BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Roman Mars, when I say Konami code, does this mean anything to you?
ROMAN MARS: Ben Brock Johnson, it means a zero to me, actually. I have no idea what you’re talking about.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Okay. All right.
ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLING] I mean, when you say code, maybe I think of a cheat code. That’s about it. That’s all I got.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: You’re getting warm. You’re getting warm. We were mentioning all these kind of Easter eggs and cheat codes at the end of our first episode about NBA Jam. And this is maybe the most famous, I would say, at least in some circles, so-called cheat code of all time. And it originated in a game called Gradius in 1986.
So, Gradius, Roman, is this spaceship shooter game, which I think both you and I enjoy.
ROMAN MARS: Totally.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: It was made by the Japanese entertainment company Konami. And Gradius–it had this code in it. The code would give you power-ups in the game–so, like, bigger guns, more shields, and things like that–to help you fight the bad guys. To access this cheat code, there’s a series of buttons and movements. And this code became a signature of Gradius. And it was so popular, it was copied into other games. So, for example, Roman, you might know this as the Contra Code.”
ROMAN MARS: Yes. That sounds more familiar, yeah. That’s a side-scrolling shooter–Contra–right?
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Yeah, absolutely. And if you use this cheat code, you’d get 30 extra lives, which was important for Contra because Contra could be a hard game.
ROMAN MARS: I mean, 30 lives helps, yeah.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: So, this code is now so popular, it’s also been reused, for instance, in Google Home. If you put this into Google Home, you’ll get an interesting response. It’s almost become its own kind of meme or reference. It’s this wink from gamer to gamer that you both know this piece of video game lore.
ROMAN MARS: Okay, so if this cheat code is everywhere, how do you access it?
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: It is a series of moves on the controller. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, button or select, Roman, or B or A, depending on what controller you’re using–what game. But the constant here, Roman, is the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, which admittedly sounds like gibberish when we say it out loud. But the difficulty of executing this particular cheat code really depends on the controller. It could definitely cramp your fingers on the Nintendo. But this code was so much easier for consoles that use an actual joystick.
ROMAN MARS: I can totally see it being easier on a joystick because that’s what a joystick is for. It’s for going up and down. It’s kind of the ur controller. And a lot of things are designed around the joystick itself.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: That’s right. There’s so much that flows out of the joystick’s development. And so that’s what we’re gonna talk about today.
This is Hidden Levels, our series about how the video game world has changed the world beyond video games. And today we’re going to find out how the joystick was created and why it has endured.
ROMAN MARS: Hidden Levels is our collaboration between 99% Invisible and Ben’s podcast from WBUR, Endless Thread.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: And my Endless Thread cohost, Amory Sivertson, brings us this one. Enjoy.
AMORY SIVERTSON: It was mid-December, 1903, on the northern coast of North Carolina. Two brothers known at the time for a thriving bicycle business were about to change the world. Orville and Wilbur Wright were about to go from pedaling to piloting an engine-powered airplane. Now, I remember hearing about the Wright brothers in school. But what I did not know, until recently, is how they flew this thing. It was a full-body activity. Rather than sitting upright, the pilot was in a prone position. Wilbur Wright– We’ll go with him since he made the longer flight. Sorry, Orville. Wilbur’s hips were resting in something called the “hip cradle”–pieces of wood on either side that were connected to the tips of the wings of the plane with wire. So, as Wilbur tilted his hips right and left, he was tilting the plane right and left. The up and down tilt of the plane was controlled by a lever in Wilbur’s left hand, connected by a pulley system. This flight was an incredible feat–all 59 seconds of it. Yep, that’s it. Because as the Wright brothers would be the first to tell you, their plane was really hard to control. They trained for months, trying to get that hip lean and lever tilt just right. But it was a little like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, except taking your life in your hands–and hips.
