Serious Player

Posts Tagged ‘gamepad’

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.

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