Comparing Game Systems: Wireless Controllers

Wireless controllers are the best thing to happen to video game consoles since the invention of the Compact Disc (sorry, SNES). No more tripping over wires or having wires that are just too short for you to sit on the couch. Now, you just have to pair the controller with the console, and you’re set.

This process has slight variations across consoles, but one feature I found interesting was how the different wireless controllers indicated which Player they were. Back in the days of wired controllers, if a controller was plugged into Port 1, that controller would be Player 1. Today, it’s assigned based on the order each controller is turned on. The interesting differences between video game consoles (Wii, XBox 360, and the PlayStation 3) come in how the controller displays this information.

On the Wii controller, it’s shocking simple. There are four lights, arranged left to right. The light that is on indicates what Player number you are, and the leftmost light is Player 1.

On the XBox 360 controller, it’s not quite as easy. There are still four lights, but they’re arranged in a circle. Upper left indicates Player 1, and the order goes clockwise around the circle. Still intuitive, but not as immediately so as with the Wii.

The one neat feature is that this mapping is shown on the console itself, so anyone just looking at the console knows how many controllers are connected. This is not so on the Wii or the PlayStation 3.

Finally, the PlayStation 3. At first glance, you don’t see anything.

Then you tilt it up, and you see, similar to the Wii, a row of 4 lights.

Except that, from this angle, Player 1 is the rightmost light and Player 4 is the leftmost. This arrangement only makes sense when you’re looking at the controller from a different perspective.

And who in the world looks at their controller from this angle? Not cool, Sony.

Winner? WII! With the XBox 360 close behind.

XBox 360: New and less-cluttered Dashboard

Only two weeks ago, I posted about an excellent analysis of the XBox 360 Dashboard and a potential redesign. It would have been a great new interface. Microsoft, however, had other ideas.

Yesterday at the E3 conference, Microsoft released details of their Dashboard update this Fall. Frankly, it looks far more modern and far less cluttered. The “blades” have been replaced with a Zune-like menu that should be easier to understand. From a human factors perspective, the biggest feature is: less clutter! The interface is much cleaner with an emphasis on the important UI elements.

A big deal was made on making it easier to find downloadable content. I haven’t seen any screen shots showing an improved search feature, but anything would be better than the current system. Hopefully there will be screenshots to come!

Incredible analysis of a display

The XBox 360 dashboard is the user interface to the XBox operating system. When the game console is booted up, the user is presented with a display that looks like:

The user can navigate to different sections of the display using the XBox 360 controller to switch “Blades” - between, Games, Media, and other functions. It’s a fairly usable design, though it is difficult to make sense of initially (at least, based on my experience).

Over at the blog The Fanboys, there is a fantastic analysis of the 360 dashboard display. The dashboard is broken down into pixels and classified as being used for the user’s content, interactive items (buttons, menus, etc.), ad space, or blank space. The results are startling but also inform a smart redesign that minimizes dead space but does not lead to increased clutter. It’s a really impressive redesign.

The Fanboys: Dreaming of Dashboard 2.0

As someone who is starting to propose a display redesign for a submarine tactical system, this kind of analysis could be incredibly useful to implement. At the very least, it gets the mind thinking in a visual, yet quantitative, manner. Oftentimes, it is easy to be descriptive about changes that need to be done. But when you get sensible and realistic numbers, the case becomes far more convincing.

Vision Sciences 2008

I am at the Vision Sciences Society conference right now in Naples, FL. It’s my fourth VSS, and the presentations are of high quality and the beaches are of the same high standard. I’m presenting two posters at the conference.

The first is a study I’m doing with my labmates and Carl Smith (Evaluating Design) looking at eye movements in experts and novices while they view a movie of the first-person shooter Quake 4 and have to detect targets. The big picture is that more experienced players make fewer eye movements for longer periods of time. This reflects previous research that suggests experts have a larger functional field of view, so they can extract more information from the periphery than novices.

The second poster are a series of studies I worked on with my advisor and another faculty member at George Mason University. We examined the effect of holding similar and dissimilar items in working memory to determine how the capacity of visual working memory changed when you had to remember sets of items from different categories. The interesting result is that remembering 2 objects from 2 separate categories (4 total object) led to higher working memory capacity than 4 objects from a single category, but only if faces were part of the two-category set. This is not due to a general “faces are special” effect, as memory capacity for two or four faces alone was never greater than memory for other object classes.

As I attend other interesting talks and posters, I hope to write about them here. Stay tuned!

Pointy Wiimotes

The original Nintendo Entertainment System was released in North America in 1985. It was quite the revolution in gamin, and its controller did not take into account the ergonomics of the hand. It was quite pointy:

Fast forward 16 years to 2001, and the Nintendo GameCube shows how far design has come in understanding how our hands grip things and how best to design controllers to effortlessly fit human hands.

But now, with the Wii, there is the Wii Remote, or Wiimote. It is held in your hand like a remote, and there and several easy-to-reach buttons for most games. However, for other games, there are alternative control schemes. For example, in Super Paper Mario, you play the entire game holding the remote sideways.

The pointiness has returned. WIth Super Smash Brothers Brawl, there are many different ways to control the game. One way is to turn the controller sideways, which is, once again, pointy. Many gamers have said they prefer to use the GameCube controller with this game because of how much more comfortable it is.

Options are a good thing, generally. The Wii enables more analogous control for many games, such as Tennis or Bowling. But for other games, you need a more traditional controller. At least the designers of Brawl understood that the Wiimote is not the optimal control and allowed for others. Not all games allow for this, which means users are back to pointy controllers jabbing into our hands.

Miscellaneous Note: Controller design has been remarkably difficult for consoles throughout the ages. The original Microsoft XBox controller, for example, was a monstrosity:

It was rumored that the controller was too big for most Japanese hands, so Microsoft had to redesign the whole thing to be sold overseas. Whoops. Penny Arcade even made a non-work safe comic about it (NSFW due to language).