appeals to casuals, to non-gamers. Why is that a bad thing? No one is forcing you to play those games and companies are still making the games you like, so why bitch about it? The funny part is if a game is fun enough to appeal to non-gamers, I would thing they would also have some appeal to gamers as well. An easy to control fun little game? Sign me up.
