The PS5's "weird" new controller is the epitome of the future of gaming| hard philosophy

After the release of Sony's PS5, its DualSense 5 controller has been widely recognized by players.

The DualSense 5 has made great progress over the previous generation of handles in terms of appearance design, grip feel, and haptic feedback.

The addition of a linear motor and an adaptive trigger has raised the depth of interaction between players when playing games on PS5, and this beautiful controller is arguably one of the most attractive parts of PS5.

However, this good-looking and playful handle is not perfect. Or maybe the controller, which only considers ergonomics and human interaction, is still not perfect for everyone – such as game journalist Grant Stoner.

Grant Stoner has loved playing games since he was a child, and when he grew up, he turned this hobby into a job and became a reporter in the game industry, reporting on the latest developments in the game industry and publishing game review reports.

He reviewed many games of different genres and platforms, but few of PlayStation first-party games because Grant Stoner suffered from spinal muscular dystrophy and didn't have enough hands to hold and control the huge DualSense 5 controller.

Unless Sony moves first-party masterpieces such as God of War 5 and The Last of Us 2 to the PC platform so that he can operate it with keyboard and mouse, Grant Stoner will be completely out of touch with these top titles in the gaming industry.

Similar to Grant Stoner, there are many players with gaming barriers, and the console's closed ecosystem makes these obstacles more difficult to solve, but thankfully, this "invisible wall" that separates people from happiness is disintegrating.

Accessible design is driving the gaming industry

Friends familiar with console games should have a little impression of Xbox's adaptive controller released in 2018.

This strangely shaped, four-sided version of an arcade control panel is actually an expandable handle designed for people with disabilities.

Players can not only press the keys including elbows, feet, head and other parts to achieve operation input, but also through the front 19 3.5mm interface external buttons, joysticks and other components, combined the most suitable operation method for their own use, so the Xbox adaptive controller was named one of the "10 most influential technology products in 10 years" by Time magazine.

On the other hand, PlayStation, which has always competed with the Xbox Chamber, did not follow up immediately at the time, which made it difficult for people with disabilities like Grant Stoner to play PlayStation games. Fortunately, Sony has now finally caught up with Microsoft.

At the CES 2023 conference, Sony released a barrier-free control kit codenamed "Project Leonardo", from the appearance point of view, "Project Leonardo" can be said to have nothing to do with the DualSense 5 controller or traditional controller except for the consistent button icon and color scheme.

This also means that "Project Leonardo" was born to solve problems that traditional handles cannot solve.

The first thing the designer did was to "pat the handle flat":

The grip that originally pursued the grip feel became two flat discs, and all buttons such as shoulder keys and cross keys became independent large buttons, arranged around the disc, and these buttons can also be arranged and combined at will, so that the key operation is no longer harsh.

The originally mini joystick has also become larger like eating Mario's mushroom, and the player can push the joystick to control the character more significantly, reducing the requirements for the player's input accuracy.

With its flat design, "Project Leonardo" can be controlled on a platform such as a table, so that players no longer need to hold a controller to use it.

And the designer also made a left-right hand separation of the handle, and the player arranged the position of the handle arbitrarily according to their own needs to play in the most comfortable posture.

Similar to the Xbox adaptive controller, "Project Leonardo" also reserves four external accessory interfaces, so that players with severe disabilities can further arrange their own operation modes through external components.

For the unique shape of "Project Leonardo", Sony interactive entertainment designer So Morimoto also explained:

Our team worked with accessibility experts to test more than a dozen designs to find ways to help address the ease of use of the controller.

We finalized a design for a split controller that could be positioned with left and right sticks to push the buttons, which could be used without holding, and flexible in the arrangement of buttons and hats.

Users can customize Project Leonardo according to their needs, so there is no such thing as the "right" form. We want to empower users to create their own collocations.

We're excited that the design will be done by working with the player, rather than presenting us with a single form.

"Project Leonardo" is an experimental product jointly developed by Sony and the accessibility community, and its usefulness needs to be further verified by the accessibility community, and more adjustments may be required in the future, so it is not yet available to all players.

But the emergence of "Project Leonardo" is still encouraging, which means that the needs of what was originally defined as a few people are getting more and more attention, these groups that have long been ignored by the game industry are finally getting attention, and accessibility design is becoming a common consensus in the game industry.

In addition to Microsoft, Sony and other head manufacturers pay attention to the design of barrier-free handles, many manufacturers have also readjusted their products to meet the needs of some people with disabilities.

For example, peripheral manufacturer Babitang designed a lightweight design for players with muscle weakness, which eliminates the shoulder button design of the traditional handle and arranges all buttons on the same plane to make it easier for fingers to reach.