But just a few years later, in 1907, a French aviation pioneer, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, suggested a new streamlined solution for bringing human and machine together–a way to maneuver a plane up and down and right and left with a single stick. All that mobility and control in the palm of one hand, almost like an extension of the self. Esnault-Pelterie never experienced this for himself, but he did secure the patent for this new instrument, unaware that what he was patenting would end up in military planes and machinery but also in arcades and homes around the world. I’m talking about the joystick.
The origins of the term “joystick” are a bit murky. Some credit the British actor and aviator, Robert Loraine, who used it in a diary entry in 1910. Others claim the joystick was originally the “Joyce stick,” named for a different early 20th century aviator and inventor, James Henry Joyce of Missouri. One thing scholars largely do agree on–contrary to what you might read on the internet–the “joy” in “joystick” does not have to do with its positioning between the legs of the pilot, like you might see in many World War I-era planes. It’s simply the exhilaration–the joy of taking flight. Now, most of us haven’t personally taken flight, but we’ve likely controlled something with a joystick.
HOW TO WIN EVERY TIME IN A CLAW MACHINE!: I’m gonna get it. I’m getting it right by the head…
AMORY SIVERTSON: Those claw arcade games where you try to grab onto a stuffed animal, maybe some sort of forklift or construction vehicle, or most likely…
AMORY SIVERTSON: I want this guy with the crazy blue hair. Ludwig! How do I select?
AMORY SIVERTSON: A video game.
PHILLIP SOUCY: The most important part is the joystick, so use that to steer…
AMORY SIVERTSON: This is my friend Philip.
KELLY O’CONNELL: Oh, top right is jump…
AMORY SIVERTSON: My other friend Kelly.
MIKE MOSCHETTO: Hey, come on.
AMORY SIVERTSON: [LAUGHING] Oh, sorry…
AMORY SIVERTSON: And my husband Mike, all bearing with me…
AMORY SIVERTSON: Oh, I feel like I’m enduring a lot of hits…
AMORY SIVERTSON: In baby’s first game of Mario Kart.
AMORY SIVERTSON: I’m staying on the road, it’s a miracle…
AMORY SIVERTSON: Experienced players would agree: the joystick has made video game controllers what they are–easy, precise, and fun.
PHILLIP SOUCY: Hey! You advanced. You advanced…
AMORY SIVERTSON: And yet, it’s only in recent decades that most of us have even had them within reach.
DAVID O’GRADY: In many ways, video games and joysticks and other controllers were moonlighting projects for a lot of engineers and early computer scientists.
AMORY SIVERTSON: This is David O’Grady. He’s a lecturer in design media arts at UCLA and a researcher in its game lab. And he told me that a lot of the first video games were developed in labs, but these ones were at institutions and companies known for working on technological developments for the military.
DAVID O’GRADY: You know, it was a way to kind of use your downtime to develop something other than some kind of military application or a missile tracking system. Or you might try to make a game just as a sideline kind of project.
AMORY SIVERTSON: One such engineer using his downtime to create a downtime activity was Ralph Baer–the guy who invented the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, in 1972.
MAGNAVOX ODYSSEY COMMERCIAL: The electronic game of the future. Odyssey easily attaches to any brand TV, black and white or color…
AMORY SIVERTSON: The Odyssey’s controls were knobs that you’d twist to do things like play a game of tennis.
MAGNAVOX ODYSSEY COMMERCIAL: The horizontal knob on the left side of each player control unit allows you to move your player light in a left to right or right to left direction. The vertical knob on the right side of each play or control unit lets you move your player light in an up and down direction…
AMORY SIVERTSON: I don’t know. This sounds a little like the Wright brothers rocking their hips to move the plane one way, pulling a lever to move it another… Clunky. Takes some getting used to. But what if, just like in aviation, we streamlined the maneuvering with a single, joyful stick? Ralph Baer did actually make a prototype of a video game joystick, but he wasn’t the first to incorporate it into a game you’d see on shelves, David says.
