When we look into the design of these portable video game consoles, we can easily identify their similarities. Take the most two popular at present handheld game consoles – Nintendo DS Lite and Sony PSP for example. They both constructed in a brick-like shape, with LCD screen in the middle, direction keys (D-pad) on the left and other buttons on the right. They also have two shoulder buttons on the top of the console. Why they both look like this? It has to be the reason of the first modern game-pad – the controller of Nintendo’s Famicom. If we take a look at the Famicom’s controller, we can see there are the cross-shaped D-Pad on the left and the ‘B’, ‘A’ button on the right side.
Famicom controllers
Sony PSP-1000
The layout design of such game-pad was possibly come with the experience of the way a person holds and reads a book. Book is a kind of traditional things people will carry around and read. When people read books, they will open the book with both hands and give pressure on both thumbs to against the force from the spine of the book. In the meanwhile they will also use their other 8 fingers to support the book against the gravity. In a game pad, you will use you’re your thumbs to press the D-pad and buttons, and use other fingers to hold the pad. The thumb is giving pressure to the pad and the other fingers are fighting with the gravity from the weight of the pad.
How about shoulder keys? When you read a book, sometime you will insert your forefingers in between previous pages to “mark” that particular page so that you can go back and forth anytime without remembering the pervious page number. That is also very similar to what you will do when you use the forefingers to hit the shoulder keys in a game controller.
The text of the book is in-between your two thumbs while you are holding your book and reading. Same thing happens while you are holding a modern handheld portable game console. You see contents through the LCD screen in the middle of your two thumbs.
To sum up, the interaction of a Game pad has a lot of similarities with the interaction of a traditional paper book. It is highly possible that the idea of the game pad layout design was come from the experience of a person reading a book.
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December 18, 2008 at 3:09 am
danoliver
Interesting analysis. I always found it interesting how the joystick on early video game consoles (like the Atari) came to fall into disfavor to be replaced by the gamepad. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the early joystick was just a copy of the arcade joystick. Large, sturdy, simple controls, limited motions of axis. These are design features applicable and important to the arcade but not as much to the home video game console where a player would want something smaller, responsive, with more input controls.