As someone who grew up with Nintendo games, it was really interesting playing the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) last Tuesday. When I was younger, I remember playing my cousin’s Nintendo Game Boy and playing Super Mario Bros on it and also playing my other cousin’s Nintendo GameCube, playing Super Smash Bros: Melee.
Now with the advent of the Nintendo Switch, which has been all the rage in the past year or two, it’s truly astounding how these gaming consoles have remained relevant for the past 30+ years. I first played Mario Kart on the Switch during our time in the Gaming Lab and realized how similar it felt compared to playing on the Nintendo Wii. Because so many people have this innate feeling to move their character via the controller, there are even supplemental controls that cater to this to emulate this feeling (these were also in the Gaming Lab as well).
One thing I noticed that felt a little “unnatural” was that I had to actually use the controls to control my character, as opposed to moving the console to emulate myself driving throughout the courses. In a way, this seemed to detract from my experience, but I later learned that there is a way to play via the steering wheel instead of actual controls.
Compared to this, the NES gaming console was almost more intuitive. As seen above, there are only two buttons and then the navigation controls. With Super Mario Bros. 3, I was almost used to using these exact buttons on the Nintendo Game Boy and it felt nostalgic, familiar to me. The A button let Mario jump, B let him run, and the left and right arrows let him move across the screen. With the evolution of these gaming controllers, Nintendo kept many of the same features in later, different controllers, as seen from the NES, to the Game Boy, to the GameCube, to the Nintendo DS, to the most recent, Nintendo Switch: they all have the same basic standard features with the A and B buttons, with the navigation controls (arrow pad).
This makes me wonder about a lot of things, like how did Nintendo know that these placements of the arrow pads, the buttons, etc. would be optimal for their users? How did they know that this was the best way for users to enjoy their gaming experience? As we can see in the picture above, the arrow pads for all the controllers are on the left side, and the buttons are on the right side. Why? Similar to what we discussed last class, I think it just goes to show how important user testing is to a company and the products that they test. Even if initially the controller is “unnatural”, I think it is relatively easy to pick up any one of these controllers and become familiar with it in only a short amount of time.
It was also interesting to see the group dynamics over games, especially with Octodad. There seems to be some sort of camaraderie with games, as this can be seen through watch parties and gaming tournaments. I think similar to sporting events, there’s a unification of “winning” or rooting for a specific team, player, etc. that creates this sort of watch party.
