Now here’s an interesting development.

If you can’t be bothered to watch the video, the short version is that Wii Mortal Kombat will include an option allowing the player to use gestures to trigger special attacks instead of the more traditional button sequences. These gestures roughly mimic the special attack, like making a circular gesture to execute a backflip. To my knowledge, this represents a first for the genre, and it is a welcome change.

Fighting games have almost always required the memorization of arcane button combinations and sequences. If you’ve played any of them in the past 20 years, you probably know a few yourself. Show of hands: how many people here can execute a Hadoken? You start in the down position on the D-pad, roll through the diagonal, and finish by pressing in the direction of attack and a punch button. Hell, these basic sequences are so ubiquitous that they seeped out of the fighting genre into RPGs a decade ago (Sabin’s Blitzes, anyone?) and into other genres since then.

Using button combinations and sequences makes a lot of sense when you stop to think about it. For most fighting games, there’s a lot more attacks and defense actions than there are buttons on the controller. Sequences and combinations help you load all that extra functionality onto the same number of buttons. There’s a price tag, though. More combinations and sequences means more crap to remember and document.

The developers usually don’t seem to enjoy documenting (at least in the home versions of these games. The arcade versions usually had half the cabinet covered with instructions on how to do inverted helicopter kicks), but that’s not really that big of a deal. The real problem comes from memorizing the arbitrary relationship between button sequences and their outcomes.

There’s nothing about pressing forward, down, and then a diagonal that’s particularly evocative of an uppercut, no matter what Street Fighter II may have taught you. It’s something you have to explicitly memorize, like the Latin name for butterflies they tested you on in 10th grade biology (Lepidoptera). When you have a list of 7 meaningless sequences for every character in a fighting game, it’s not gameplay, it’s homework.

This problem only gets worse with the addition of combos. It’s bad enough to memorize an arbitrary button sequence for an action, but when you have to memorize sequences of these sequences, something has gone very wrong. Killer Instinct was particularly guilty of this, including combos of up to 37 arbitrary serial keypresses to trigger minute-long pummelings.

Not all fighters have been quite so bad about this sort of thing. Super Smash Brothers put the analog stick to good use and used the speed at which you tilted the stick to represent the force of an attack. This same stick was also used to control the direction of attack. Overloading a button or stick with too many functions can get confusing, but Smash Brothers circumvents the problem neatly by having those functions make sense outside the context of the game. So, if you want to attack upward as hard as your character can, you strongly tap up on the analog stick and press the attack button at the same time. Contrast this with having to press forward, down, and then a diagonal with a punch button for an uppercut, and you can start to appreciate how the Smash Brothers approach is easier to learn.

The Smash Brothers solution usually gets called “intuitive control design” or something similar, but that’s just another way of saying ecologically valid. If a control scheme is ecologically valid, the controls will make sense in much the same way as the rest of the world makes sense. The player doesn’t have to work very hard to remember to press the up button and the attack button to attack upwards because the player already knows that the blending of direction with action yields directed action. An ecologically valid control design allows the player to rely on general experience to help figure out and remember a game’s specific controls. Heck, I’d even venture to say that discovering each character’s “up-attack” is rewarding in much the same way as exploration. It’s an exploration of each character’s abilities, if you will.

Getting back to Mortal Kombat (remember that?), I have to ask, will this be even better? Well, we’ve identified two major issues to address in the design of these kinds of controls: providing an ecologically valid control scheme so the player can figure out many or most of the controls on the fly, and minimizing the load of arbitrary relationships between buttons and actions.

The answer turns out to be maybe yes and maybe no. On the maybe yes side, the commands are pretty ecologically valid. The commands for special attacks tend to mimic the special attacks themselves in some way, so they should be pretty quick to learn and easy to remember. On the maybe no side, if there’s a different gesture for every special attack on every character, that’ll be quite a stack of garbage information to learn. It’s encouraging to see that the projectile attacks (i.e. Scorpion’s spear throw and Cyber’s rockets) seem to share a common gesture. Fatalities, on the other hand, still seem to have unique chains of serial actions that, while they mimic the actions of the character onscreen, are probably different for every fatality and make for more rote memorization.

Looking at the comments below the article, there seems to be a lot of fan resentment about the switch in control schemes. Some complain that the new control scheme will make the execution of special attacks too simple. It’s easy to sympathize with them to some degree. Those players have probably learned most of the button sequences I’ve been complaining about, and see a switch to a “more intuitive” control scheme as invalidating the hours they’ve spent learning the old scheme.

They’re right. It does.

Cutting out the learning curve will let noobs with clever strategies threaten their dominion over fighting games. However, you have to remember that these cumbersome button sequences were a necessary evil and a developmental stage, not an end in themselves. Also, making a genre accessible to a broader audience isn’t a bad thing. New blood will generate more interest and fighting games might become more attractive to publishers. More publisher interest means more money and more fighting games. Who knows? After a few years of Wiimote fighters, you may wonder how fighting games survived with such primitive interface tricks.

Another common complaint is that the gesture controls will be imprecise. There’s a lot of worry about lag between command input and execution, and accidental incorrect input. That’s a valid worry, it’s frustrating to have loose control in games where precision timing matters. However, that’s an awkward phase that analog control went through as well, and now it’s an indispensable standard. Remember every FPS control scheme before Halo? They all pretty much sucked before Bungie figured out that fine sensitivity near the center stick position and coarse sensitivity at the edges made for a nice balance between precision and responsiveness. Hopefully, as software generations proceed, we’ll see a similar progression of refinement in Wii controls.

Finally, I think these issues apply to Wii control design as a whole. The point of the Wiimote is to break down barriers to entry by minimizing the learning curve. However, it’s easy to see, just from this short Mortal Kombat video, that the inclusion of gestures doesn’t automatically make controls “intuitive.” Designers, please remember this as you develop the interface: it’s not fun to memorize fifty arbitrary controls, but it is fun to have fifty easily-inferred controls once you know the first three.

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