Serious Player

I remember old discussions with other computer gamers about First Personal Shooter (FPS) games some years ago and how masochistic console players could be playing with a pad controller. Since 1997, the year of Quake 2 on PC and Goldeneye 007 on Nintendo 64 there has been many discussions about the so “valuable” skill of PC players compared with console player. Because of the lack of handiness providing by a gamepad, FPS players on game console got a poor reputation. Even if gamepads have been improved nowadays, the same reputation seems to affect the console players.

Damien Lopez - A History of Game Controllers (edited version)

The frequently blame we can hear about it is the fact that gamepads do not allow an accurate aim unlike the use of a mouse. As far as I know no real experiment or serious observations have been made about how “good” a player can be according to the controller device he uses. It is just generally accepted that keyboard and mouse are the best way to perform in FPS and nobody seems to be looking for the reasons why it might be true (or not). It could be interesting to confront a group of very good console players against another group of very good computer players in a FPS game that would have been designed to be released, on computer and game console (e.g. Halo series). What could be even more interesting would be to observe and to analyse how console players play in comparison to computer players. Perhaps it could be possible to detect different performances and playing behaviours between both groups. This could leads to draw some behavioural patterns according to player habits and raise assumptions about the influence of the controller devices.

This thought pop up after reading a nice article titled “The FPShuffle” by Richard Terrell on Critical-Gaming Network blog. To sum up what FPShuffle is about, here is the author’s words :

The FPShuffle is an emergent behavioural occurrence in first or 3rd person shooters. [...] Picture one player moving back and forth in a fairly unpredictable fashion shooting at every opportunity at a single opponent who is doing the same. Neither can cause enough damage to kill the other quickly. So this dance of sorts continues until someone runs away, gets lucky, or other factors intercede.

Point after point, Richard Terrell explains why this kind of behavior occurred in video games. Even if he believes that some variables such as player skills and play styles are also contributing to this situation, he was mainly focused on gameplay mechanisms. For instance, some of these structural factors can be the weapons attributes, avatars movement, or level design. While it is certain that game structures are really relevant points, I would like to complete his approach by pointing out that FPSshuffle can also occur on account of controller devices used by the player. I argue playing a FPS with a gamepad won’t develop the same behaviour and performances than with a keyboard & mouse. That’s not new since developers have always seperated consoles and computer users for multiplayer on internet. Actually, there is no technical reason to explain why it is still seperated (it is as easy to get an internet connection with a game console than with a computer), but only the fear of an unfair balance between the skills of the computer players and console players. I’m not saying that a console players is less capable than a computer player, but it seems that developers emphasize this idea since a long time. Because of the lack of convenience providing by a gamepad for a FPS, game designers have also adapted the structures of their games. The famous “lock on” and “aim assist” features  have been created to facilitate aiming with a gamepad, especially during bustling actions in game where it is hard to keep his target on sight. “Aim assist” feature has always be banned from the use of most FPS computer players even if some games were providing it. In recent games such as Borderlands there is a mix between “aim assist” and “lock on” features that is activated by default. Knowing the fact this game has been developped for Xbox360, PS3 and PC, it’s not really surprising.

In the following video, you can see an exemple of aim-assist feature on Halo2 during the first minute:

To come back to FPShuffle, my assumption would be that because of gamepad mechanism, it is easier to move quickly and dodge attacks (especially projectiles) than aim accurately and shoot deadly his opponent. Supposing this, we could argue gamepads are partly accountable for an emergence of FPShuffle behaviour.  In order to check the hypothesis about how controllers can shape the way players perform, it would be useful to design a rigourous experiment. I will try to think about it and draw the big lines of it for the next weekf. When I’ll be finish with it, I’ll post it on the blog, so it’s a “to be continued”…

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