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with the action. But there is no reason why such an
arrangement should persist.
Early sports games like Daley Thompson’s
Decathlon actually boasted a far more compelling
physical interface with the notorious
“joystickwaggling” method: the faster you could
waggle your joystick from side to side, the faster your
character would sprint or skate. This system has been
resurrected for Konami’s brilliant multi-player athletics
game International Track and Field 2 (1999), except
that the player must now press two buttons alternately
at very high speed. But Sony’s present-day controller
for the PlayStation, the Dual Shock pad with two
thumbcontrolled analogue joysticks, has so far been
woefully underused in just the types of game it could
revolutionize in a similar way.
An analogue joystick provides far greater sensitivity
and range of control. The old-style digital joysticks
only recognized “on” or “off” states of any particular
direction; the analogue joystick recognizes degrees of
change. You can move, for example, slightly right or
fully right, with degrees in between, which may
correspond to various velocities between a slow walk
and a run, or various rotational positions of
