Sis said:
I don't think a Keyboard to Controller comparison really works. On the keyboard, you are inputting the exact key you are pressing, teaching your brain the spatial relationship directly through its use. A controller uses symbological mapping between what you want to do and what the button is. Using shapes removes any built-in relationship, since Triangle has no relationship to Circle; they're both just shapes floating out there.
I don't think in the main people need to start again from scratch trying ot remember the placement of the different buttons. If I get a new game and see 'Press Triangle for Jump' I know already that's the top button. I don't have to look at the controller and think 'where's that triangle button?' for every game. From PES to FIFA and back again, I know the Shoot and Lob buttons are reversed. Sometimes I mix them up between games, but once I've reminded myself it's 'the other button' to shoot, I adapt. I don't need to look at the controller and think 'that's Square, which is shoot in the other game, but not this one.' If you learn the placement of the controls then attaching them to actions per game shouldn't require any reference to the controller icons. In the same way if you play a PC game you can map any control to any letters, but don't need to reference the keyboard. I know in GW that W is forward and Tab, how I configured it, is select next enemy, and was comfortable with these controls from the beginning. I remember Morrowind where I changed the jump and action buttons I think to keep them local to each other, but it wasn't an impossible hurdle and I didn't need to think 'which button do I use for jump?' confusing it with other games.
Anyone who's had a PS2 a while should be okay with the button positions. Likewise with XB. If you handed me an XB controller and said 'press the B button' I'd need to look where that was, but it wouldn't be long before I'd learnt it. I've only played one XB game when a friend got one free at an MS dev conference and we played the Oddworld game. None of us had any trouble playing it. We're used to moving our thumb left, right, up and down to do different things, regardless of the colour or icon on the button. If it were Y to jump, we'd look where Y was and map that to the up button, and that was that. This is a skill I guess most gamers have, andit's certainly a skill that can vary a lot from person to person. Some people will undoubtedly have a mental block with some placements (a friend on the Weekend for some reason kept tryig to use R1+Triangle in XMen Legends II despite knowing it doesn't do anything and despite never using that combo in any other games. Also I've had days where I keep hitting the Lob button instead of the Shoot button in PES, so these things can be temporary) but I don't know that there's any specfic icon set that is ideal. Once that works flawlessly for some people will have problems with others.
Regards the GC controller, I've little experience of games but have found it harder to adjust to it's different layout. It takes a while for me to adjust to the different shapes, as my friends. If there's a red button we have to wonder which that is and look on the controller for the beginning until we're warmed up. Where it does work in when they show the four buttons with one solid and the other three semi-transparent, but that's true for other controllers too. eg. In Tekken it was easy to pick up button placements because they were shown as the group of four, showing spacial positions. In a throw like Square+Triangle (or whatever they are) you could see it was the top-left two buttons, and didn't need to know which buttons on the controller were labelled Square and Triangle.
For those memory games I think the difficulty anyone has with the icons are more a matter of personal preferences. I don't see that either XB or PS icons would make that any easier. What the games SHOULD do is either show the button positions or use the D-pad directions (though XB doesn't have separate buttons so this wouldn't work so well). It wasn't hard for me to learn Tekken's 10-Hit combos because the pattern of thumb-movements was very evident. If the games keep to just showing shapes, colours or what-have-you, there's going to be a mapping process involved that's much harder for most people to learn. But that sums up the future really. Games need to make sure they are as easy to access as possible. I don't think, with a stick and button layout, much more can be done to make things easier. Changing the layout to something different like GC might be good for new users, but doesn't work well for existing gamers, in the same way switching a touch-typist's QWERTY keyboard with a DVORAK keyboard will leave them confused. For a decade at least now gamers have been used to four buttons under the right thumb in a diamond layout and changing that is going to add an extra level of difficulty in learning new games (eg. ABCD in a square or Circle, Waves, Cross Star in a cursor-keys layout), so console desginers are rather stuck by legacy it seems to me. Changing the button colours, shapes, or any other attributes (soft, hard, clear and mirror...) isn't going to make much difference in learning a controller layout or learning which controllers work for which game.
