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."

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.

Joysticks are everywhere.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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?

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.

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

[GenKreton]

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...

FTA, but what about N64

[DrWho520]

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.

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.

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.

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 [slashdot.org], 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.

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.

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."

Re:Joysticks are everywhere.

[donscarletti]

those little thumb-twiddlers are just operated with your thumbs in (in my experience) the most hand-cramping configuration you can imagine

I would conjecture that the one of the key reasons they are so popular (and why the D-pad used to be popular) is that the joints in your thumb and fingers are extremely durable and can be subjected to huge amounts of repetitive movements whereas wrist movements (such as in a joystick) cause the wrist to become very sore, very fast.

My PS3 causes me no pain nomatter how much I play it (cue jokes about PS3's game catalogue and price) whereas mice hurt my wrist after about 2-3 hours of FPSing and joysticks hurt almost right off the mark.

Whatever Happened To The Joystick?

[c0d3g33k]

(Looks down at lap) Thanks to Viagra, nothing. Same as it ever was.

Re:What happened to the joystick?

[Bowdie]

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 [amazon.co.uk]

And the second fit so perfectly in your hand :
http://www.consoledatabase.com/accessories/pc/konixspeedking/index.html [consoledatabase.com]

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.

Curse you Nintendo and your left handedness

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Good ones are expensive

[rjschwarz]

I agree, the only reason the joystick disappeared is because the article redefined the ones used today as thumbsticks.

Re:Joysticks are everywhere.

[petermgreen]

in (in my experience) the most hand-cramping configuration you can imagine. I find them almost unusable.
One problem with a lot of console controllers is they have to decide for each side whether to give the comfortable position to a stick or to buttons. The dualshock has the buttons in the comfortable position and the sticks in the uncomfortable one on both sides. The gamecube controller has one side with a stick in the comfortable position and the d-pad in the uncomfortable one and the other side with a group of buttons in the comfortable position and the stick in the other one.

Joysticks on console controllers

[mcvos]

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.

Re:What happened to the joystick?

[fiznook29]

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.

Let's be clear on what we're talking about here...

[swordgeek]

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?

Re:Lack of games

[IdahoEv]

. 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.

You won't buy a game you don't already have the controller for? Tell that to the DDR/Guitar Hero/Rock Band crowd.

People will upgrade their whole gaming rig if there's a good enough game to play for it. If there was a good enough game, I'd happily buy a new joystick. Unfortunately, the last time I was interested in a game enough to buy a joystick, it was World War II Online. (Which was pretty cool, but very hard in the name of realism ... I think I only ever had 3 kills)

Get off my lawn

[MorePower]

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.

Re:What happened to the joystick?

[operagost]

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.