COLUMN: 'HDR Knowledge': Controls, Simplicity, Focal Interest, and Contextual Sensitivity
[HDR Knowledge is a bi-weekly column written by Nayan Ramachandran and chronicles his hopes and wishes for the future of the industry. This week, we dive back into controls and games, but this time, we talk about control design philosophy.]
In my column Controlling the Future, I talked about changes in controllers in our current generation, as well as future generations, from touch and gyroscopic control, to pressure sensitive buttons and analog sticks.
There are two parts to the equation, though. Once developers have controls in front of them, how do they utilize them for their games? It’s no surprise that every developer has its own design philosophy when it comes to how their games control. Nintendo is famous for creating their games to be as accessible as possible, while still allowing for complex moves and actions if the player is willing to invest the time.
Companies like EA’s Tiburon studio steps farther and farther away from the line of accessibility in each installment of Madden, making use of every button on the controller in increasingly complex and complicated ways. Games like Sony’s Siren overused certain buttons for a variety of actions, making the controls clunky and frustrating, when they could have been intuitive and simple.
The problem, in the past, has largely been a lack of reliable sources for that kind of information. Specifically in the forum of American parenting, most parents only know what television and newspaper media tell them. There’s nothing wrong with that. Most people with common sense look to newspapers and daily news shows for trustworthy news on a variety of subjects. Those same people would assume that the information those programs provide on other subjects would be equally trustworthy.
As time went on, developers started to become more inventive about how they approached the idea of a series iteration. Final Fantasy is an excellent early example. While Final Fantasy II for the Family Computer offered much of the same gameplay and atmosphere that fans of the first game had come to expect from a sequel, the game’s story was completely disconnected from the previous iteration, offering totally new characters, challenges, and even world. Final Fantasy may not have been the first series to change what gamers expect out of a series, but it was one of the best.
The misnomer about story, of course, is that it must be told at the player, rather than with the player. Because of technological issues (as well as limited experience with a narrative medium), cut scenes became famous in the Super Famicom and Playstation 1 eras, because of their effective nature in telling a story.
This problem is two fold: not only do many then miss out on our exquisite writing, but often times, readers will never really know why a game received an 8, 9 or 10. One of 
