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Weekend Bashing: Why Do Game Developers Think We Are Monkeys?

If not all, at least the people at Epic do

By Silviu Stahie, Video and PC Games Editor

12th of July 2008, 00:06 GMT

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Do you feel you're intellectually challenged when playing Gears of War? Do you ever feel too stupid for today's games? Are you, in fact, tired from pushing all those buttons on the expensive controller that came with the overpriced console and which apparently is targeted at some rather inept individuals on this planet?

We are here to answer these questions for you because, according to some, you are "unqualified" to do so. You will wonder why I'm so annoyed and the reason is quite simple. Cliff "CliffyB" Bleszinski, lead designer for Epic Games stated the following (in an interview with CDV), "I hope if there's a new Xbox that there'll be fewer buttons on the controller. This is purely me speculating in my own realm of game development, but if you look at a controller right now it looks like an alien spaceship". We might even go as far as assuming that a lot of game developers think that less buttons means more customers. This is not the issue of motion sensors or other kind of gimmicks. The issue here revolves on simplification and how it affects gaming and how people are perceived by the publishing companies: are we monkeys or gamers?

Magnavox Odyssey is the first console in the world, build in the sense we know it now. As you can clearly see, there are almost no buttons and just a couple of knobs on each controller. No problems here and I'm sure that a monkey must have been involved in the early stages of creation. You can't go wrong with hoses and knobs, I'm telling you. The natural evolution can be seen immediately and from two knobs in 1972; in 1976, there were joysticks and tons of nicely colored keys. The monkey had to be put in an asylum as it went mad from all the play-testing. The age of humans playing consoles started.

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Let's take a look at a more recent era or better yet at the 16-bit era. Sega Mega Drive is iconic to that particular generation and we clearly see that consoles, as we know them, were starting to take shape. A couple of controllers with D-pads and six buttons and the monkey was reinstated in its former job to insure that really dumb gamers are still smart enough to play games.

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The 32-bit era meant the rise of Playstation and games started pouring onto the market. Nonetheless, most known games were rather platformish and didn't really force players to think. Apparently, the developers missed the point and instead of producing games that were better aimed at their target audience, they started to make games for the monkey that was play-testing their titles. Few developers went out of their way to ignore the monkey but even fewer succeeded.

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In the meantime, the PC was still hanging on to their QWERTY keyboards with 102 buttons. People from all over the world managed to get used to accessing so many buttons and in development studios monkeys were nowhere to be found. To deepen the analogy even further, people using the PC were accessing TWO devices at the same time, each with distinctive functions. Imagine that. Games on PC were really challenging players with amazing quests and great adventures that are still remembered today. The Playstation owners were still collecting coins with Crash Bandycoot.

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The current generation of consoles, according to Cliff Bleszinski, is way too cluttered with buttons and apparently it needs some simplification. I'm sure they have in mind a couple of knobs that would certainly make life a little easier for Epic but my personal opinion is that the perfect gaming controller that would satisfy the monkey and the majority of the audience should look like the one below. I have one last question: simpler means cheaper, right?

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TAGS:

Xbox 360 | Epic | Playstation | Sega

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User opinions:

Comment #1 by: tom on 14 Jul 2008, 08:34 GMT	reply to this comment
if only their was a way to make sure the developers read this article and got what it is you/we are saying.they dont quite get the nature of evolution from bad to better to best and not the worse comparative.

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