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Honestly, the lack of dedicated controls will never allow for mobile gaming to be anything more than a time diversion for most people. A touchscreen just isn't

Honestly, the lack of dedicated controls will never allow for mobile gaming to be anything more than a time diversion for most people. A touchscreen just isn't something that's comfortable to use for extended lengths of time, in my opinion at least.

justinhj 11y ago
You just need to find ways to utilize it for its strengths. I've been playing Rovio's Retry which has very skillful twitch gameplay, and since it involves touching with one finger it's easy to play on a bus or in a coffee line up, which is vital. Another great game is Brain It On where you draw on the screen to solve puzzles in a simulated physical world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jo7EXUS1Vk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jo7EXUS1Vk
tcfunk 11y ago
I think there's certain games/tasks for which touch screens are miles ahead of the old mouse and keyboard. Card games, for example, lend themselves very well to touch screens. That's only one example, but I think the issue is that so many games try to adapt touchscreen to old control methods, rather than create new control methods for touchscreens.
- zamalek 11y ago
  > try to adapt touchscreen to old control methods Touch-screen joysticks are appalling - it's very hard to interact with a game when you've got a good deal of the game obscured by your fingers. That being said, I can't think of a better way to do it - those games probably don't belong on phones as phones are seemingly the wrong tool for the job. I simply uninstall ad rich games, but controls? I've frequently felt the desire to throw my phone against the wall.
jerf 11y ago
Yes, I'm intrigued how one is going to bring "old-school arcade sensibilities" to a system where the inputs really need to be interpreted as "a user pressed sort of hereish, sort of nowish" and when the user does that, they also have to cover some percentage of the screen to do it. Precision is not available. Not all games require precision, so it's not a fatal problem, merely just another design issue to deal with, but it does sound fatal to a lot of "old school arcade" ideas.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Not all games require precision, so it's not a fatal problem, merely just another design issue to deal with, but it does sound fatal to a lot of "old school arcade" ideas. Not sure what the issue is. I've used tons of old-school arcade games in the 80s. They had horrible precision joysticks, guns ("operation wolf"), etc.
  - jerf 11y ago
    Well, speaking at least for the light-gun games, I've almost never enjoyed the arcade versions, especially the ones that don't even show a crosshair on the screen showing your current aim point. I far more enjoyed using the Wiimote to aim, since it was far, far more accurate than anything I've seen in the arcade... and lo, rail shooters turn out to be pretty fun after all! (With a Wiimote you can actually develop muscle memory... ah, I need to aim here so I put the remote here, blammo. Trudging a massive hunk of plastic bolted to the cabinet, thus having a restricted range of motion, is just nothing like freely moving a Wiimote. Seriously, if you've got a Wii and you've never tried a "light-gun game" (ironically still called that despite the term being decades obsolete now), pick one up sometime. They're cheap.) So, at least in my case, my experience directly contradicts your claim that accuracy isn't important for that genre. Also would have to say that when the joystick is not really working correctly, I immediately leave, and when they are working correctly, I don't know what you mean by them being imprecise.
  - badloginagain 11y ago
    The biggest challenge with mobile game design is not so much the precision of controls, it's the premium on screen real estate. You have to put all the information of your game on the same layer as the controls- meaning your number one concern will be optimizing your interface and controlling the flow of information. It also means that the games you'll be making should be unique to touchscreen- games ported from other platforms are almost always inferior, in part because their design is optimized for a different platform.
protomyth 11y ago
The Apple TV also suffers from the requirement that you have to be able to use the remote to play the game.
grandalf 11y ago
why not just use a single finger on the touchscreen, or tilt the device? I think the flaw is expecting the phone to behave like an elaborate 8-button hardware controller.
- potatolicious 11y ago
  Single finger on touchscreen works - but tilting I think largely doesn't work. Device tilt was the dominant mode of input for earlier iOS games back when the App Store was new - in part because of the Wii's popularity at the time - but didn't stick. Part of it's because despite Apple's pretty spectacular accelerometer, detecting fine motion is very difficult, and so the amount of "resolution" available to you as a dev is pretty limited. Variation in fine motor control between players also means that you can't necessarily rely on players being able to affect small, precise movements. Motion controls ultimately ended up being low resolution and relied on substantial/large movements of the device. This is worse on Android, where the quality of the accelerometer varies widely depending on hardware, and getting consistent experiences across a range of devices is nearly impossible. Add to environmental factors (say, playing the game on a bus, train, or airplane) massively screwing with your accelerometer readings, and the propensity for mobile games to be played in those exact places, and the situation gets worse. In any case, this leads to fatigue. Turns out holding your phone up and tilting it every which way is a bit tiring. tl;dr: Because of individual biological variation, hardware limitations, and environmental noise, fine motion control for mobile games didn't work out, at all.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 11y ago
>Honestly, the lack of dedicated controls will never allow for mobile gaming to be anything more than a time diversion for most people. Isn't gaming precisely a time diversion?
- pdkl95 11y ago
