The Gamepad Skill

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about my own difficulties when playing a console game as I am not used to play a game using gamepads. This observation provides another example for the requirement of well-trained human skills to successfully play a computer game.

Recently, we rediscovered the Playstation console in our meeting room and installed God of War on it. The game is an hack-and-slay action game and played from a 3rd-person perspective. God of War’s main challenge lies in the goal to defeat large groups of enemies or very powerful boss encounter by using the main characters abilities. These abilities mostly consist of combinable normal and powerful melee attacks and damage avoidance techniques such as dodging and blocking.

In this way, players are challenged to monitor an enemy’s behavior, to avoid taking damage and to defeat it as soon as possible. This, however, requires the player to quickly adjust to the situation and to move around to always face the enemies. As a result of this, a player’s hand-eye coordination is challenged to quickly react to the gameplay.

As the game is played on the Playstation, the only available input device is a Playstation controller. All navigation, interaction and view controls are mapped to the controller’s various buttons and thumbsticks. While performing actions using the controller’s buttons is not too much different to pressing keys on a keyboard, controlling my avatar’s orientation using a tiny thumbstick is very challenging. As a PC gamer, I am used to controll my perspective and to aim at targets with the mouse that allows for a very precise control in contrast to the thumbsticks.

As a result of this, although the gameplay itself is not very difficult, it seems to me very challenging as my avatar constantly faces into the wrong direction. It also shows how much playing a computer game requires constant practice to automatize and master the interaction methods.