Its key trigger force is also modulated by 1/3 of the conventional controller, which is more convenient for players to play.

The controller is an extension of the human hand in the virtual world, the entrance to the game, the addition of barrier-free design may only make them more comfortable to play for some people, but for some people, these designs are like a hammer, breaking the barrier between playable and non-playable, allowing more players to have the opportunity to connect with the game and achieve many things that were simply impossible to do in the past.

As Grant Stoner felt when he learned that Project Leonardo was being developed:

In the past, the PS5 was just a 7-pound piece of meaningless iron for me, but now I can finally play it as soon as the PS game is released, just like everyone else.

"Inclusion" is leading to better products for all

Before we can take a deeper look at accessibility design in the gaming industry, we need to understand what the journey of "playing games" really is. Abstractly, playing the game can be roughly broken down into the following steps:

Receive information from the game

Process the information and determine the reaction

Output a reaction to the game

Repeat the process

Whether you're shooting at enemies in CS:GO, swiping blocks in Fun, or turning the steering wheel in Horizon 5, you're repeating the process.

Therefore, when we discuss accessibility, we must first determine where the "obstacle" occurs.

When the player has no problem with the first two processes, but there are obstacles in the output response, manufacturers can design hardware devices such as Xbox adaptive controllers and "Project Leonardo" to solve them.

But if the player has a barrier when receiving information (such as visual impairment, hearing impairment), they need help other than hardware - in-game accessibility design.

At the 2020 TGA (The Game Award) ceremony, the "Innovation in Accessibility" award was added for the first time, and the award was awarded to the annual masterpiece "The Last of Us 2" that year.

Although "The Last of Us 2" has caused a lot of controversy in terms of plot, it has been widely recognized for its achievements in accessible design.

Naughty Dog Studios, the developer of The Last of Us 2, added more than 60 accessibility features, allowing the hearing impaired to freely adjust the size of subtitles, identify the speaker, and add directional arrows to help identify the direction of sound.

Add a high-contrast mode to reduce ambient colors and highlight player-controlled characters, so that players with low vision can see the game world clearly.

This meticulous accessibility design sets a benchmark for game development and influences other game developers to some extent, such as Crysis 6, Horizon 5 and other games where you can find similar accessibility features.

At the 2022 TGA Awards, "God of War: Ragnarok" beat "The Last of Us 1 Remake" also developed by Naughty Dog Studio with its thoughtful and practical accessibility design, and won the "Accessibility Innovation Award" that year, which can be said to be "better than blue".

In terms of addressing input barriers, God of War: Ragnarok also incorporates a high-contrast mode similar to The Last of Us 2.

But further, God of War: Ragnarok highlights characters while the details of the environment are lightened while still being preserved, and in-game lighting effects also have an impact on the highlighted characters, striking a balance between reducing visual impairment and visual effects as much as possible.

▲ Not only the font can be increased, but the icon size can also be set to a huge number

Steve Saylor, a visually impaired game journalist, said that one of the accessibility features he liked most about God of War: Ragnarok was that it could adjust all fonts in any interface in the game to be oversized, making it less prone to eye strain when playing.

This adjustment hardly requires much technical investment from the developer, but it is such a small change that has greatly improved the playing experience for many visually impaired players. And small changes like this are many more in the game.

Mila Pavlin, lead UX designer for God of War: Ragnarok, said that at the beginning of the game's development, the development team had a lot of communication with the accessibility community, collected a lot of real feedback and suggestions from people with disabilities, and improved the game based on these suggestions.

That's why accessible design can go back to its roots – allowing more people to enjoy games, not just formalities.

In recent years, accessibility design has become a topic of discussion among more and more game manufacturers, and game studios large and small have consciously taken accessibility design into account in game development to reduce the difficulty of players and meet more diversified play needs.

This is the next question that game makers need to solve: when we have the ability to develop games that are fun enough, how do we make it accessible to more people?

Popcap, the developer of "Plants vs. Zombies", mentioned in a survey report that more than one in five (20.5%) casual video game players have problems including physical and mental disabilities, and according to the US Census, this person accounts for 15.1% of the society.

That is to say, more people with disabilities are willing to participate in gaming activities and use games as an important way for them to distract themselves or relieve themselves from illness, and this "minority" of tens of millions of players should not be ignored if the global player base of 400 million is estimated.

From a broader perspective, as players get older, their vision, hearing and mobility may encounter obstacles for different reasons, and to borrow the lines of the popular "Three-Body Problem", the so-called "healthy" and "normal" are actually accidental.

Therefore, accessibility design is actually relevant to each of us, it brings the game to more people, and it makes the game, or the product itself, go in a better direction.

As Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft's gaming business, puts it:

The result of accessible and inclusive design is a better product for everyone.