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Does Your Controller Tell a Story?

Does Your Controller Tell a Story?

We talk about story a lot in games. More specifically, we talk a lot how you can tell a story in games, and frankly there are a lot of ways to do it. The most straightforward way is straight exposition. You can read narration, characters can talk to each other, and you can see the story unfold in front of you. You can also tell a story by exploration. When you find enough audio logs, for example, the backstory of the game will reveal itself to you. You can tell a story through graphics, by crafting the setting to tell tales through ruins and overgrown buildings, like The Last of Us did. You can even tell a story through mechanics, like the sanity meter in Eternal Darkness.

But there is another thing that tells a story when you game. It’s your controller.

Now this may seem strange, but think about it for a second. Each controller gives you a completley different gameplay experience. A boxy NES controller feels very different from an N64 controller, which feels very different from a PS4 controller. On the surface, this seems like it only really effects ease of play, right?

But anyone who has tried to emulate an N64 before can tell you that really isn’t the case. With an emulator you can very easily play Star Fox 64 with your keyboard and mouse. Any number of flight simulators have come out for computers, so you can just look up an old KBAM control scheme for one of them, map that to the Star Fox buttons, and away you go.

Except then you don’t feel like you are flying an Arwing. The middle arm of the N64 controller had a distinct flight stick feel to it, what with its backside trigger and analog stick. The way it felt in your hand made it feel like you were naturally controlling a plane, so much so that you would usually give one of those corny leans when you were afraid you weren’t going to avoid an obstacle in time.

Simple controllers have the same effect. Mega Man 9 came out for all last-gen platforms, but the platform it feels most at home at is on the Wii. Why? Because the Wiimote functions like an NES controller. The simple two buttons and small controller made Mega Man feel snappy to respond. It allowed you to very quickly press buttons rapidly and get used to Mega Man’s jump momentum. Playing it on a PS3 controller is functional, but it’s just not the same. It feels too heavy in your hand and the buttons are too far away to feel like a real classic Mega Man experience.

Does Your Controller Tell a Story?

Controllers express tone. They convey a sense of feeling to the player. Good games take advantage of this, like Heavy Rain , which made you perform finger ballet when you had to squeeze yourself through electric transformers, or made you hold down buttons while tapping them until your fingers ached when you had to actually cut off your own finger. You can play Heavy Rain with a keyboard and mouse but it just doesn’t feel the same, as part of its tone is missing. Similarly, you can play it with the PS Move, and that too feels wrong, even though it’s trying to emulate real life movements.

Can you think of any other games that use their controls to set a feeling or tone? Let us know in the comments.

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