The Life and Merciful Death of the Fad Controller

Sorry, grandma. This doesn't exist anymore. I guess you should have bought more than the launch title.

Over the years we have had console gaming, the perfect control mechanism for our entertainment has emerged.

Our thumbs, those nimble and durable pieces of flesh and bone, operate the joysticks and buttons. Our trigger fingers work the triggers. The rest of our fingers, stupid and useless, hold the controller stable. And our bodies are left to peacefully recline and decay on the couch. (Because if we wanted to actually use our bodies for anything, we wouldn't be playing video games.)

This control mechanism easily allows two joysticks, four buttons, a d-pad, a touch pad/Back button, two triggers, and two bumpers. Enough inputs to easily handle even a very complex game.

(You can also push the joysticks in to provide two extra buttons, which is how controller engineers tempt game designers into making mistakes. If your game uses pushing down on a joystick as an input, please move that command to a real button. If you don't have a button free, just lose that feature. Your game has too much stuff in it as it is.)

Yes, the modern console controller is a marvel of design and functionality.  Yet, brave game designers are never satisfied with mere perfection. They are always coming up with new, weird fad controllers to tempt us. This article will describe the lifespan of this process.

Harmonix tried to teach players how to actually do something. It didn't work out. Moral: Never hope for anything to ever get better anywhere ever.

Why Make a Fad Controller?

Part of it is artistic exploration, I suppose. The desire to elevate our new art form to new and undreamt of heights.

The real reason is money. There's a lot of money in this biz, but there's also a ton of competition. A new sort of game that catches the consumer's fickle eye will result in a fortune. Guitar Hero and Rock Band both sold well over a billion dollars. The motion controllers of the Wii led to that console winning its generation (old people like fake bowling).

Employees of game companies need to keep coming up with ideas to justify their salaries, whether you want them or not. No executive wants to go to E3 to say, "We're treading water another year. We have the same old crap. YOLO!"

In the end, all we’re trying to do is reach an increasingly jaded, desensitized audience and present something new enough to raise their heart rates above rest level for five freakin’ seconds.

You ask: How on EARTH did they ever get anyone to buy the Wii Fit board? Answer: Pornography.

Phase One: The Shock and Joy of the New

So fad controllers are made. What is a fad? Something new and exciting, which hordes rush to buy to get a bit of newness and variety in their mundane, repetitive lives.

Maybe your fad is motion control, to get the pudgy masses off their couches. Like the Wiimote, or Playstation Move, or the Kinect, or the Wii Fit Board. ("No, THIS will be the peripheral that gets gamers to exercise while they game LOL!")

Or maybe it's the plastic version of a real life peripheral, to better simulate something in the real world. Like a guitar or drums. Or maracas. Or bongos. Or, for the suicidal, a skateboard.

Most attempted fads fail, of course. Some, however, caught on and made a bunch of money. Bloggers, ever hunting for the next Hot Take, gazed upon them and proclaimed a new exciting future for gaming! Then, a few months later, reality set in.

How will we get people to play Guitar Hero again? I know! We'll make the controller incomprehensible and beige!

Phase Two: The Bloom Comes Off the Rose.

The thing about fads: The newness wears off. Purchasers start to think, "Oh. Wait. This isn't holding up that well." And they move on in droves. A fad is a massive wave, and waves always recede.

I was a diehard Rock Band fanatic. I played it a ton. I went to many Rock Band parties. Enough of them to say with some authority: For the vast majority of humans, 3 songs is all it takes to get tired of Rock Band. (Some blame the music game crash on too many titles coming out per year. This is nonsense. If your genre can't handle 5-6 titles a year, it's a crappy genre.)

Phase Three: The Fatal Flaw Becomes Apparent.

Most fad controllers fail for one of a few simple reasons:

1. They just aren't precise enough to support more than a few crude, simple games. (e.g. Wiimote. Wii Fit Board. Kinect.)

2. The controls are precise, but the games you can play on them turn out to not be that interesting. (e.g. Any music game ever.)

3. Even if it's a decent controller and a cool idea, it's tied to one platform, so no major developer ever bothers with it. (e.g. Wii U Tablet. Also, did you know that big pad in the middle of a PS4 controller is a full touch pad and you can do little drawings on it and stuff? It's OK, nobody else did either. Why would any developer who supports more than one console ever use that feature?)