  Games can be many different things besides a time diversion. An important thing that games can be is an artistic or storytelling medium. Is a novel a "time diversion"? It probably depends on the work. One of the benefits of games is that the subtitles of the interaction can also be part of the story. A touch screen, unfortunately, offers only a small set of possible interactions, and thus it has a limited toolset for telling interactive stories. This is important, because we are just learning how to use interaction as a expressive tool. I highly recommend watching Innuendo Studios' "Story Beats"[1]. The first 3 clips are examples, and the last (4th) has the main essay. The thesis is that games offer the storyteller a different set of tools. Video (movies), for example, can generally only access your sympathetic emotions (you feel excited/sad/etc for the character), while interaction allows other emotions to be experience first-hand. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY4f8-eoY0mg7gzXoqhBYN6y https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY4f8-eoY0mg...
- chillingeffect 11y ago
  The key historical context this article omits is that they're a social time diversion. The arcades are a place facilitated by the games. Focusing on the games is like focusing on the highway in a road trip. It's about being with friends. Phone games surely have the potential to do that, and probably some of them do, but if you look at Bushnell's other works, the restaurants, the Atarti C-380, he was trying to improve social activities via graphics/gaming. The Nintendo CEO guy has said the same thing with respect to controller design facilitating other people to see how your hands move.
- pasquinelli 11y ago
  there are people that watch movies because it's an entertaining way to pass the time, and then there're film buffs for whom moviegoing is an important part of their identity. and so on.
Declanomous 11y ago
For you and I maybe. Touchscreens are very natural for people who have grown up using them. My 3 year old cousin (once removed) can destroy most people I know at touchscreen games because she has grown up using touchscreens. My cousin's mother gave her a glossy magazine to read a while back, and she tried swiping the pages to turn them.
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  its like saying your cousin is great at special Olympics, same goes for console FPS/RTS.
  - josefresco 11y ago
    Are you claiming a gamer fluent with a traditional controller would always beat (handily) a gamer fluent with a touchscreen?
    - lotyrin 11y ago
      In a game which required precision, timing, broad visual awareness and/or offered benefit to having more controls than can be provided on the touchscreen without obscuring the view, yes. Just like for classes of games where fast but also precise motions are required, a mouse will beat a controller thumbstick. Pretty straightforward matters of bandwidth, latency.
  - Declanomous 11y ago
    First of all, I assume you mean the Paraolympics. The Special Olympics is for people with mental disabilities, the Paraolympics are for individuals with physical disabilities. Second of all, that metaphor is not true at all. Great works are often improved by working within the limitations of their medium. To claim otherwise is utterly absurd.
swah 11y ago
I also feel like that, but the game download numbers tell otherwise :( (My favorite kind of mobile games are the ones where the game stops until you complete your input: Stickman Golf, Score Hero)
camelNotation 11y ago
This is something I've been thinking about recently. Nintendo really should move into that gap since they can't seem to directly compete with XBox or Playstation. They should engineer a control system of some sort that works for iOS and Android, then write content that is compatible. It wouldn't be something you could just use while waiting in line or waiting for your food at a restaurant, but if the content was excellent, that wouldn't matter. People would find time to play, just as they find time to play gaming systems now.
aabajian 11y ago
I understand your point if you're talking about racing games / first person shooters, but for RPGs I think touch screens work really well. I just finished playing Final Fantasy VI on the iPhone, and it was much easier than playing on the SNES, specifically because of the touch screen.
tbolt 11y ago
Agreed. I wish Nintendo would release a quality game pad to go with their upcoming games. I can imagine if it's done right, would be awesome.
rush340 11y ago
Time diversion versus what? The lack of dedicated controls is only a negative for games that require precise inputs (like classic arcade games). There are so many fantastic games that don't require that at all. Strategy, turn-based RPGs, puzzles, adventure games, etc. For certain games, a touchscreen can blow dedicated controls out of the water if the interface is designed well.
- babuskov 11y ago
  Yup, especially for strategies. It's much easier to touch the position with your finger then having to drag mouse across the screen.
  - Retric 11y ago
    That only works on a simple boards. Chess is 8x8 and feels cramped on a 4" screen. Go at 19x19 takes scrolling or zoom then click which slows down input. For a more complex board you end up being vague or spending lots of time fighting the UI.
- azazqadir 11y ago
  Exactly. Some games are perfect for touchscreen, like Temple Run, Candy Crush and Subway Surfer. I don't think that's the real problem with mobile gaming.
ashad 11y ago
I totally agreed with your point. Lack of precise control and having no physical feedback and limitations on touchscreen controls led game developers to compromise the quality of games to make them ready for touch controls. In addition, fingers are hiding a big chunk of the screen for them to use on-screen controls which again compromises both quality of control and game design. Although there are controllers in the market you can attach the phone to top of the controller but all are bulky and not good for a mobile user. We made http://www.flitch.io http://www.flitch.io , a mobile and smart-toy controller in the form of a phone case. It has two intuitive Josyticks and two trigger buttons and all works with no battery! Buttons are pressure sensitive which means if you press harder you punch harder! check it out and share your thoughts. Thanks

