Lamentations of a sinister gamer
As a left-handed guitarist who plays righty, I’ve always found it odd that most people fret the strings with their non-dominant hand. It seems to me that you’d need more dexterity to make complex chord shapes than to strum; why waste your good hand on a simple repetitive motion?
I’ve often had similar thoughts about video game controllers. We take it for granted that the directional control is always on the left and the buttons are on the right. But isn’t it strange that most people control a D-pad or analog stick with their bad hand? Doesn’t directional control require more precision than simply tapping your thumb?
I’ve had the opportunity to explore these questions with the Wii. Since the Remote and Nunchuk act as disconnected halves of a controller, it was finally possible for me to manipulate the analog stick with my non-dominant hand, like a righty.
Super Mario Galaxy was the first game I played this way, and the results were mixed. The Super Mario 64 controls are burned into my muscle memory, so it took a while for me to mentally flip all of the buttons. More crucially, I had trouble with delicacy; I ran at top speed everywhere, and occasionally did so in the wrong direction and into a pool of lava. Righties may be used to controlling an avatar (or fretting a guitar) using their non-dominant hand, but it’s difficult to flip everything around after years of experience.
With practice, though, I got pretty decent at playing with the controllers backwards. While it never felt completely natural controlling the analog stick with my right thumb, it was definitely more comfortable holding the heavier Wii Remote in my dominant hand. In fact, I ended up playing most of the game that way — including that killer Luigi’s Purple Coins star!
Thinking I was pretty badass I went on to play Twilight Princess and No More Heroes with the controllers reversed too, but in those games the results were less than stellar. I never quite wrapped my head around the controls for Twilight Princess; even in the final dungeon I’d constantly hit the wrong button during battles. That, combined with my lingering awkwardness in using the analog stick, made Link a bit less graceful than I would have liked.
In No More Heroes I had to struggle with the fact that the wrestling move instructions were all backwards. After trying to do mental gymnastics every time Travis flipped someone over his back, I started just crossing my arms when those parts came up so that the positions of the controllers in space matched their positions on the screen. I’m sure I looked ten times sillier playing that game than I ever did playing WarioWare.
I decided that my success with Galaxy was an aberration and resolved to go back standard controls for Okami — directional control with the left hand, buttons with the right. Now I’m thinking that might have been a mistake.
Here’s the thing: holding the Remote + Nunchuk combo normally puts the Remote in my bad hand. Since Okami makes extensive use of the Remote’s infrared pointer functionality, I constantly find myself drawing like a righty and cursing the wobbly circles and squiggly lines.
In Galaxy the pointer wasn’t terribly important since shooting Star Bits was largely unnecessary. In Twilight Princess I just used it to fire the occasional arrow or Clawshot, which I think I could have pulled off with my bad hand. Drawing shapes in Okami, though? The recognition is finicky enough as it is; my crappy right-handed penmanship is only exacerbating the problem.
And yet I can’t help noticing that I’m starting to improve. After several hours with the game my circles have become more circular, my lines more linear. Maybe, given enough time, the Wii will make me ambidextrous.
I’m having a hard time remembering the exact moment in Okami that almost drove me from the game, but it had something to do with drawing circles and slashes around a series of critters (in trees as I recall) to the rhythm of a tune in a limited amount of time. If the game doesn’t recognize one of your circles, you fail and must start over.
Thankfully, I made it through after about 25 attempts and never experienced a similar moment later, but for awhile my beloved Okami was the bane of my existence and the cause of much lamentation. :-)
I’m actually ambidextrous and do most things with my right but some others with my left (for instance I golf right, but play hockey left). One of the things I found with the Wii is when the game is played with just the remote, I’d often just switch hands. When it came to using the nunchuck, I’d sometimes swap them too without realizing it. I think that’s great! It’s nice to be able to have that kind of freedom with the controls:)
Michael: I hope you’re talking about the part where you have to help Mr. Orange do that tree-sprouting dance, because I had trouble with that too and it’d be good to know that the worst is over. :-)
Rayna: Even though I’m very much a lefty, I too have tried playing all the Remote + Nunchuk games both ways. Mario Kart Wii was a disaster when I tried steering with my right hand, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl was…well, that one is still pretty much a disaster either way. I don’t think I can blame my ineptness on the controls there. :-) I agree with you, though — it’s nice to have options.
One interesting side effect of the separated Remote + Nunchuk controller is that I often play with my arms folded. My housemates mock me for it, since it looks like I’m pretending to be all nonchalant. Really, though, it’s pretty comfortable.
Interesting experiments! I’m a lefty too. I’ve never tried switching hands on a game, although I did once reverse the keyboard on my digital piano so the high notes were on the left and the low ones on the right. I hoped my left hand would be better than my right at scales and fast melodic figuration, but years of piano lessons have effectively crippled it.
The other thing was that although diatonic scales still felt diatonic, major chords and minor chords were swapped. That took some getting used to!
Peter: Oh god. That sounds like it would drive me absolutely insane!
Here’s another thing I just thought of. Back in the early 90s I played a lot of platformers on the computer — Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit, all of those Apogee titles like Bio Menace and Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure. By default, those games used the arrow keys for movement (right hand) and some combination of Ctrl, Alt, and the spacebar for actions (left hand). Eventually, of course, that system was supplanted by the now-standard WASD keys, which put directional control back in the left hand. Maybe that’s why I managed to do all right when flipping my Wii controls — I had some experience doing it both ways already.
Also, “flipping my Wii controls” sounds funny.
I actually did that instinctually with the wii the first time I played it. I was running a race on Mario Kart, and sucked it up. Then I realized my flaw. It is a bit more comfortable to hold it reversed, but the thumb movements are a tough habit to break.