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[wMattDodd]

I'm trying to work out a bit of design. What are some examples of fun input systems?

A clear example of what I mean would be DDR. It's especially notable on an arcade machine, but it's still fun even on a standard controller or keyboard. Rock Band/Guitar Hero is another. And in the same vein, Parappa. In Mario Kart Wii, the wheel is more fun than a Gamecube controller. Getting away from specific peripherals, the way you set your power per shot on Mario Golf is what I'd call a fun input system, as was the critical hit system in Mario RPG. More ambiguous, but still applying, would be platforming with tight controls, like Megaman or Mario 64. Those things just feel fun to interact with, regardless of what you're actually doing.

Counter-examples would be Final Fantasy 7 or Crusader Kings. Great games, but the input isn't a factor at all, only the outcome. It's fun to fight a boss or conquer a kingdom, but none of that fun is derived from the act of clicking through menus.

On the more theory side, what makes those things fun, when others aren't? Timing seems to be a factor, as does peripherals physically matching the activity (the wheel in Mario Kart Wii, the guitar in Guitar Hero). But clearly those aren't the only factors, otherwise it wouldn't be fun to just run around in the castle (or other areas away from enemies) in Mario 64.

Thanks for reading, and I'm looking forward to seeing any responses.

[Alec S.]

It seems that there's two issues here.  One is the means of controlling the game, and the other is the tuning of the controls themselves.

For the latter, that goes into a games "feel".

There's a lot that goes into making a game "feel" right.  If you look at the code for, say, a good platformer game, there will be a series of constants that determine max speed, acceleration, friction, mid-air acceleration, mid-air friction, gravity, ect...  It's the little thing that matter.  If a player is running left, and immediately starts going right, it feels wrong if they go from full speed to full speed in the opposite direction.  There needs to be that moment of friction where they're slowing down, and then acceleration where they're speeding up in the other direction.

As for control devices, this is a good video as to why control devices which are closer to the action they're supposed to be simulating are actually worse than control devices which are more abstract (an analog stick feels much more natural to control walking than walking in place on a Wii board or in front of a Kinect do).

[Muz]

Angry Birds.

Heck, a lot of smartphone sensors. There is a cool app, which you put on your mattress while you sleep, and it senses the vibration on your mattress to indicate how soundly you're sleeping. It also uses the noise detection sensors to detect if you're snoring/talking in your sleep and records it if it goes past a certain noise treshold.

[rdein]

osu tatakae ouendan, taiko no tatsujin, etc.

[tha_Chiller]

Making Interaction worth it, even on smaller scales, that's what watered out Menu-Selecting/Turn-Based combat in RPGs, when there was nothing more than just waiting around. Squeenix try to rectify this with XIII's Paradigm combat but instead simplified something that was watered down; seeing things happen when you just press a button & not really apart of the interactions is bad (makes the player feel dumb). However Tactics Ogre makes you think twice before interacting.

The Mario RPG series (Super Mario RPG, Mario & Luigi, Paper Mario) have the timed hits & defense/dodge - Superstar Saga had QTE in the Bros. Special Attacks. The Ocarina of Time didn't simply play songs, it opened doors, transported Link to places & created flash storms or brought out the sun...even everyone knows at least a melody from that game if not all.

Try to pay attention to the character + lore of you're game to develop a style for even the smallest interactions (if you can + if its necessary) - Fallout 3 had the VATS system that was integrated into the Pipboy 3000 which happened to be the menu screen as well.

[randomnine]

Some factors that may help:

- Responsiveness.

When you apply an input, the effect should be immediate. Delayed effects feel sluggish and disconnected from your actions.

- Significance and empowerment.

Effects feel better when more happens. Sounds, particle effects and dramatic punchy animation all contribute to significance. This single aspect is most of the "juiciness" concept and is all about locking in on that feeling that your actions have had consequences.

In any realistic scenario, people will generally prefer control response which flatters and empowers them rather than the reverse (though feeling grounded in reality is necessary for that empowerment, so there's a balance to strike; see Tony Hawk vs Skate). Crackdown doesn't have particularly great controls but you can jump up the side of buildings and throw cars; that's fun. Driving and shooting games routinely apply the same logic, even "simulation" driving games with their various assists.

As a side note, survival horror games struggle with engaging controls in part because they're thematically incompatible with empowerment.

- Intuitive mapping of interface to effects.

The Guitar Hero guitar and steering wheel are good examples; so is the Steel Battalion controller. However, arrow keys and control pads can also achieve this.

In Mario 64, you push the stick in the direction you want Mario to move. In Katamari Damacy each thumbstick is one of your hands, pushing or pulling the katamari. In Skate the thumbsticks become a gestural interface, each movement corresponding to part of a trick. In Smash Bros., slamming the thumbstick violently to one side is a component of especially violent actions. In Metal Gear Solid 3, grabbing a human shield turns into snapping their neck if you apply a bit more pressure to the button. In Forza, the joypad's right trigger becomes a pressure-responsive accelerator pedal. In Call of Duty it becomes the trigger of a gun.

- On the edge of predictability.

If controls aren't predictable, the game's unplayable or mushy and random. If they're too easily predictable, they're no longer inherently interesting. Engaging controls need to be predictable but get away from you slightly, requiring constant focus and attention and rewarding increasing mastery with increasing precision. This knife-edge balance can come from the timing of snappy, volatile response; the nuances of subtle, intricate motion; the unfolding layers of combo systems; or all three. Either way, the gap between success and failure should be hard, clear, and stand on the limits of human capacity.

- Context and surprise.