DAVID O’GRADY: It would actually take until a little later in the 1970s for us to see commercially a device that we would call a joystick today. In fact, it was the Atari joystick, which is absolutely iconic–this little kind of squat black box with this stock on top of it and a single red button to the side. This is kind of the first moment where the joystick becomes not just a specialty piece of military hardware or something that airline pilots control when they fly, but something that all of us have access to.
AMORY SIVERTSON: This accessible joystick came with the Atari VCS, or Video Computer System, first released in 1977 and better known today as the Atari 2600.
ATARI VCS COMERCIAL: Don’t watch television tonight. Play it!
AMORY SIVERTSON: Imagine what it must have been like as a kid back then–to have a game on your TV that you get to control using the same tool that’s been used to fly planes. And yet it’s childishly simple to operate–almost no learning curve–just power and possibilities. So where does the joystick’s power come from? What makes it so great? It starts with the term you hear a lot when talking joysticks with an expert like David O’Grady.
DAVID O’GRADY: Interface for flying is probably how we would describe it today.
AMORY SIVERTSON: “Interface.” A point where two things meet–human and machine.
DAVID O’GRADY: And so a flight stick, a joystick, the kinds of controllers that we use today for video games and other applications–these are all an attempt to solve a fundamental issue, which is how do you provide human input to a device or a machine?
AMORY SIVERTSON: In other words, what are the physical instruments that allow us to turn intention into action–that help make a machine feel like an extension of the self? And what the joystick really has going for it…
DAVID O’GRADY: Is this idea of affordance. What does the interface you’re using enable? What does it allow you to do?
AMORY SIVERTSON: For example, David says our human biomechanics afford us the ability to walk–to move ourselves through space. A joystick affords us the ability to move something else through space without really having to think about it.
DAVID O’GRADY: Exactly. I think that’s such an important part of interface design from joysticks to mice to everything else that, in some ways, it is a kind of invisible art. For most applications, we want the interface to disappear. We want to look at where we’re pointing, not at the hand that’s doing the pointing, right?
AMORY SIVERTSON: You want it to feel like mind control, like we’re just controlling things with our mind without having to–
DAVID O’GRADY: Yeah, exactly. There’s something very automatic about it, right?
AMORY SIVERTSON: What David’s getting at here is really another meaning of affordance. It’s not just about what an interface allows us to do. It’s knowing how to do it, intuitively.
DAVID O’GRADY: There’s a kind of direct manipulation quality to it. Do you want to move forward on a screen? Press the stick forward. Do you want to move backwards within the environment of the screen? Pull the stick backwards. Do you wanna go left?
AMORY SIVERTSON: The joystick has what’s called “perceived affordance.” You see one, and you know exactly how to use it. Compare that to those knobs on the Magnavox Odyssey. Sure, you can imagine that you should probably twist them, but what does that motion have to do with moving through space? Now, with a joystick?
DAVID O’GRADY: The motion of your hand and arm deeply corresponds with what’s happening on screen. You don’t really need to read an instruction manual to do that.
AMORY SIVERTSON: This was just the pep talk I needed before taking a field trip to a joystick wonderland.
JEFF BUJACK: So everything’s usable, but it does go chronological…
AMORY SIVERTSON: Jeff Bujack is the owner of Prodigy, an 8,000-square-foot game room in Western Massachusetts with a glow-in-the-dark mini golf course in the center–hell yeah–and a perimeter of more than 6,000 retro video games and their consoles dating back to the late ’70s.
JEFF BUJACK: It’s pretty much just my collection. I’m an organized hoarder.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Jeff has all matter of retro video game accessories, too. The Nintendo Power Glove–a short-lived, ill-performing motion-control device that made you look like a space movie badass from the forearm down. Jeff’s got it.
JEFF BUJACK: This was horrible because, for every game, you had to put in a different code…
AMORY SIVERTSON: The Logitech NetPlay–basically a full-sized keyboard scooched between two halves of a modern-ish game controller. Jeff has that, too.
JEFF BUJACK: This was the… “Hey, let’s just combine everything,” because computers at this point were starting to really take off…
AMORY SIVERTSON: But most importantly, Jeff has the Atari 2600.
