Controls: WASD deserves to die
Earlier I mentioned that I’m indebted to Gothic 2. That’s because the newbie experience was so awful that it drove me to Gamefaqs, where I found this Survival Guide by alterEgo. In the guide, the author expressed his distaste for WASD and explained how he used ESDF instead. Reading his explanation made perfect sense, and I felt obtuse for never thinking about it before. Look at the keyboard. Where are your fingers? My left hand rests on A, W/S, E and R/F. There’s a little notch on the F key for identification. Placing my fingers on ESDF requires almost no adjustment whatsoever. Now, if I moved my fingers over to WASD, I’m putting a crink in my wrist. My arm is no longer straight and it’s not as comfortable to hit the keys.
I had wrist pain for years when I played PC games, and I coudn’t play WASD games well because I had to play cautiously. I severely restricted my playtime because I was looking at long-term injuries, and I avoided quite a few games. Then I switched to ESDF and it went away almost immediately. That’s huge, and it’s hard for me to understate my enthusiasm for anything that is not WASD. It makes me wonder how many other people have the same problem, because WASD is unnatural and jams up the wrist. RTS games are still an RSI risk, but that’s generally from requiring constant mouse movement and an absurd number of mouseclicks (even with hotkeys).
I’m still waiting to find a game that offers an ESDF control set, even if it isn’t the default, but I’m not keeping my hopes up. WASD is deeply ingrained in games, and it’ll be hard to get rid of even if it shouldn’t exist. Where else does this happen in our industry? What simple controls adjustments could we make to improve the general ease of gameplay and quality of life?
March 14th, 2008 at 8:35 am
I agree with you, although I think one reason people stuck with WASD over ESDF is that the former has easier access to the ctrl, shift, caps, and tab keys. However, as more and more games use things like circular and contextual mouse menus instead of extra keyboard keys, I think that concern has less and less merit.
March 14th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
This could be an entirely personal thing, but I find ESDF works better for me with ctrl/shift/alt/caps/tab. My fingers are relatively long, so that may help. When I’m using WASD and hit those keys, I scrunch up my hand in two places and it causes more problems. It’s harder to hit those keys on ESDF, but the movement feels more natural and comfortable with repeated use.