4. The controller requires getting up off the couch. I'm not doing that. (e.g. Almost every fad controller.)

If the controller is lucky, a few more games get written for it after the initial release. They made bank at first, but now they are tanking with increasing severity.

Now comes Phase Four, the endgame. The company who makes the fad controller has two choices: The path of the canny businessman. Or the path of the insane Viking.

I want Star Wars Kinect dancing videos to be the new Rickroll.

Phase Four, Option One: Give Up and Take the Money

Seriously, if your product becomes a fad, you can make a TON of money. When the big cash river stops coming in, accept that your product wasn't actually going to change everything forever. Cease production, count your winnings, buy another Tesla, and never speak of it again.

Phase Four, Option Two: Double Down!!!

There are some who are struck by Divine Madness. They are the true believers, who really believe they are changing gaming forever. Like remember when Harmonix convinced itself that Rock Band fans actually wanted to learn to play a real instrument?

The greatest such tale: When it became clear that the Kinect was only good for dancing games, Microsoft could have accepted its limitations, cashed their huge checks, and moved on.

But no, humility is not the Microsoft way. They were determined to explore the Kinect's maximum possible potential. So they not only kept it around, they built their entire next console generation around it. With disastrous results.

But it's all right. We'll always have the cautionary tale, and the wonderful memories.

It's OK, VR Beard Guy, YOU GOT THIS.

Phase Five: Regret and Garage Sales

The final destiny is the same. The story starts with a beautiful dream, moves on to cargo ships full of cheaply made plastic drum kits, and ends with piles of the things filling garage sales and thrift stores everywhere.

I mean, seriously, isn't it amazing? Factories in China made millions and millions of shoddy plastic drum sets. They were shipped across an entire ocean and delivered to households in America, where they were played for probably 2-3 songs and then thrown in a dumpster somewhere.

Think about how much effort went into this project! Someday, historians and economists will look back on that whole event and ... Well, I don't know what they'll think but we're going to come across pretty awesome.

How Does VR Enter Into This?

I should point out that this whole cycle has absolutely nothing to do with the VR craze. I mean, sure, VR goggles are really expensive, make lots of people sick, and have yet to come up with an actually compelling title. But it's fine. VR is the future. Bet your mom's bottom dollar on it.

I'd like this picture but with grandparents in the goggles instead of pasty tech nerds. It could be the beginning of a really lousy episode of Black Mirror.

So What Have We Learned?

Nothing.

That's the wonderful thing about the game industry. Almost everyone burns out of it by the time they're 35, so whatever institutional memory they developed disappeared and a new generation of worker bees is brought in to make all the same mistakes again.

So when the next weirdly-numbered generation of XBox comes out in a few years (Working Name: "XBox Eleventy Five"), you can look forward to its new motion controllers about three years after that. They will sell ten million units, have two decent games, secretly send pictures of your clothes to Forever 21 for marketing purposes, and your kids will LOVE it. For three days.

###

You can buy our awesome, easy to control games here. We are also on Twitter.

Edit: Changed the Harmonix guitar caption to something a little less unkind.

The Last, Best Article On How to Fix the Olympics!

I don't just spend my time writing games. I have interests. I have passions. And that is why, every two years, I plop my well-rounded self onto to couch for several weeks to watch an abusive amount of the Olympics.

And we're serious about it in this household. We were dumb enough to renew our Tivo subscription for the Winter Olympics, just so we wouldn't have to sit through commercials like animals.

Of course, those who feel that they are oh so superior to any mere sporting event have totally tuned me out by now. Good. They don't deserve the Olympics. Sure, the event is expensive, commercialized, and occasionally full of corruption, stupidity, and incredibly tight-assed officials. But there is an awesomeness there that the bad parts simply can't obscure.

However, speaking as a game designer, the Winter Olympics could really, really use some tightening up. There are countless ways to make the events more interesting for the people who count. That is, us. At home. But I'm not going to suggest, as some have, dropping sports. That is cowardly and Unamerican. Also, if some young, strapping lad has spent his short life wrecking his body to be best at something that is almost surgically absent of interest, I'm not going to be the one to tell him that his sport sucks beyond redemption. Even if it does.

So here, offered free and out of my pure love for humanity, are my ways to make the Winter Olympics much more cool and watchable. I'm not the first to make up such a list, but I plan to be the last.

Downhill Skiing, Speed Skating, Slalom - Here's a rule. Any sport where you can't tell with the naked eye who is winning is dumb. These events are always decided by a margin of three squintillionths of a second, periods of time too small for the human brain to process them, and only magic, time-telling robots can tell us who won. And maybe the robots are lying. Because robots hate us.

