Introduction

What do the buttons on a game console controller represent for you? Each button most likely has different functions which vary among each game’s unique game mechanics. Take for example, the “B” button. In Splatoon, pressing it results in your in-game avatar to jump, in Hades, it makes you dash forward, whereas in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, holding it down makes your avatar run. Our real-life act of pressing a button translates into another action occurring in-game, as depicted on the screen. One could even say that the buttons having diverse effects in each game’s unique mechanics, representing their own specific set of rules, relies on their own system of signs.  

This fascination surrounding such concepts is precisely why I chose a game controller as my evocative object. Although there are so many different variations of a game controller, I am going to use the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller as an example as it is the controller I was mediated by the most and is also one of the more “standard” modern designs when it comes to game controllers (the existence of a joystick, four buttons with letters/symbols, L and R buttons, etc.). By analyzing the game controller, I will highlight the ways that it mediates between us, the player, and the virtual world that the game exists in. 

The Controller and the Player

As mentioned before, the game controller has the unique ability to mediate between us and the virtual world displayed within the hardware (whether that is the console or the PC). When it comes to “playing” a game via a controller, there is a unique set of feedback that is inputted and outputted mediating between our physical corporeal bodies and the incorporeal in-game virtual bodies. 

You would first take in the world through senses, like sight and hearing. Certain in-game index, symbols, and icons may evoke feelings of fear, especially if it had informed the player of it causing harm to the avatar in the past. Others may evoke curiosity, enticing the player to explore more of the game and the “rules” of this digital world. Once you have cognitively processed that, your instincts—shaped by in-game and real-world experiences—would inform you to react. You would react by pressing buttons or rolling the joystick to the direction you want it to. We know, or at the very least expect, that the controller has received input when we receive the tactile feedback of the button being pushed down then springing back as we release it from pressing down on it. Then you would see the fruition of your act of button-pressing/joystick pushing by seeing the pixels on-screen change to indicate movement/change within this virtual world. 

The feelings evoked from the virtual information would translate in the grip of our controller; dodging enemies evoking another emotion of relief and safety, the achievement leading to satiate more of our curiosity, all driving our progression of the game. Thus, the controller is the mediating object for the player’s input and the software (which would be the game). Without the game, there is nothing for it to control and without the player input, there is nothing being controlled. 

Exerting Control over in-game “bodies”

Much of what is being said about the “control” over avatars/characters is correlated to what is said about the “body” as a medium in Critical Terms for Media Studies. After all, the controller could be seen as an extension of our own body, which extends into what is being “embodied” in-game. Wegenstein, too, utilizes psychoanalytic theories of how video games allow us to play the role of the “other”, a virtual embodiment that differs from the embodiment of ourselves. She quotes Slavoj Zizek on “a figure capable of taking on, or projecting itself into, many simultaneous roles” (28). The concept of roles that we project onto is correspondent with how the controller that mediates and perpetuates this “ego” that we project onto, making the body of the playable character another medium. 

Thus far, I have only discussed characters and avatars that have an anthropomorphic body, which is easy to visualize as we easily project our human bodies onto these characters. But what about games with no “avatar” or humanistic representation of our own bodies? I would argue that there is still a “body” or “vessel” in which we, in our physical and corporeal forms, exert control over digitally. Take Tetris for example, the falling blocks would be the body that we project ourselves onto. As the blocks fall, we move with it left or right via the joystick or D-pad. 

Game Controller as a “Black Box”

Even the most avid gamers most likely do not know the internal computational and mechanical workings of what occurs in between the space and time in which we press the button and watch the game do its magic. The game controller generally works under the “black box” heuristics (a cybernetics theory coined by Norbert Wiener), in which the processes of the input from our button to the output in the game is shrouded in mystery for the average user (Wiener, page xi). However, I would argue that this knowledge we lack of our game controller’s internal workings is precisely the tool we use to immerse ourselves in the virtual space of a video game. What we do know as gamers is that eventually, its mechanics is burned into the memory of our bodies through “muscle memory” as the controls become second nature to us, thus “mediating” our physical bodies in the real world and the incorporeal bodies that exist in the virtual space of a video game.

Citations

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2010, pp. 19–34.

Wiener, Norbert, et al. Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. MIT Press, 2019.

Images and footage were all taken by Christine Choi