JEFF BUJACK: I mean, this is a beast. This was probably the best-built controller…
AMORY SIVERTSON: I’d driven two hours to see one of these nearly 50-year-old home consoles in person. And?
AMORY SIVERTSON: They’re boring-looking. I’m sure they were very exciting for the time. But, yeah, this looks like this could be your grandpa’s radio or something.
JEFF BUJACK: Exactly, yeah.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Just black and brown and nothing that says, like, “Spend a lot of time!”
JEFF BUJACK: Definitely. Oh yeah…
AMORY SIVERTSON: But Jeff kindly fired it up for me…
JEFF BUJACK: And then, of course, you have to turn it down because it’s incredibly loud…
AMORY SIVERTSON: So I could experience the Atari joystick for myself in a game of Pac-Man.
JEFF BUJACK: And then you just move the joystick.
AMORY SIVERTSON: That’s it. What’s the button for then?
JEFF BUJACK: Nothing. This game has no…
AMORY SIVERTSON: With the little square joystick panel steadied on my lap with my left hand and my right fist white-knuckling the joystick, I jolted right, left, forward, back, trying to gobble up as many little Pac-Man pellets as I can until…
JEFF BUJACK: You’re being thrown right in.
AMORY SIVERTSON: I’m supposed to avoid the ghosts, okay.
JEFF BUJACK: Yeah, you’re supposed to get the small pellets…
AMORY SIVERTSON: I meet a demise so swift, I think even Jeff is surprised. But I try again. And pretty quickly, I realize something that he’d actually warned me about with the Atari joystick.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Oh, it is rigid! I’m having a hard… Like, it’s not as responsive as I thought it would be.
JEFF BUJACK: Nope…
AMORY SIVERTSON: This iconic device sucks. It’s stiff to the point where it hurts my wrist minutes into the game.
JEFF BUJACK: Could you imagine hours?
AMORY SIVERTSON: But back when the Atari joystick was a novel thing, in the late ’70s, people did spend hours with it. Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Adventure–you could play 1,300 different game variations with this one joystick console.
ATARI VCS COMERCIAL: Have you played Defender? It’s the newest of the smash-hit home video games that just keep coming…
AMORY SIVERTSON: Before people had home computers or the internet or even just a wider variety of TV channels, this was the epitome of joy.
JEFF BUJACK: This is all you did. I mean, I’m sure when a family got this, kids were playing with these joysticks for seven, eight hours at a time. Their hands and wrists must have gotten massive fatigue–massive fatigue! I can only play these for maybe 10 minutes. And that’s where this frees that up…
AMORY SIVERTSON: By “this,” Jeff means an entirely different controller he’s now holding.
AMORY SIVERTSON: This is the Nintendo 64 that you have in front of you?
JEFF BUJACK: Yep.
AMORY SIVERTSON: This is one with, like, the three little prongs? And you hold onto the two outer prongs, then there’s just the one…
AMORY SIVERTSON: “Prongs.” The handles, let’s say. And yes, awkwardly enough, there are three of them on the Nintendo 64 controller. It’s shaped kind of like an upside-down trident. Out with the boring block-like devices. This controller, which came out in 1996, looked like a little spaceship. And positioned on the middle handle is a whitish protrusion, maybe half an inch high.
JEFF BUJACK: That’s where Nintendo really hit the nail on the head with that. They made video games extremely addicting at that point.
AMORY SIVERTSON: “The nail on the head?” More like the thumb on the stick. This was a new kind of joystick–a thumbstick–made for navigating a video game with the intuitiveness of a joystick, but with much greater ease of movement. No more stiff wrists–just smooth thumb circles.
JEFF BUJACK: And then you’re like, “Oh. Okay, I can play for 12 hours now.”
AMORY SIVERTSON: It wasn’t just the interface that was changing around this time. The games were, too. As the microprocessing power of video game consoles increased, game worlds were able to go from two dimensions, where the characters really only went up and down or right and left, to three.