My game designer powers tell me that this is an easy fix. Just add a factor that will cause a greater variance in the finish times for the athletes. A polar bear randomly wandering halfway down the course should solve the problem. And, for extra exciteness, put a ribbon on the bear's tail. Pull it off on the way down and we shave five seconds off your time.

Ski Cross, Snowboard Cross, Short Track Skating, Any Four-Person Roller Derby On Ice - These are how downhill skiing and speed skating should be done. Fast races. You can see who won. Awesome crashes.

And in Short Track Skating, on average, 90% of the skaters are disqualified. Anyone can win! Heck, I just got a Bronze for the men's thousand meter, and I never left my house!

Anything With Ski Jumping That Doesn't Involve Lots of Nifty Flipping In an XTREME Manner - These are the most tedious sports to watch that don't have the word "luge" somewhere in the name. Every jump looks exactly the same. Also, these sports are harder to fix, as the slope doesn't really have a good place to put the polar bear. The only way to fix this is to change the rules and equipment to make ski jumping exactly identical, in every way, to snowboard halfpipe and hope that nobody notices.

Any Event With a Snowboard - Thank God for XTREME sports for keeping the Olympics watchable. Enjoy it while it lasts. Give it a decade or two and the Olympics-fun-sucking-machine will have its way with them. Remember, a snowboarder got booted from the Olympic village for getting photographed displaying his bronze medal in an (ahem) erotically suggestive way. The fun window is closing fast, folks.

Hockey - Basically soccer on ice. Which means it's boring. The best way to fix it is to force the players to play 60 minutes straight. No rests. No interruptions. Watching their desperate efforts to flail the puck into the net around the 50 minute mark will be awesome. Also, the profound fatigue will make it much harder for them to keep away from the polar bear.

Figure Skating - The perfect sport for the Winter Olympics. No sense of fun or spontaneity. Comically corrupt judging for us all to argue about. And sparkles, sparkles, sparkles! Plenty of excitement, but not the sort that is ever, you know, exciting. Perfect viewing for those of us with cardiac issues.

There's still room for some minor changes. First, no skaters under eighteen. I want to be able to watch some contestant pull out her sultry Salome dance without feeling like my name should be on a list somewhere.

Second, three nights isn't near enough for Ice Dancing. We need a minimum of eight nights to fully appreciate the splendor of whatever the hell that is. Oh, and finally, the entire current pool of judges could perhaps be removed and replaced with ANYONE AT ALL.

Bobsled - In my brave future world, everyone in the bobsled will be forced to switch places halfway down.

Curling - There is a general progression that goes on with curling. People hear about it and go, "They do what? What brooms? That sounds dumb!" And then they sit down to watch it for a few minutes, hoping for a good laugh. And then they say something like, "Wow! How lame! They're just playing shuffleboard with brooms. And they ... Ooh. That was a nice shot. And the shouting and the snacks and they're all middle aged. This is so dumb. And ... Sweet. Completely knocked their rock out of there. ... Where was I? This isn't a sport. This ... This ... ... ... SWEEP HARDER, BITCHES!!!"

Curling is the ultimate sport of the Winter Olympics. It moves relatively quickly, compared to, say, hockey. A lot of points get scored. There is strategy. You can tell who is winning with the naked eye. And there is an eccentric, low-tech charm to the thing, an "I could do that" air (even though you really can't) that makes it far more approachable than watching wiry, teenage pixies jumping eighty feet into the air.

So to fix curling? Show more of it. Especially the woman. A lot of them are totally hot in a kind of naughty librarian sort of way.

Oh, and One More Thing - The best way to fix the Olympics is to get rid of the tight-assed, suffocating self-importance of the Olympics. After the Canadian hockey-women won their gold medals, they took to the ice and drank champagne and smoked cigars. Look at the pictures. They are awesome! And so some officials got angry and made them apologize. Hey, we aren't talking someone performing an act of love on a bronze medal here. It's celebrating your hard-earned victory by cracking a cold one on the back of a Zamboni.

The Olympics is about (i) insanely dedicated young people (ii) doing crazy things (iii) for our enjoyment and then going off to have (iv) mind-bogglingly athletic sex. Anything that does not directly contribute to one of those four key factors must be destroyed without mercy. Preferably before 2012, when the next Real Olympics will happen.