justinhj 11y ago

You just need to find ways to utilize it for its strengths. I've been playing Rovio's Retry which has very skillful twitch gameplay, and since it involves touching with one finger it's easy to play on a bus or in a coffee line up, which is vital. Another great game is Brain It On where you draw on the screen to solve puzzles in a simulated physical world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jo7EXUS1Vk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jo7EXUS1Vk

tcfunk 11y ago

I think there's certain games/tasks for which touch screens are miles ahead of the old mouse and keyboard. Card games, for example, lend themselves very well to touch screens. That's only one example, but I think the issue is that so many games try to adapt touchscreen to old control methods, rather than create new control methods for touchscreens.

zamalek 11y ago
> try to adapt touchscreen to old control methods Touch-screen joysticks are appalling - it's very hard to interact with a game when you've got a good deal of the game obscured by your fingers. That being said, I can't think of a better way to do it - those games probably don't belong on phones as phones are seemingly the wrong tool for the job. I simply uninstall ad rich games, but controls? I've frequently felt the desire to throw my phone against the wall.

jerf 11y ago

Yes, I'm intrigued how one is going to bring "old-school arcade sensibilities" to a system where the inputs really need to be interpreted as "a user pressed sort of hereish, sort of nowish" and when the user does that, they also have to cover some percentage of the screen to do it. Precision is not available. Not all games require precision, so it's not a fatal problem, merely just another design issue to deal with, but it does sound fatal to a lot of "old school arcade" ideas.

