Hello and welcome to Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column, the 27th of its kind, coming to you from the East Coast of Canada where I live and play. If you are a NEW subscriber? Well, wait til you hear this theme tune!
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All hail Alex Camilleri, a Sicilian games designer who lives in Sweden. Or rather all hail his wife. Who is his wife? I don’t know. Mrs Camilleri? Lady Camilleri? Duchess Camilleri, perchance? He didn’t mention his wife’s name in his tweet that I am about to pore over. He just said that his wife had “casually fixed the videogame industry”.
How did she do that? Did she ban microtransactions? Send an electric shock up the joypad of anyone who posts abuse in online games chat? Did she – gulp - get gaming YouTubers to stop shouting?
No. She changed the names of joypad buttons.
Now I am 50-whatever years old. I have been playing games for a fair few years now, especially with Xbox and Playstation joypads. But I still cannot under any circumstances tell you in a pinch which one of the buttons is X, Y A, B, triangle, cross, circle or square. Seriously. I can’t. Not without looking. This has ruined so many games for me. I will be playing something like Telltale Games The Walking Dead and I will be loving it. I am progressing through the story. I am engaged. I am having… dare I say it… fun. And then something happens where I have to press certain buttons in order, and I am left screaming “which one is the fucking X button again” and then I die through delay. Or I play my kids at some incarnation of Mortal Kombat, and I spend most of my time looking down at the joypad trying to remember which one of the four raised blobs is the triangle button while they gleefully rip assorted parts of my spine out.
I have tried ways of remembering these buttons in the past: Y is the top button because it looks like it is stretching its hands up the sun. X is on the left because I am left-handed and I am Xtra special. A is “AT” the bottom. But then B should be at the bottom because the word Bottom starts with B.
You see? It’s impossible.
PlayStation buttons are even worse. Triangle at the top could be made memorable because you can imagine the triangle pointing up to the top. Also, T is for Top and Triangle. But then I can’t think of any reason the square should be on the left. Because all left-handed people are squares? No, because I’m already saying left-handed people are Xtra special so I can remember the Xbox buttons. They can’t be both! How do I remember the circle? Circle is on the right because… because… er… because I throw a tennis ball up with the right hand to serve at tennis. It is ridulous! (I don’t even play tennis…)
Sorry. Is it just me or is this whole bit seeming like a bizarre GamesMaster and Sesame Street hybrid? T is the for Triangle and all that malarkey. “Today’s show is brought to you by the letter P. P is for Pants.”
And so… Alex Camilleri, that Sicilian game designer in Sweden, says his wife believes they should be labeled NESW – as in North, South, East, West because THAT IS HOW THEY ARE LAID OUT ON THE JOYPAD!!!!
(PIC follow Alex Camilleri on Twitter if you want - he seems smart. And Sigur Ros follow him!)
Sensational!
That way people like me can be told “Push N to punch” and I know it’s in the place North is in the compass. How simple is that? I worry that this is so obvious that it must have been tried before. But I don’t remember it. They surely must have thought about it. Why didn’t they do it? It seems a no brainer. Can you imagine if Microsoft or Sony HAD done this years ago, and patented it so the other side couldn’t do it?
So why didn’t it happen?
Do they want to make the games harder to play? I would think the opposite: that they would want you to complete the game quicker so you could buy another one? Or am I not seeing a problem here? Let me know in the comments section, or rather the Domments section, as we like to call it now, thanks to legendary Dommenter Coxy.
Unfortunately, you can only access the comments - sorry - Domments section as a PAID PALS subscriber, and… er… that is it for the free teaser version of this week’s Little Old Purple Column. There IS a column five times the length of this bit waiting for those who are stumping up the bargain price of less than a quid a week. You can do it by clicking this button.
Otherwise, I’ll see you in the free section this time next week. Until then keep it little, keep it old, keep it purple.
Dominik's Little Old Purple Column #27 FREE VERSION