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."

Comments

Good ones are expensive

[Mr. Underbridge]

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.

Re:Good ones are expensive

[AKAImBatman]

Did you ever actually use some of the pre-gamepad joysticks? I expanded on the issues in this thread, but the problem can be summed up in one word: TORQUE.

There's nothing more "fun" than fighting one's self for stability of the controller. Some of the controllers were extremely hard on the wrists and caused tiring rather quickly. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the console joysticks were unnatural control devices. When playing my classic game machines, I often do things like hold the joystick sideways in an attempt to find a better grip. (Or at least get gravity on my side. ;))

Joysticks always worked best in an arcade environment where the rotational forces were absorbed by the heavy machines rather than your hands.

Re:Good ones are expensive

[nschubach]

As far as I'm concerned, the Joystick did evolve, into what you called an Analog stick. Now every Playstation/XBox on the planet has two joysticks for every controller and the Wii has one on a "dongle thing."

Joysticks are everywhere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't each XBox 360 and PS3 controller have *TWO* joysticks on them??

Re:Joysticks are everywhere.

[gstoddart]

Doesn't each XBox 360 and PS3 controller have *TWO* joysticks on them??

Arguably, they're not joysticks per se.

A joystick was held in your entire hand, those little thumb-twiddlers are just operated with your thumbs in (in my experience) the most hand-cramping configuration you can imagine. I find them almost unusable.

A true joystick is much bigger, and is grasped in your entire hand -- usually, fairly comfortably. It is very different from what you see on a modern controller.

Cheers

Re:Joysticks are everywhere.

[Pojut]

/agree. I personally have always found the Playstation DualShock design to be one of the most uncomfortable controllers ever conceived...true, the original Xbox controller sucked, but that was rather quickly fixed. For some reason, Sony insists on sticking with a design that causes your hands to hurt after a very short period of time.

Why the hell is this thing such a popular controller? It feels entirely unnatural.

Flight Sims

[m50d]

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?

Re:Flight Sims

[Creepy]

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

ugh, no, wrong.
The mouse wasn't even mass marketed until Xerox Star in 1981. Joysticks (for games) evolved out of paddle technology - basically, they combined two paddles.

Early FPS's actually did it wrong - there was no mouse look, you'd use the joystick or keyboard to look and target (partially because the mouse was not ubiquitous). 2D games hinted toward mouselook, but it really didn't appear until one of Carmack's games (Quake?). I was essentially using mouse look for a flight simulator I was working on at the time (on a mac that had no joystick) and was already doing that, so I didn't find it that revolutionary (expected evolutionary in my mind), but many reviewers did. Incidentally, anyone that had played Space Battle on the Intellivision would be instantly at home with mouselook.

The joystick decline started probably with the Intellivision, which used a disc controller, and the nintendo with its D-Pad controller, which were cheaper to manufacture and less prone to stress failure (joysticks are levers, so the smaller the lever, the less the force). ColecoVision used a short lever, but even that had failure problems (I broke mine twice in 6 months and never broke an Intellivision controller). Gamepad controllers do some things well, joysticks other things. I personally find it easier to do rolling actions with a joystick because a gamepad doesn't naturally redirect momentum (i.e. half-circle and full circle moves in fighting games).

The other problem with joysticks was that flight simulators have much different needs than game controllers, and adding controls capable of yaw, pitch and roll, throttle, and buttons mapped to keys made for a much bulkier and expensive control. Basically, joysticks forked to bulky flight sim controllers and small cheap D-Pad controllers, which are essentially joysticks without a lever.

What happened to the Joystick?

[AKAImBatman]

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.

I blame IBM.

[iansmith]

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!

Re:The joystick is alive and well.

[hansamurai]

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.

Lack of games

[ThePyro]

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.