coldtea 11y ago
>Not all games require precision, so it's not a fatal problem, merely just another design issue to deal with, but it does sound fatal to a lot of "old school arcade" ideas. Not sure what the issue is. I've used tons of old-school arcade games in the 80s. They had horrible precision joysticks, guns ("operation wolf"), etc.
- jerf 11y ago
  Well, speaking at least for the light-gun games, I've almost never enjoyed the arcade versions, especially the ones that don't even show a crosshair on the screen showing your current aim point. I far more enjoyed using the Wiimote to aim, since it was far, far more accurate than anything I've seen in the arcade... and lo, rail shooters turn out to be pretty fun after all! (With a Wiimote you can actually develop muscle memory... ah, I need to aim here so I put the remote here, blammo. Trudging a massive hunk of plastic bolted to the cabinet, thus having a restricted range of motion, is just nothing like freely moving a Wiimote. Seriously, if you've got a Wii and you've never tried a "light-gun game" (ironically still called that despite the term being decades obsolete now), pick one up sometime. They're cheap.) So, at least in my case, my experience directly contradicts your claim that accuracy isn't important for that genre. Also would have to say that when the joystick is not really working correctly, I immediately leave, and when they are working correctly, I don't know what you mean by them being imprecise.
- badloginagain 11y ago
  The biggest challenge with mobile game design is not so much the precision of controls, it's the premium on screen real estate. You have to put all the information of your game on the same layer as the controls- meaning your number one concern will be optimizing your interface and controlling the flow of information. It also means that the games you'll be making should be unique to touchscreen- games ported from other platforms are almost always inferior, in part because their design is optimized for a different platform.

protomyth 11y ago

The Apple TV also suffers from the requirement that you have to be able to use the remote to play the game.

grandalf 11y ago

why not just use a single finger on the touchscreen, or tilt the device? I think the flaw is expecting the phone to behave like an elaborate 8-button hardware controller.

potatolicious 11y ago
Single finger on touchscreen works - but tilting I think largely doesn't work. Device tilt was the dominant mode of input for earlier iOS games back when the App Store was new - in part because of the Wii's popularity at the time - but didn't stick. Part of it's because despite Apple's pretty spectacular accelerometer, detecting fine motion is very difficult, and so the amount of "resolution" available to you as a dev is pretty limited. Variation in fine motor control between players also means that you can't necessarily rely on players being able to affect small, precise movements. Motion controls ultimately ended up being low resolution and relied on substantial/large movements of the device. This is worse on Android, where the quality of the accelerometer varies widely depending on hardware, and getting consistent experiences across a range of devices is nearly impossible. Add to environmental factors (say, playing the game on a bus, train, or airplane) massively screwing with your accelerometer readings, and the propensity for mobile games to be played in those exact places, and the situation gets worse. In any case, this leads to fatigue. Turns out holding your phone up and tilting it every which way is a bit tiring. tl;dr: Because of individual biological variation, hardware limitations, and environmental noise, fine motion control for mobile games didn't work out, at all.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

coldtea 11y ago

>Honestly, the lack of dedicated controls will never allow for mobile gaming to be anything more than a time diversion for most people. Isn't gaming precisely a time diversion?

pdkl95 11y ago
Games can be many different things besides a time diversion. An important thing that games can be is an artistic or storytelling medium. Is a novel a "time diversion"? It probably depends on the work. One of the benefits of games is that the subtitles of the interaction can also be part of the story. A touch screen, unfortunately, offers only a small set of possible interactions, and thus it has a limited toolset for telling interactive stories. This is important, because we are just learning how to use interaction as a expressive tool. I highly recommend watching Innuendo Studios' "Story Beats"[1]. The first 3 clips are examples, and the last (4th) has the main essay. The thesis is that games offer the storyteller a different set of tools. Video (movies), for example, can generally only access your sympathetic emotions (you feel excited/sad/etc for the character), while interaction allows other emotions to be experience first-hand. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY4f8-eoY0mg7gzXoqhBYN6y https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY4f8-eoY0mg...
chillingeffect 11y ago
The key historical context this article omits is that they're a social time diversion. The arcades are a place facilitated by the games. Focusing on the games is like focusing on the highway in a road trip. It's about being with friends. Phone games surely have the potential to do that, and probably some of them do, but if you look at Bushnell's other works, the restaurants, the Atarti C-380, he was trying to improve social activities via graphics/gaming. The Nintendo CEO guy has said the same thing with respect to controller design facilitating other people to see how your hands move.
pasquinelli 11y ago
there are people that watch movies because it's an entertaining way to pass the time, and then there're film buffs for whom moviegoing is an important part of their identity. and so on.

