The Fallacy of Simple Controls

Part of the genius of Cannabalt is the simplicity of its controls – there's only one button.  Many Wii games have similarly simple interfaces – simple in that they're intuitive and easy for nearly anyone to pick up and understand on a basic level.  However, the intuitive simplicity of these control schemes usually lead to a complexity in the long run that often is entirely overlooked

In many ways, simple control schemes in games like Canabalt and Wii Sports are a huge success. Their goal is to make games accessible and interesting to people who don't want to sit down and struggle with thumbsticks, and they're pretty good at it. When new players pick up a game like Halo, they get absolutely destroyed by anyone competent – and not because they don't understand Halo, but because their hands don't understand the dual sticks. In contrast, new players will lose in Wii Tennis less because they don't understand the controls and more because they don't understand Wii Tennis.

So simple controls smooth out the beginning of the learning curve and get you right to the meat of the game.  How could that be bad? It's not like it's interesting or fun to spend the first few hours looking down at the face buttons and trying to remember the colors. But, for their simplicity, these controls almost always sacrifice something important in the long run: precision.

Wii Tennis is a good example of this. When you start playing Wii Tennis you swing the Wii remote around like an actual tennis racquet and pretend you're playing tennis.  As you get better at the game, though, you stop imitating tennis players and start finding the moves that work for Wii Tennis – small, sharp movements that look nothing like swinging a tennis racquet.

This creates a steep learning curve around the middle skill level of Wii Tennis instead of at the very beginning of games like most game controllers. Wii Tennis controls are intuitive and that allows people to get into the game very quickly, but once they start getting good people have to relearn the controls in a way that most games don't make you relearn the controls. The buttons on most controllers are mapped to a single, explicit action: B lobs, A is a forehand, X is a backhand, so on.

The functions of the Wii controller are much less explicit, but you need to make them explicit in order to get good at the game – as in most games, the people who can perform an action consistently whenever they want to are going to be better than those who can't.  If you want to get good at Wii Tennis you have to learn to lob 100% of the time you're trying to lob, and because the Wii controller isn't precise like the face buttons on a typical console controller, performing consistent lobs is actually pretty difficult.

Because they're intuitive, Wii controllers smooth over the beginners' learning curve that keeps a lot of people from playing these games in the first place. However, it also adds a significant intermediate learning curve that typical game controllers don't have – as players get better, they have to learn how to consistently translate their movements into in-game actions.

In addition to creating this learning curve, I think that Wii Tennis has less potential precision and consistency than most games, even at very high levels of play. The Wii controller motion-sensing is imperfect, and even the best players will not be able to perform moves with total consistency.

That said, imprecision is not necessarily a bad thing, especially for Wii Tennis. Real tennis is similar – there are a number of imperceptible details that mean that the same shot will not always go to the exact same place. Even the best possible human tennis player would probably not ace every single serve both because of these imperceptible details and because it is not physically possible for the human body to make the exact same shot twice.

However, the Wii Tennis example details an interesting dichotomy that goes unnoticed in many other games. Take Cannabalt for example: its one-button interface means it has a very shallow initial learning curve. Once you start trying for high scores, however, you realize that you need to consistently hit low jumps and medium jumps and high jumps when you decide to. Once again, there's a trade-off between simplicity and precision – obviously a game with 3 buttons for low, medium, and high jumps would be initially more complex but would skip the intermediate phase where you have to learn how to push down slightly long so you get a medium jump without pushing down so long that you get a high jump.

So maybe the question, when we talk about controls, is not how they steepen or flatten out the learning curve but instead how they move the peak based on the trade-offs they make between simplicity and precision. Simple controls are more likely to create a steep learning curve for intermediate players, while precise but complex controls will move that steep learning curve to newbie players. It's also possible that even expert players will never get simple controls to be as precise as they want them to be – will Wii Tennis, even in the hands of an expert, ever be as precise as Virtua Tennis?