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Whatever Happened To The Joystick?
Ant writes "MSN UK has up an article that looks into the 'downfall' of the joystick: 'Sometimes technology disappears completely, but often it just fades into the background — still existing, still being used and sold and, occasionally, desired, but probably looking wistfully back on past glories. Which neatly described the joystick's steady slide away from its role as THE gaming peripheral to a fondly remembered also ran. But the joystick's tale is a long and convoluted one — and it is worth looking back into its often mysterious and ill-studied history before explaining why it will rise from the ashes like the mythical phoenix.' Seen on ClassicGaming."
Today's games require dual analog controllers and about 27 buttons. A decent joystick set that has all that functionality does exist - but it's primarily relegated to the flight sim community.
To have dual analog controllers in a large form factor, you'd have to have the joysticks mounted on something sturdy. Recall that back in Atari days, you used your weak hand to stabilize the thing while controlling it with your dominant hand. With two sticks, you'd need a base. And that would be big and not very mobile. And you'd still have to have some design where you could easily press all the buttons without moving your hands. Again, like a flight sim system, but those are very expensive.
So basically, the joystick got shrunk and put on a handheld controller.
Doesn't each XBox 360 and PS3 controller have *TWO* joysticks on them??
Joysticks were always a niche peripheral really - keyboard/mouse is much better for FPS, and though fighting games use joysticks in the arcade, it's a lot easier to combo with a digital pad (dammit Melty Blood, I pushed down three times, why isn't your dead zone large enough to notice?). I think what the decline in joysticks really shows is the decline in first-person flight sim-esque games - remember when X-Wing/TIE fighter/etc. was the big thing to play? What happened to those days? The last decent game of that sort I remember was Star Trek Bridge Commander, and I'll bet many people played through the whole campaign without even noticing the ability to control the Enterprise flight-sim style. It's a shame, because it seems like one of the genres that would really benefit a lot from modern graphics. So, what happened to it?
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It was an inferior control device for home consoles. The joystick is only an effective controller when it's properly secured into a solid base. e.g. An arcade machine. When translated to home use, it tended to be detached from a solid base and thus suffered. The 2600 CX40s used a wide base to attempt to combat this problem, but a player still applied torque to his own hands when using the joystick. The CX24 Prolines that were included with the Atari 7800 were that much worse. It was physically straining to use the joysticks properly due to the narrow base.
The only company that produced a worse home joystick was Coleco. Their joystick was so small, you needed to palm it to use it. Palming the stick resulted in even MORE torque, thus making gaming very tiring despite the wide base.
At the end of the day, the gamepad was a superior control device for home consoles. It met the needs of the average game better, thus relegating joysticks to arcade and flight-sim use only.
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Ever play one of the MechWarriors or similar giant bipedal war machine robot games? I found joysticks rocked for those, as well.
Unfortunately I game so little know, I hardly knew joysticks were out of style...
These thumbsticks bear stronger consideration - although they are reduced to joystick nubs - these have been integral to joypads since the original PlayStation...
As I recall, my N64 had a thumbstick smack in the middle of the controller before the Sony Dualshocks (or pre Dualshocks, if they had no vibe.) Am I remembering this incorrectly? In additon, I found the article to be a bit pedantic and with littel substance. No mention of force feedback or joystick hats, which are the real progenitors of modern day thumbsticks.
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The IBM PC had no joystick ports and as it became the dominant gaming platform over machines from Commodore and Atari the inexpensive, simple 8-way joystick was abandoned to be replaced by expensive sound cards and complicated joysticks.
I find it sad that entire genres of gaming became extinct with it.
Only now are flash games reviving the idea of simple, but fun games.
It's funny that in 2008 there are tons of games being developed that play with.... a keyboard!
ASDF!
