tech: The Cult of Gamepad
Posted on Saturday, December 18 @ 18:12:08 CET by julian |
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![](gamepad/gamepad8.jpg) Looking at the spectrum of gamepad designs, alien anthropologists would assume the hands of humans were vastly varied and mutated; the surgical tools of Cronenberg's 'Dead Ringers' come to mind when looking across a selection of these creatures.
Taken each on their own however, a gamepad is the holy bridge between the worlds of life and game, a shape to which we wrap our will and augment our ability..
Gamepads are totems of a strange religion. Boxed with exploding supernovas or depicted as craft at war in space, they're always marketed as a kind of mythological vehicle. Some gamepads come embedded with glowing LEDs as though they were a magical item of arcane power to be discovered by the player in the flesh.
Regardless of their shape, every gamepad is released in Beta; countless human hours of chafe and blistered thumbs are testimony that we are in a sense responsible for their evolution - wearing at their form until those that make them listen to our cries.
Some however never get it right. Microsoft landed a mothership in our hands with the XBox and un-supersized it a few times in a failed attempt to degeneralise it's audience.
![](gamepad/madcatz_gamepad_pro.jpg)
And Intel, believing that people actually liked holding fish gave us the 'Intel Wireless'.
The history of gamepad design echoes the evolution of games through a description of how we play them; in this sense their design is a rich pictogram of action. The same could barely be said of the knife and fork.
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