Though controls should be predictable - pulling the trigger should always shoot - they should also ideally have enjoyable and possibly surprising consequences based on their current context. Your fist can punch many things, but each reacts differently. Your gun can shoot many things but some ping off, some explode and some fall over. Your Katamari can pick up different objects, but each makes a different noise.

The tool remains the same but the situations they're applied to change dramatically. If you can surprise and entertain players when they apply the controls in new contexts, they'll look forward to experimenting with new possibilities.

Magicka is a great example here, but so is simply interacting with people in Psychonauts. So are the different songs and riffs in Guitar Hero. In Mario, it's usually about how stuff reacts when you jump on it.

---

If your controls are responsive, have clear feedback, map intuitively, are on the edge of predictability but reward mastery and cause significant things to happen in an empowering way... you're probably on the right track.

Conversely, "bad" controls in many of the above respects can be aesthetically valid (as in survival horror, or in the ending of Shadow of the Colossus), and unintuitive controls can open the way to interesting mechanics.

[wMattDodd]

Thanks for the responses, everyone.

It seems that there's two issues here.  One is the means of controlling the game, and the other is the tuning of the controls themselves.

For the latter, that goes into a games "feel".

There's a lot that goes into making a game "feel" right.  If you look at the code for, say, a good platformer game, there will be a series of constants that determine max speed, acceleration, friction, mid-air acceleration, mid-air friction, gravity, ect...  It's the little thing that matter.  If a player is running left, and immediately starts going right, it feels wrong if they go from full speed to full speed in the opposite direction.  There needs to be that moment of friction where they're slowing down, and then acceleration where they're speeding up in the other direction.

As for control devices, this is a good video as to why control devices which are closer to the action they're supposed to be simulating are actually worse than control devices which are more abstract (an analog stick feels much more natural to control walking than walking in place on a Wii board or in front of a Kinect do).

I really meant the total system--both the controls, and the way the game reacts to the controls. I have seen that video before, actually, and I agree--Kinect, and motion controls in general, are usually worse due to the effects therein. On occasion, however, such as the Mario Kart Wii example I gave, they do work--you don't expect resistance from a steering wheel, for example (most of the time anyway), unlike a sword.

Pulling a trigger on the 360 controller and a gun on the screen firing bullets was fun.

Good point. Kinda simplistic but the fact that it didn't occur to me is proof enough that it's easy to overlook. Great example.

(lots, cut for length)

Responsiveness: I came to this exact conclusion last night, actually. Basically all the examples I could think of used either a single input (button press) or at most a very rapid double input (like a double-click), and the reverse was also generally true, my counterexamples required multiple button presses before taking action. This was especially clear in Star Ocean 2 on manual targeting, where 'double-clicking' (so to speak) the attack button to attack the current target was engaging, but hitting attack, then switching targets with the d-pad, then hitting attack again to confirm lost the engagement.

The rest of your post was very insightful, it's clear you've spent a lot of time thinking about this long before I started the thread. Excellent thoughts, thank you very much for sharing them. I think they'll be very helpful. Do you have any suggestions for further reading (articles, videos of talks, etc), or is it all from personal experience and reflection?

[randomnine]

Kinect doesn't intuitively map to actions very well at all. Your actions are at such a level of fidelity that dissimilarities are very clear. The most common issue is that there's zero tactile feedback, and we rely on touch a great deal.

As for further reading... I've dug up a few things for certain points.

- Responsiveness

This is plain old cognitive science: how close do an action and a result have to be in time for the brain to assess them as a single event? The Perception of Cross-Modal Simultaneity.

- Significance and empowerment

Juiciness. It's very easy to see this at work in casual games - say, PopCap games - but it's just as present in any game with really powerful sounding guns and cool-looking explosions.

As for empowerment, this runs deep. Since the dawn of gaming we've been mowing down armies, coming first and kicking arse all the way, and the balance between empowerment and realism defines the spread of entire genres: Bulletstorm to ArmA, Need For Speed to rFactor, THPS to Skate, Dragon Ball Z to Fight Night. (Though, even games towards the realistic side generally grant you peak human physical competence, knowledge and status to play with as a matter of course.)

- Intuitive mapping of interface to effects

This is just design, not really game specific. It relates to affordances, to immersion, and to the controller as metaphor.

- Edge of predictability

For an example of someone explicitly applying this principle see Tuning Canabalt.

- Context and surprise

Nothing specific here, but adventure games are generally huge on this. They have all these verbs and all these nouns and they want you to play around with them all, but there's nothing intrinsically fun about pressing buttons and getting an "I can't do that" non-response, so they shove comedy everywhere for you to find so you're motivated to explore the possibilities. Psychonauts definitely has this mindset too, what with Tim Schafer moving over from adventure games. There are loads of cool little interactions specially added just to make things feel fun and reactive.

Here's a challenge: check out Super Mario Bros (NES) world 1-1 and count the interactions available. Including the secret block and the secret area you can descend into I count 20 different ways things respond when you jump into them, jump on them or simply move into them. All of that from left, right and jump. That's context.

[Gimym TILBERT]

A great tragedy in video game right now is motion input are ill split. Kinect would shine in complement with wiimote/nunchuk setup. Button, stick and full body gesture in the only way to develop complex all purpose control.

Imagine gesture validate with button and how it would increase some kind of control (one button many gesture/stance for giving order or display emote to npc), stick would alleviate the navigation fatigue in kinect game and pointing at the screen would allow precise selection of items.

I can think how fps could greatly benefit from it, one player action control, one order control, point at the ground and action is take items, pointing at the screen on an object is interacting with it, stance plus pointing to indicate something to your team, etc...