I've always considered those thumbsticks. When I hear joystick I look back fondly at the days of Tie Fighter or Falcon 3.0 where you grasped the joystick with your entire hand and it had multiple buttons built in on it and on the base. I really felt like I was controlling the aircraft when using a joystick. Nowadays when using thumbsticks I usually have to configure the game to inverse the Y-axis, something that seems so obvious to me since I grew up using joysticks but it must not be that common anymore.
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Joysticks have gone out of style because we haven't had a new Descent game in almost a decade. Similarly, the last great space combat sim was Freespace 2. There are probably some chicken-and-egg issues as well. You don't buy a joystick if you haven't a game to go with it, and you don't buy appropriate games if you don't have a joystick.
(Looks down at lap) Thanks to Viagra, nothing. Same as it ever was.
You're all wrong, the only two joysticks that could ever come close to perfect were the Competition Pro 5000 or the Konix Speedking.
The first was built like a brick shithouse : http://www.amazon.co.uk/Competition-Pro-5000-Joystick-PC/dp/B000J5U09W
And the second fit so perfectly in your hand :
http://www.consoledatabase.com/accessories/pc/konixspeedking/index.html
yes, www.dotcomforwardslash.com is my real URL.
Joysticks are still around, but for some reason they are not all left handed.
8/16-bit era joysticks were operable with either hand, so naturally being right handed I used my... right hand! Then Nintendo came along with the NES and it's left-handed gamepads, and everyone else copied them. Now modern gamepads have analogue joysticks, but they are operated with the left hand.
Surely since 9 out of 10 people are right handed, and precision joystick control needs more dexterity than simple button pressing, the joystick should be on the right.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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When I read the title, my first thought was: "I thought most controllers for consoles have one or two joysticks." The joystick may be dead on the PC (with its superior mouse), but it's alive an well on controllers. It shrunk, that's all, but it's basically the same thing.
Come on now...we all know that running in summer games was done with two buttons. The real trick was using a back-pocket comb to go even faster.
OK, everyone seems to be talking about THEIR joystick, and for some people it's "analog" whereas for others its "digital."
Both have been around since the dawn of modern gaming, and both had their place.
Digital joysticks, i.e. ones with four (or sometimes eight) discrete position switches, have mostly been replaced by gamepads of some form or keyboards. Really, they were no more than custom-purpose keyboards themselves. Moving in a direction consisted of "hold the button down until you're where you want to be." Most of the continued existence of these 'classic' joysticks is from nostalgia, although modern game controllers certainly can trace their lineage back to them.
Analog joysticks are a different beast entirely, with either pots or digital encoders on two axes, for continuous range-of-motion detection. These are essential for flight sims, and are not at all endangered. As long as we have (good) flight sims, we'll have analog joysticks.
As an aside, stick-less joysticks have been around just about as long as joysticks. Does anyone else remember the Intellivision controllers?
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Lack of joysticks these days is one of the reasons I gave up on consoles (until the Wii). Those...things that you control with your thumb are not joysticks. I can't understand how in the hell that was supposed to be better.
My thumbs are.. all thumbs. I mean seriously, that phrase came about because thumbs just aren't very precise in their movement. But all you kids who had NESes before puberty all have that "mutation" that was talked about here on Slashdot a while back which allows you to use your thumb as a precision input device instead of your index fingers. Which also explains how in the hell you manage to text from a cell phone.
Oh and what is it with you folks who say FPS games were best used with "keyboard and mouse"? I was never much into FPS games, but the only really usable configuration was "joystick and mouse". You suction-cupped the joystick onto your desk (your joystick did have suction-cups, right?) for your left hand and mapped the trigger and/or top buttons to things like jump or crouch (the buttons on the joystick base were clearly unusable). Then you put the mouse under your right hand, as usual. This way, you had good coarse analog control of your movement with your left hand, and fine precision analog aiming with your right hand.
Now everyone get off my lawn.
You do realize that Microsoft made analog joysticks, and all of your favorites were digital? Of course the analog has a longer throw-- because it returns X and Y positions rather than just on or off. That was true for Gravis, Logitech, Thrustmaster, etc.
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