DAVID O’GRADY: You might remember from–I don’t know–high school algebra or something, the X-axis, left and right, the Y-axis, up and down… Well, now we’re on a Z-axis, moving towards you and away from you.
AMORY SIVERTSON: David O’Grady again, our game scholar from UCLA.
DAVID O’GRADY: We had whole genres of games that were starting to emerge in the 1990s that used a kind of first-person point of view. In fact, we kind of know them still as “first-person shooters.” They were huge in popularizing a way of playing in 3D space, essentially.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Games like GoldenEye 007, which allowed a player to weave through concrete mazes, up ladders, across bridges…
DAVID O’GRADY: These games have a point of view where you are the camera, essentially, and so you don’t really see much of an avatar of yourself on screen or of the character you’re playing.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Other than your gun-toting hand, in this case.
DAVID O’GRADY: It pretty much is you.
AMORY SIVERTSON: And you are immersed, going right, left, up, down, and deep in virtual reality. So, we have the genius of the joystick right at our thumb tips. We have the ability to move through games with visual depth, until we hit a wall–literally–because with just one thumbstick that controls movement, we don’t have an easy way to look where we’re going first. So, now, David says…
DAVID O’GRADY: We need to separate out movement from looking. These are two fundamental things that we tend to do in our lives, and also in games, which tend to simulate things that come from our lived experience.
AMORY SIVERTSON: In real life, we don’t have to move in a particular direction whenever we look that way, like, “Now I’m looking over here, here I come! Now I’m over here, here I come!” And we can move in one direction while looking in another. Now, it’s not that you couldn’t look and move distinctly or strafe on the N64 controller, but it was inelegant. It involved more buttons–specifically the D-pad or directional pad, the up-down, left-right, cross-shaped one, which just isn’t as easy or precise as the thumbstick. And so…
DAVID O’GRADY: The long and short of it is we came up with a two-thumb solution–two analog thumbsticks that sit underneath each of your thumbs.
AMORY SIVERTSON: “Analog” meaning you are controlling the degree of motion with how hard you press the thumbstick in a particular direction–and two joysticks to physically separate the looking from the going.
DAVID O’GRADY: The right thumbstick typically is sort of pointing the way to go, and the left thumbstick is actually doing it. It’s the movement.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Basically, one joystick is your eyes, the other your legs. The pioneer of this two-thumb solution? Sony PlayStation’s dual thumbstick controller, which came out a year after the Nintendo 64 in 1997, with–yes–two thumbsticks, symmetrically positioned, that afforded you the ability to move very precisely and aim very accurately, like in Medal of Honor, a World War II combat game created by Steven Spielberg and inspired by his then-recent film Saving Private Ryan and, according to a couple of his collaborators, by watching his son play GoldenEye 007. It was among the first games to really integrate both thumbsticks into its gameplay. With a second thumbstick, it was easier than ever to make your on-screen avatar do exactly what you wanted it to–as close to mind control as a controller could get. The gaming industry had reached peak interface. And the proof is in the play because, while the video game industry has continued to iterate on the design–Xbox moved the thumbsticks diagonally–the tactile experience has become increasingly buttery, as I felt for myself in Jeff Bujack’s game room.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Oh, these thumbsticks are very joyful–very smooth!
AMORY SIVERTSON: The dual-stick controller itself hasn’t changed all that much, functionally or stylistically, in the nearly 30 years that we’ve been using it now to navigate 3D space. What has changed in that time are the spaces we’re using it to navigate.
JARED KELLER: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In fact, just throw it to your troops.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Coming up, video game thumbsticks go from game world battlefields to real ones…
[AD BREAK]
AMORY SIVERTSON: Within a century, we’ve gone from using a joystick to navigate three-dimensional airspace to using it to move Pac-Man two-dimensionally–up, down, left, right–on-screen, to shrinking it beneath our thumbs, to adding a thumbstick to make maneuvering through a game world feel like moving through the real world. And where we’ve arrived now, at the modern dual-stick video game controller, is a new period of evolution–not of the interface itself, but in what we’re using it for.
