I think the day I realised I’d definitely joined the realms of the ‘causal gamer’ was when I fired up a demo of … something, I can’t recall … and groaned when I saw screen that tells you all the million-ty buttons you now have to remember.

A Typical Controller Configuration Screen

You see, it’s shit like this that stops me from playing new games (or indeed, any games sometimes). I just cannot be arsed to learn all these new buttons any more.

Being an old git, I remember ‘back in the day’ when we only have 1 or 2 buttons on the “joy-stick” as they were amusingly called back then (fnar fnar). So why do we apparently need so many buttons now, and why do all games have to use all of them in maddeningly different ways?

Mostly I think the problem is the “If you build it, they will come” scenario. Although in this case it’s more like “if the button is there, a use will be found for it”. I’m sure many of these buttons could be removed with more generic “do shit” or even “do useful/relevant shit” button.

Now, some games do this, to be fair. Nintendo aren’t button-crazy like some and some games even have nice generic “action” buttons which make life a little bit easier. I find the worst game are the FPS (“First Person Shooter”) games that have a legacy of starting on the PC with its 102 keys where it was very tempting to just assign a key to everything and call it done.

If I had any kind of design feedback I would say – can we have an ‘easy’ mode in the game where most of those buttons just aren’t there? The game could just do the ‘right thing’ automatically or have a ‘magic button’ to choose automatically for you?

That would certainly help old gits such as myself to get into games more quickly, and dare I say it, actually enjoy them a bit more as well.

I’m getting too old for this shit.