If you hand a dual analogue stick, 10+ button controller with a D-Pad and contextual/media buttons to someone who hasn’t been playing games for most of their life, odds are they’ll turn it over in their hand like it’s an alien artefact, with no idea of how to use it.
I first noticed this when I was a kid. The controllers were much simpler then, but still none of the adults would play games with me. Even if they did hold the controller correctly, and there were some deeply amusing incorrect attempts made, they just didn’t have the required skill to interact with the game, nevermind play with a kid who had been performing this seemingly basic interaction for his whole life up to that point.
When my kids got old enough to be interested in games, they’d sit on my knee as I played and would watch or direct me on what to do. This was great when they were small but sooner or later they wanted to be able to do it for themselves. Except, when I handed them the controller, even with direct, hands-on guidance, they were quickly frustrated by their inability to translate what they wanted to do, into action in the game.
It’s no wonder - modern games have high expectations of players, and responding to the information and situations presented needs a suite of different actions. As designers we’ve had to find creative ways to get the most out of the limited number of buttons on a controller, which has led us to devise a variety of input actions.
The most common input actions are:
- Press - One press of a button. Triggers either when the button is pressed or released
- Hold - Keeping a button pressed for a duration
- Repeated - Pressing the same button multiple times (also called tapping)
- Sequential - Pressing a series of button in a specific order
- Chorded - Pressing (or holding) more than one button at a time
Along with input actions, there are Gameplay considerations:
- Input buffering - Preserving a button press for an amount of time, to be consumed after a gameplay action or duration has occurred
- Input window - The amount of time the player has to perform an input action
- Input layout - How far does the player need to move a finger, thumb or hand to perform an action
Given all of the above, it’s fair to say that these are massive hurdles for new players to learn and overcome.
To digress here briefly, this is also one of the reasons why the Wii was such a smash hit and phenomenon. It took otherwise challenging controls and made them extremely simple. That, in turn, influenced the types of games that were made for the system to a large degree. Regardless of your feelings about motion controls, it’s inarguable that this simplicity opened up gaming to a much wider audience. Like my grandmother, who had a Wii and played a tonne of Wii Sports.
As I thought about the specific challenges my children were facing, I realised that they needed to have curated experiences that would allow them to engage with a game they could enjoy, but that presented limited demand for inputs. I compiled the following list to gradually increase their literacy with a modern controller.
Donut County
Besides being an absolute gem of a game, it also has the perfect onboarding for teaching a player how to navigate a virtual environment; it starts with just the left analogue stick.
You can’t get hurt, fall out of the world or actually fail the levels (excepting perhaps the last one, if memory serves). The lack of gameplay consequences means it is a risk-free playground where you can experiment at your own pace.
The game’s presentation is clean and stylish making it easy to parse visually for newer players as well. While the presentation is in 3D, the gameplay is largely constrained to 2D, with some exceptions for later mechanics, which also gently teach players how to interact with the third dimension.
This is my go to game to teach a beginner how to use a controller to interface with a virtual world.
Unpacking
Similar to Donut County in terms of its gameplay safety, this is a great title to teach finer control of an analogue stick as you pick things up out of boxes and put them where you feel they belong.
Again, there are no gameplay failure conditions or requirements for timed resulting in a game over, though you do need to be more precise with your interactions.
Untitled Goose Game
Another game with a nicely staged introduction to teach players the ropes in small, easy to digest chunks. The inputs aren’t demanding up front but it does introduce low stakes pressure early on as you reach the first area and learn to deal with the gardener.
Navigation is 2D with some areas that you can pass under or over. There are some controls that, by default, require the player to hold a button while doing something else, but it’s intuitively introduced and natural as it matches the on-screen presentation well.
The addition of some truly excellent humour is an interesting complication as I’ve seen my kids fail to perform some inputs because they were laughing too hard. Not a bad problem to have, really.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
While still largely sticking to 2D movement and navigation, this adds more elements that need inputs, like inventory management. This is a new gameplay context that players need to understand navigating won’t cause their character to move until they close the menu, which is something that definitely tripped up at least one of my kids when they played it.
It introduces verticality slowly through both stepped terrain and floating objects you learn to shoot down. There is some light input time pressure for certain activities, but they aren’t particularly stressful, and the gameplay is forgiving.
Minecraft (Creative)
Many and more words have been written about Minecraft but few, if any, focus on how well Creative Mode is a low stakes opportunity to allow players to learn and explore 3D controls and movement in a game. The game defaulting to first person view does take some adjustment for new players as now forward on the left analogue stick is no longer “up” on screen, but forward and in order to look around you must begin developing skill with your right thumb to control the camera.
Due to the lack of consequences in Creative Mode, players are free to spend time learning how to navigate and create without the pressure or threats that Survival Mode has.
These titles acted as a safe way to learn how to use a modern controller to interact with a virtual world. My kids went from feeling frustrated at their inability to use a controller to feeling encouraged to explore more games and expand their skills. The confidence they built up through the course of this progression of games translated to others, with different types of gameplay challenges and required inputs. And, as a designer, it was an interesting and enjoyable problem to solve; to deconstruct where they were having trouble and figure out how to alleviate that in a way that let them build skill, have fun and learn to enjoy games without struggling with the controls.