AMORY SIVERTSON: What makes, in your mind, a video game controller the right tool for operating the kinds of advanced weapons that the military is using it for?
JARED KELLER: It’s generally a matter of familiarity.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Jared Keller is a longtime military technology journalist. He wrote a piece for Wired magazine last year called This Video Game Controller Has Become the U.S. Military’s Weapon of Choice. The controller he’s talking about is the Freedom of Movement Control Unit, or FMCU.
JARED KELLER: It’s rugged. It’s designed to be durable and to endure intense environs. But to the average observer, it would look like anything that comes with a PlayStation or Xbox.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Yeah, it’s shaped like a PlayStation or Xbox controller. But it’s, like, tan in color–kind of your stereotypical military color palette.
JARED KELLER: Yes, “coyote tan” is what they call it.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Coyote tan, okay.
JARED KELLER: Yeah, or sometimes, you know, “desert tan,” right?
AMORY SIVERTSON: Right. But really, I cannot stress enough that, if these FMCU controllers weren’t desert tan, you really would just think they were for Fortnite or Final Fantasy. They have the two thumbsticks, the D-pad, the all-too-familiar trigger buttons on the tops of the handles–except in this case, they are actual triggers.
JARED KELLER: The military has been experimenting with video game controllers for the last two decades. But their proliferation and use has really accelerated in recent years as their utility has been demonstrated in various field experiments and tests.
AMORY SIVERTSON: The Pentagon has confirmed the use of the FMCU controller in the Air Force’s RADBO–or Recovery of Air Bases Denied by Ordnance–vehicle, a boxy, desert tan, bomb-finding truck, also in the Army’s short-range air defense system. Picture heavy-duty vehicles, often unmanned, with turrets and machine guns and missile launchers mounted on top to take out low-flying threats like helicopters and small planes. “Every mission is different,” the FMCU’s product description reads. “Shouldn’t your controller be as versatile as you are?”
The FMCU isn’t the only game controller that’s in the action, Jared says. The Army’s LOCUST Laser Weapon System blasts drones out of the sky using an actual Xbox controller.
JARED KELLER: It gives the operator a better sense of control and focus on a system that requires precision to be effective.
AMORY SIVERTSON: And the U.S. Military isn’t the only one using video game controllers. The British Army, the Israel Defense Forces, also the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who, Jared says, have been using PlayStation controllers to direct armed drones and machine gun turrets at invading Russian forces. So, why? Why video game controllers? One reason, as you heard, is familiarity.
JARED KELLER: Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who are going to make up the majority of the Armed Forces in the coming decades, have grown up on these systems. So, why waste time building a new one when you can give prospective troops something they’re already familiar with and can use almost instantaneously?
AMORY SIVERTSON: Another? That precision Jared was talking about–the mobility of the thumbsticks for directing vehicles and weaponry–and the level of responsiveness that, according to the FMCU’s product description, can “be the difference between success and failure.” But also, the military doesn’t have to reinvent the controller. In fact, Jared says, that might be for the best.
JARED KELLER: I think we’ve all heard the joke that a camel is a horse designed by committee.
AMORY SIVERTSON: [LAUGHING] I have not heard that joke!
JARED KELLER: Yeah. And often, a lot of proprietary systems designed by the DoD end up being camels–not necessarily because of bad design decisions, but because the knowledge and understanding and research exists out there in the private sector.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Not only does it already exist, Jared says, it may very well have already been perfected.
JARED KELLER: The gaming companies–as the technologist, Peter Singer, put it years ago–spent tons of money developing what is optimal, intuitive, and easy to learn. And the military is basically saying, “Well, they did the job for us. Let’s build these systems so that this next generation of warfighters can adapt those skills seamlessly to a military context.”
