Gamers, especially veteran players, often express exasperation at new or casual players’ difficulty accommodating some basic gaming conventions.
The classic example is mouse turning, as opposed to using the keyboard. It’s self-evident to us that mouse turning is a superior way of gaming: turn speed is faster, and you’re free to use your left hand for hotkeyed abilities rather than for turning / movement.
Personally, I think designers are being unfair to new gamers.
People who are not hardcore gamers come to games with a pretty sizable pre-existing set of skills at computer use. These skills are, unfortunately, largely of no use in games, given interface design choices that game designers make.
- Most of the time nongamers spend at a computer, the most efficient arrangement of their hands is to use both hands on the keyboard and only occasionally use the mouse for the selection of objects (files, menu choices) in their desktop environment.
- Movement within the desktop environment is most efficiently done not with a mouse, but with a keyboard.
People come to gaming with a set of skills that are the most efficient for what they do most on their computers: navigating documents and manipulating text. Cutting and pasting text, navigating documents, even most aspects of page layout and design, are all more efficiently executed with keyboard commands than with the mouse. It’s one of the reason users of text editors like vi and emacs scoff at “inefficient” word processing programs like Word: they rely too heavily on mouse use and not enough on efficient keyboard commands.
If a new gamer spends 5 percent of his time at the computer playing games, why should he bother learning an entirely new way of interacting with it that doesn’t build on the interface knowledge he has from the other 95 percent of the time he uses the computer?
What if, instead of designing games that went 180 degrees in the opposite direction from how people use their computers outside games, designers actually tried to make game interfaces work more like applications nongamers use? Would that make PC gaming more accessible? Couldn’t hurt.
I await the epoch-making first-person shooter that’s designed to be played with 2 hands on the keyboard. I’m not entirely joking. 
August 25, 2009 at 7:14 pm
I am a mouse turner but I don’t use hotkeys. I’m a pointer and clicker. I never learned the keyboard enough. If I take my fingers off WASD I lose my place and have to look down at the keyboard. I guess that makese a casual gamer. My girlfriend tried to play WoW last weekend and had hard time because she didn’t want to ever touch the mouse. I wish there was easier way to game for new PC gamers. Xbox controller?
August 25, 2009 at 9:21 pm
I’m wondering, is this an issue of complexity of controls, or familiarity with the controls?
Any set of complex controls are going to be, well… complex. Simplifying the experience doesn’t usually get a good response from the core audience.
For familiarity, is there a way to win? Plugging in a controller as a solution implies that new players would be familiar with the controller.
I think, more appropriately the answer is in the learning curve.
If the game requires skills beyond the player (IE: twitch games that favour youth, high reflexes), that definitely puts up a barrier.
I’ll note from experience, my girlfriend’s mother started playing games with WoW and she turned with the keyboard at first. It was painful to watch. Yet she did learn the mouse and was a lot happier for it. I know her response to this topic would be something like “bah they can handle it, just learn the controls”.
I’m all for accessible games, but if you try to create too soft of a curve, you’re in danger of making the player learn twice: Once for the baby-step controls and again for the fully complex ones.
August 25, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Yeah, Rog — I don’t think 2 sets of controls is a solution, either. Adding a layer of complexity basically negates the accessibility improvements you get from adapting to what players already know.
I’m just saying that keyboards do a lot of things well, and that their utility is complemented by the ways people already use them.
@Scarybooster — I think one of the reasons for console success vs. PC games is the portability of knowledge that players have of how to interact with games. They aren’t required to unlearn how to use the controller, for the most part, from game to game. There are big variances between games, but in general, if you know how to use the camera stick and movement stick, you’re 80 percent of the way home. Contrast that with how games basically force people to put their knowledge of how PCs _usually_ work on the shelf.
August 26, 2009 at 2:22 am
On the first person shooter part: Every FPS prior to Descent was designed for keyboard control, although Quake popularized the standard WSAD + Mouse combo in use today.
Mouse-look was added after-the-fact for Doom and older games. I tried to load up classic Duke Nukem 3D the other day and the mouse control was unbearable, it really wasn’t designed for it.
I remember at Fragapalooza ’97, most players were still using keyboard for control. I was trying that experimental SpaceOrb 360 device (which was great for circle-strafing, but broke during the tournament). The next year, virtually everyone was using a mouse and you got your arse kicked if you were still on a keyboard.
What you’re asking for sounds a lot like what we’d experienced with games prior to the popularity of the FPS and RTS genres.
There were a lot of application-like games just as games moved from DOS to Windows and even before. Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Sim City, these are the games that immediately come to mind, but there were tons of other lesser known games too.
When I think about it though, the mouse is the primary input device in application-like games too. The only exception would be adventure games with words / phrases as the input.
August 26, 2009 at 4:05 am
Given the amount of Spectre I played on the dorm LAN in college, I’m surprised I didn’t think of it. Point conceded — there have been keyboard only first-person games that met with success, if only many years ago.
The difference with what you’re calling application-based games is that input efficiency isn’t really a factor. The Sims is not reaction-dependent, nor are most of the empire-building games of that sort.
It may very well be that there’s no way to create a responsive, versatile control system that’s as reactive as using the mouse. But it doesn’t seem enough, to me at least, to just shrug at that.
I really do think that the accessibility of controls plays a lot larger role in peoples’ reluctance to game on PCs, at least relative to consoles. There are still people who are mystified or only vaguely competent at using their PCs who are amazingly adept console gamers, and i think control accessibility plays a role.
Candor compels me to state: I still only _mostly_ mouse turn and move. I still have a very unwieldy-looking set of chorded movements (holding down, for example, q and d at the same time to strafe left while turning right in a pseudo circle-strafe maneuver) that twists my left hand into some very bizarre shapes.
I’ve tried to untrain my hands, but after this long, it’s not looking easy. I can play games where strafing and mouse turning are the only options, but when i have the option to keyboard turn, my hands always find a way to sneak just a hair of it in with these weird movements.
Ah, well. It works for me.
August 26, 2009 at 5:21 am
One of the old problems too with keyboards for games that require immediate and responsive input is that not all keyboards are created equal.
There are still a lot of keyboards (even some expensive ones) with a great deal of latency and single-control chips that allow only up to three key presses simultaneously.
As a player that did a lot of circle-strafing, even in the keyboard days, I can tell you that three-simultaneous keys problem is a big barrier.
…
On accessibility, hmmm. I’d agree that it plays a role, but it’s not as large as the bigger factors related to just getting games to run on most common PCs. The whole graphics card debacle is such a huge barrier and I would single-handedly credit it with the Console – PC gap.
Prior to that big gap, PCs more than held their own against consoles quite comfortably and computers are even credited with the “crash” of ’83, which I still dispute is a crash when it was basically about the failure of Atari matching the C=64. Computers or consoles, both of those were game machines.
Heh, starting to migrate away from the main topic of human interfaces, although the whole consoles vs computers part is definitely related.
August 26, 2009 at 5:22 am
Oh on another note, since the whole human interfaces thing is an interest: Have you ever tried chording keyboards?
August 26, 2009 at 3:33 pm
I am an old fogey reporter when it comes to keyboards. The only innovation i’ve been able successfully to integrate is mapping the Caps Lock key to control. Which is very nice.
The gal uses an ergonomic keyboard for the express purpose, I think, of keeping me off her computer.