Anyone
watching me play through the first few hours of BioShock Infinite would have had a painful experience. When I tried
to swing the Sky-Hook, I would inevitably find myself staring up an enemy’s
nostrils, having forgotten that zoom, not melee, is mapped to R3 in the game. I’m
sure you’ve had similar experiences when a game didn’t control how you expected
it to. I think my failure to grasp Infinite’s
perfectly simple controls results in part from me expecting the game to
adhere to the established ‘standard’ shooter control scheme.
The ‘standard’
form of a language (also known as the ‘acrolect’) is the way of speaking and
writing it that is commonly perceived as ‘correct’. Most languages also have ‘vernacular’
forms (sometimes called ‘basilects’). These are varieties of a language that
diverge from the standard form’s established rules of pronunciation, vocabulary,
and sentence structure. Whether you speak a standard or vernacular form depends
on many factors, including where you’re from, your socioeconomic class, and
your education.
Where
language is a system of signs and sounds people use to communicate with other people,
a control scheme is a system of button presses and control stick tilts people
use to communicate with a video game. Like a language, game controls in a given
genre tend to become ‘standardised’ over time. I’ll use console based first-person
shooters (FPSes) to explain what I mean.
A
language’s standard form usually reflects how it is or was spoken by
influential people in an important area of a country. Standard British English,
for example, reflects the way upper class Londoners spoke in the late 18th
Century. This is the same with video
game controls, where a successful game or series of games can influence the controls
within its genre for years to come. For console FPSes, this period begins in
the late 90s. This is when FPSes successfully made the jump from PCs to home
consoles, with N64 games such Turok:
Dinosaur Hunter, GoldenEye 007, and
Perfect Dark amongst the most influential.
Where shooting in console games had
previously been mapped to a face button, with the introduction of the N64 it was
mapped to the Z-trigger, which remained popular throughout the rest of the
console’s lifespan. With the Z-trigger no more, today’s FPSes still map
shooting to trigger-like buttons: R1 or R2 on the PS3 controller, and the right
bumper or right trigger on a 360 controller. While R1 and right bumper aren’t
referred to as ‘triggers’, their placement on the controller where the joint of
the index finger naturally rests means that pressing them is still comparable
to pulling one.
You
could argue that using a trigger-like button to fire guns in video games would
have happened regardless of the N64’s great library of shooters because it’s
more logical. However, far from embracing it, gamers are usually resistant to
this type of one-to-one correspondence between input and action. With the Wii,
Move, and Kinect, the current generation saw a push for less arbitrary
controls, only for the idea to be snubbed by ‘core’ gamers. Interestingly, this
tendency towards arbitrariness is another trait video game controls share with
language. With the exception of onomatopoeias such as “crack” or “pow”, words draw
their meaning from convention rather than any logical link between the sounds
produced and the thing they refer to.
While
the use of a trigger or trigger-like button to fire guns remains standard in
FPSes, new trends in gameplay have lead to new standard controls. As the Call of Duty series has become more and
more successful, so too has its control scheme become the standard across the
FPS genre. Shooters as varied as Borderlands,
Portal 2, and Far Cry 3, for example, each allow players to duck using the same
button as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (circle/B).
In addition, both Far Cry 3 and Borderlands allow the player to sprint
and execute melee attacks, uniformly mapping these actions, as in Modern Warfare, to L3 and R3
respectively.
At
university, I read a study that concluded even Queen Elizabeth doesn’t always
speak The Queen’s (i.e. standard) English (!). This illustrates an important
point: ‘standard’ and ‘vernacular’ are not watertight categories. Some people
use standard language all the time, but most don’t. Likewise, there is variance
within the template that shooter controls adhere to. As I mentioned above,
standard FPS controls use R1/right bumper or R2/right trigger for shooting, but
which they use varies from game to game. This is confusing, and I sometimes wish
developers would agree on one button or the other. Some games make more noticeable
breaks from standard FPS controls, often to accommodate a unique mechanic. For example, where most games use
L1/left bumper to aim (another hangover from GoldenEye), BioShock Infinite
uses it for vigors, freeing it up by moving the zoom function to R3. This violation
of the standard left me with the problems I mentioned in the first paragraph.
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| "Honestly officer, I was merely trying to get a closer look when I magically threw you into the air"(Picture: BioShock Infinite) |
I
dislike the word ‘standard’ because it’s a loaded one; it implies that one
variety of a language is more valid than others. This type of value judgement
is also seen in the critical reception of video game controls. Since we’ve
already established that most control schemes are arbitrary, I wonder if
‘intuitive’ really just means ‘controls that conform to the standard within a
given genre’. Perhaps dislike for the tank controls of early Resident Evil titles is stems from them
violating rules of standard third-person controls, which derive from the boom
in 3D platformers lead by Super Mario 64.
Certainly, some argue that Resident
Evil’s controls in are a legitimate stylistic choice, implemented to add to
the tension of the game.
This
post is meant as an analogy, not a genuine attempt at applying linguistic
theory to video games like in “Metaphors We Game By”. You might not agree with
what I’ve suggested about standard controls, but I’m sure you’ll agree that
this ranks as the most creative excuse ever suggested for being terrible at shooters.
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