AMORY SIVERTSON: The game companies did the job for them. Now, when it comes to the joystick specifically, this full circle moment is not all that surprising, right? The joystick is part of the military’s aviation history and development; it’s not new to them.
JARED KELLER: The joystick has kind of proven itself over the last several decades as the man-machine interface of choice.
AMORY SIVERTSON: It’s just kept getting better.
JARED KELLER: There is no more intuitive, optimized system for delicate, precise control of remotely operated technology than the joystick.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Now, the word “remotely” is important here because, when we’re using joysticks to navigate through game worlds, we know those worlds on our screen aren’t real. When a soldier is using a video game controller to shoot down a helicopter on a screen, it is real and deadly. We’ve designed something that makes it easier than ever to execute incredibly consequential tasks.
Then again, these consequential tasks can also be life-saving. Last year, an endoscopy was performed on a live pig in Hong Kong from thousands of miles away in Switzerland using a PlayStation. And momentum behind game controllers in medicine is building. Earlier this year, the FDA approved the latest iteration of the Monarch Bronchoscopy System, which uses a controller adapted directly from the Xbox to maneuver a tiny tube through a patient’s lungs to find and treat diseases. It is uncanny. The Xbox-esque black and white design, the two-handle shape, the two thumbsticks in that familiar diagonal orientation–the same optimized interface, from the game room to the war room to operating room…
AMORY SIVERTSON: How do you feel about game controllers being repurposed for things like this?
MIKKO HEINENIN: Well, I’m always happy when the geeks win.
AMORY SIVERTSON: [LAUGHS]
AMORY SIVERTSON: Mikko Heinenin is the creator of the Finnish Museum of Games in Tampere, Finland, and one half of the team behind its 2023 exhibition, The Joy of Sticks. It featured hundreds of gaming joysticks from Mikko’s personal collection but also traced the interface’s significance in society, from aviation to medicine.
NIKLAS NYLAND: Examples like this show that games have always been and are very much connected.
AMORY SIVERTSON: This is the exhibit’s other half, Niklas Nyland, one of the museum’s curators. Despite the joy these Finns find in sticks, Mikko and Niklas do acknowledge, begrudgingly, that the next big interface is already here.
NIKLAS NYLAND: Nowadays, everybody is using the touchscreen for everything.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Oh boy–the touchscreen. It is ubiquitous. But just because it’s big doesn’t mean it’s better. In fact, what makes the joystick great as an interface is the same thing that makes the touchscreen basically a black box–this idea of perceived affordance. You look at a joystick, you know how to use it. It’s an intuitive piece of hardware. You look at a touchscreen and… It’s a flat piece of glass–zero perceived affordance–completely beholden to its software. And so what the touchscreen affords us is really only what the software developers want us to be able to do with it. And Niklas isn’t particularly happy about it.
NIKLAS NYLAND: touchscreens are scarily monolithic. And they sort of become, like, I guess, a metaphor for the influence of the big tech companies nowadays. Everything is put into the same type of interface.
AMORY SIVERTSON: And that same interface is bombarding us with endless possible uses–apps, maps, games–that each have their own way of using the touchscreen that you have to get used to. From swiping through potential soulmates–oof, not much joy in that–to signing your name with your fingertip… And we all know how well that usually turns out.
MIKKO HEINENIN: On a touchscreen, you can do a lot of things. But being very precise is not one of them.
AMORY SIVERTSON: No, it is not, Mikko. But convenience–versatility–those are perhaps the touchscreen’s primary affordances. One interface in our pockets all the time that allows us to communicate, shop, split a bill with friends, and crush all the candy.
But touchscreens have also made life literally flatter. Think of how many dials and buttons we’ve squashed into extinction–on our phones, our cash registers, in our cars. We’re losing our grip on the world, one swipe, scroll, and tap at a time. But the joystick…
NIKLAS NYLAND: It’s very different because you actually use your body when controlling.