Declanomous 11y ago

For you and I maybe. Touchscreens are very natural for people who have grown up using them. My 3 year old cousin (once removed) can destroy most people I know at touchscreen games because she has grown up using touchscreens. My cousin's mother gave her a glossy magazine to read a while back, and she tried swiping the pages to turn them.

rasz_pl 11y ago
its like saying your cousin is great at special Olympics, same goes for console FPS/RTS.
- josefresco 11y ago
  Are you claiming a gamer fluent with a traditional controller would always beat (handily) a gamer fluent with a touchscreen?
  - lotyrin 11y ago
    In a game which required precision, timing, broad visual awareness and/or offered benefit to having more controls than can be provided on the touchscreen without obscuring the view, yes. Just like for classes of games where fast but also precise motions are required, a mouse will beat a controller thumbstick. Pretty straightforward matters of bandwidth, latency.
- Declanomous 11y ago
  First of all, I assume you mean the Paraolympics. The Special Olympics is for people with mental disabilities, the Paraolympics are for individuals with physical disabilities. Second of all, that metaphor is not true at all. Great works are often improved by working within the limitations of their medium. To claim otherwise is utterly absurd.

swah 11y ago

I also feel like that, but the game download numbers tell otherwise :( (My favorite kind of mobile games are the ones where the game stops until you complete your input: Stickman Golf, Score Hero)

camelNotation 11y ago

This is something I've been thinking about recently. Nintendo really should move into that gap since they can't seem to directly compete with XBox or Playstation. They should engineer a control system of some sort that works for iOS and Android, then write content that is compatible. It wouldn't be something you could just use while waiting in line or waiting for your food at a restaurant, but if the content was excellent, that wouldn't matter. People would find time to play, just as they find time to play gaming systems now.

aabajian 11y ago

I understand your point if you're talking about racing games / first person shooters, but for RPGs I think touch screens work really well. I just finished playing Final Fantasy VI on the iPhone, and it was much easier than playing on the SNES, specifically because of the touch screen.

tbolt 11y ago

Agreed. I wish Nintendo would release a quality game pad to go with their upcoming games. I can imagine if it's done right, would be awesome.

rush340 11y ago

Time diversion versus what? The lack of dedicated controls is only a negative for games that require precise inputs (like classic arcade games). There are so many fantastic games that don't require that at all. Strategy, turn-based RPGs, puzzles, adventure games, etc. For certain games, a touchscreen can blow dedicated controls out of the water if the interface is designed well.

babuskov 11y ago
Yup, especially for strategies. It's much easier to touch the position with your finger then having to drag mouse across the screen.
- Retric 11y ago
  That only works on a simple boards. Chess is 8x8 and feels cramped on a 4" screen. Go at 19x19 takes scrolling or zoom then click which slows down input. For a more complex board you end up being vague or spending lots of time fighting the UI.
azazqadir 11y ago
Exactly. Some games are perfect for touchscreen, like Temple Run, Candy Crush and Subway Surfer. I don't think that's the real problem with mobile gaming.

ashad 11y ago

I totally agreed with your point. Lack of precise control and having no physical feedback and limitations on touchscreen controls led game developers to compromise the quality of games to make them ready for touch controls. In addition, fingers are hiding a big chunk of the screen for them to use on-screen controls which again compromises both quality of control and game design. Although there are controllers in the market you can attach the phone to top of the controller but all are bulky and not good for a mobile user. We made http://www.flitch.io http://www.flitch.io , a mobile and smart-toy controller in the form of a phone case. It has two intuitive Josyticks and two trigger buttons and all works with no battery! Buttons are pressure sensitive which means if you press harder you punch harder! check it out and share your thoughts. Thanks