The Ultimate Peripherals

You don't get into games without closets and shelves full of old plastic. It doesn't matter if you're someone who primarily plays games on PC, consoles, or handhelds, because the plastic avalanche comes for us all.

The nerd's version of a Squishmallow mountain.

Some pieces of plastic mean more than others. Some piece of plastic would be better served being used, rather than on the shelf, or in a box. But taking them out is a pain, and setting them up is a pain.

But a nerd can dream, as Rob and Patrick do this week, as they wonder what mounds of nostalgic plastic should become playable installations.

Rob: A few years ago, I moved my racing wheel and pedals to a heavy-duty stand rather than mounting the wheel to the desk. It was a pretty huge instant-upgrade, but I also knew that this was going to be a temporary measure until I decided it was time to go hog-wild on sim-racing equipment. Move away from the (very good) mid-tier Logitech stuff and towards better force feedback drive systems with interchangeable wheels. Get an actual sim-racing seat, where you're practically lying reclined with the pedals and your feet in front of you. Mount a shifter and hand-brake peripheral off to the side. Fully embrace proper sim-racing ergonomics.

I'm almost at that point now that I got that little Logitech H-pattern shifter, but I think I've got about six months of research before I know what kind of racing setup is appropriate for this point in my life. Some people pump tens of thousands of dollars into these things to put force-feedback systems around the seat itself, simulating the bumps and lunges of a car going around a race track. The most common "dream setup" configuration is the three-monitor wraparound display that gives you views out the front and side windows of your virtual car, which gives you a lot of VR's immersion without its downsides.

My setup would still need to be more modest than that and I'm not sure I'll ever be in a place to dedicate an entire PC and a ton of square footage to a sim-rig, but as an intellectual exercise it's got me thinking about what gaming peripheral equipment does the absolute most to make an experience feel novel.

When we were young kids, most consoles didn't have joysticks or at least didn't have very good ones. If you wanted a joystick on a PC, you went and bought one. Ditto steering wheels. Ditto pedals (rudder and racing). It changed what kinds of games you could play. A few of my friends suffered mightily with TIE Fighter using just a mouse to play it, and were amazed how much easier it got if you had a joystick (though shooting got much harder). PC racing sims had keyboard-only controls and a shocking number of players used them! Meanwhile, consoles had all kinds of weird experiments like the Game Glove. Remember the Mario Paint mouse? Or when Nintendo decided that the little-loved Zapper deserved an SNES successor and gave us the Super Scope?

You could argue that Rock Band and DJ Hero marked the end of the line for special-use peripherals, but also their greatest expression. Game controllers that were wildly impractical for anything other than creating this singular simulated experience of musical competence.

But music and dance games are a special category unto themselves, and for me there's something about the Super Scope that feels like it captures the essence of what makes a peripheral appealing while also demonstrating why so many of them proved to be bad ideas. The Super Scope is basically an attempt to save the dying lightgun game on home console, but with something that looked cool and appealing like a Nerf gun. The ads for the Super Scope showed kids firing that thing like Afghan hill fighters bringing down Soviet Hinds with a Stinger missile. Except that it's a horrible idea for a lightgun game: you can't possibly aim fast enough with some kind of shoulder-mounted tube weapon to keep pace with your typical lightgun game. Five minutes with this thing gave you a whole new level of respect for the Zapper.

The Super Scope looked like a cool toy, and you sort of hoped that it would make games that supported it feel better to play. But it was a bulky piece of plastic that wasn't actually useful or good for much of anything. The same design qualities that made it appealing in the abstract made it miserable in reality.

The thing is though… I think we all kind of yearn for a cool, impractical gadget. The modern video game controller is a marvel of versatility and efficiency. It works well for everything, and everything works well with it. And yet there's a part of me that thinks if someone came out with a new version of the Move Sharp Shooter today, I'd still grab it in a heartbeat. 

Am I over-romanticizing these things? Is there any "useless piece of plastic crap" that you daydreamed about as a kid? Did anything ever really work well beyond the basics?

Patrick: You’re not going to get an argument about over-romanticizing novel pieces of plastic from this guy, the person who just lauded Netflix for its audacious Unhinged experiment on Netflix, a game that’s nearly impossible to find on the service. I love when game creators take a risk on the peripheral side, because it pushes back against the notion that how we control games is settled, the argument is finished.

It, of course, makes perfect sense to have a settled language for video game controllers, but even if many Wii games have aged poorly, the impulse Nintendo had was the right one. Why not try something totally different? (Even the "revolutionary" Wii eventually fell back down to Earth in this regard. The existence of add-on peripherals like the nunchuck proved that even Nintendo was happy to have some reliable inputs.)

The setup I over-romanticize is a permanent Rock Band (or Guitar Hero?) installation. A hard drive loaded to the nines with every fan note chart, connected to a guitar, bass, drum set, keyboard, and if we’re feeling nasty, a DJ peripheral. (I don’t mind if the microphone is set aside; the singing part is not key to my enjoyment of these games.) Something that doesn’t have to be dismantled when it’s not being used for months on end, but when the mood strikes me—fuck, I’d really like to jam out to a Cure song right now.