AMORY SIVERTSON: It offers us a physical, human-machine connection, Niklas says. The tactile, empowering experience of maneuvering an actual object to explore 3D space in a self-controlled way, whether we’re flying a plane or driving Mario’s cart… Poorly, in my case…
AMORY SIVERTSON: Oh, I think I’m crushing it!
AMORY SIVERTSON: It’s our bodily affordances and machine affordances coming together in joyful, sometimes exhilarating harmony.
NIKLAS NYLAND: You kind of become one with the joystick. And I think that’s something that stays in people’s muscle memory or bodily memory, like we want to be able to be very precise or we want to be able to sort of use our bodies for controlling. And sort of joysticks maybe remind us of this–that there’s options. The breadth of different ways is good for us.
AMORY SIVERTSON: You know, I too think maintaining a physical connection to our physical world with a physical interface, like the joystick, is good for us. Just like it’s good to use our own software and hardware–our brains and bodies–and to be able to move those heads and bodies separately. So it’s not really about one interface replacing another. Or it shouldn’t be. It’s about having the tool that affords what you need–versatility, specificity, convenience, precision… It all depends on the game.
KELLY O’CONNELL: So, Amory, on the right, those orange things make you go faster.
MIKE MOSCHETTO: Yes.
AMORY SIVERTSON: Ohhhhhh.
MIKE MOSCHETTO: It’s kind of propelling arrows.
AMORY SIVERTSON: You guys were setting me up for failure.
PHILLIP SOUCY: We’ve been competing.
KELLY O’CONNELL: Hooray!
AMORY SIVERTSON: Ludwig. 12th. 12th of 12…
ROMAN MARS: Ben Brock Johnson.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Roman Mars.
ROMAN MARS: I love that story, but I have one bone to pick with Amory Sivertson because I’m here to tell you that the Atari 2600 joystick is a beautiful piece of design. Your, like, weak-wristed millennials get tired using it? That is your problem. That is not an Atari 2600’s problem.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: To say nothing of the rich, mahogany veneer on the outside of this thing. It really is a beautiful piece of machinery.
ROMAN MARS: The machine is gorgeous. You could throw it down three flights of stairs. You could fry an egg on it, and it’ll still play. That thing is a gorgeous piece of the pinnacle of design. And so, like, when she goes to that and she’s like, “I don’t like it,” like, what the hell is going on there? But anyway, I’ll let her have her say. She is a great reporter.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: So, Roman, your letters and everybody else’s letters about Amory’s thoughts on the Atari 2600–I’ll happily bring them directly to her.
ROMAN MARS: Forward to her because I will not have any of this Atari slander in my house.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: But of course, Amory talked about some much more serious stuff that we’re going to pick up in our next episode. And that is military applications for video game technology. For Episode 3 of Hidden Levels we’re going to tell you how the U.S. Military uses video games to recruit.
ARMY PROMOTIONAL VIDEO: So, you’re probably wondering to yourself, “The U.S. Army has an eSports program? Why? And how do I join?” The U.S. Army eSports program is a recruiting outreach tool to help the Army connect with the fast-growing eSports audience…
ROMAN MARS: That is the next time on Hidden Levels from 99% Invisible and Endless Thread.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: This episode was produced by Amory Sivertson. Edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and Sound Design by Emily Jankowski. Additional mixing by Martín Gonzalez. Music Composition by Paul Vaitkus. Our theme music was composed by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus.
Fact-checking by Lara Bullens. Special thanks to Amory’s Mario Kart opponents Philip Soucy, Kelly O’Connell, and Mike Moschetto. And to Henry Lowood for sharing his expertise and tipping Amory off to “The Joy of Sticks” exhibition.
ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible’s executive producer is Kathy Tu. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Jayson DeLeon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor.
We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston’s NPR. The rest of our team tackling unsolved mysteries, untold histories and other wild stories from the internet includes Managing Producer Samata Joshi, Production Manager Paul Vaitkus, Producers Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, and Frannie Monahan
ROMAN MARS: We’ll see you for a new episode of Hidden Levels on Tuesday.
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