Taking a question from chat to the masses
Feb. 17th, 2014 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendi("Masses" on LJ. I know, right?)
From a chat session with my daughter: "How did WASD become commonplace in a world dominated by righties?"
It's something I seriously don't get. Movement tends to be the more complicated action of a standard arcade-style game. Given the position of one's hands and the keyboard, using the WASD keys means reaching across the keyboard or using the left hand, while the arrow keys are much more conveniently placed. Is this still the legacy of the awfully-laid out PC-AT keyboard from the '80s that wasted the left side with function keys and had the arrows double with the number pad? That's a sad legacy. Even back then, other computers had figured it out (my beloved Atari ST definitely had a standard set of arrows, which made playing Dungeon Master so damned simple).
Yet it still seems like WASD is the default set of movement controls in most games.
So are we living with a silly legacy from over twenty years ago for no better reason than inertia?
Was there a lull after the mid-80s WASD craze (and I know it existed, because I remember playing any number of games that had it then on the school PCs) and the current one? Was this something that started again post-Doom with the used of the mouse for aiming in FPS games? I remember the Marathon games (which, incidentally, remain my favorite FPS games of all time) having WASD as the default, and my modifying the keys each time.
Or am I just the only person (other than my daughter) who prefers arrow keys to WASD?
From a chat session with my daughter: "How did WASD become commonplace in a world dominated by righties?"
It's something I seriously don't get. Movement tends to be the more complicated action of a standard arcade-style game. Given the position of one's hands and the keyboard, using the WASD keys means reaching across the keyboard or using the left hand, while the arrow keys are much more conveniently placed. Is this still the legacy of the awfully-laid out PC-AT keyboard from the '80s that wasted the left side with function keys and had the arrows double with the number pad? That's a sad legacy. Even back then, other computers had figured it out (my beloved Atari ST definitely had a standard set of arrows, which made playing Dungeon Master so damned simple).
Yet it still seems like WASD is the default set of movement controls in most games.
So are we living with a silly legacy from over twenty years ago for no better reason than inertia?
Was there a lull after the mid-80s WASD craze (and I know it existed, because I remember playing any number of games that had it then on the school PCs) and the current one? Was this something that started again post-Doom with the used of the mouse for aiming in FPS games? I remember the Marathon games (which, incidentally, remain my favorite FPS games of all time) having WASD as the default, and my modifying the keys each time.
Or am I just the only person (other than my daughter) who prefers arrow keys to WASD?