Saturday, August 14, 2010

Play and Buttons and Fingers

I was reading a New Yorker article, "Painkiller Deathstreak: Adventures in Video Games", by Nicholson Baker in the August 9th, 2010, issue, and, concerning the "seventeen possible points of contact" for his fingers and the Xbox 360 controller that he may need to consider to play a game and do one of the many actions he lists (like run, crouch, aim, fire, pause, leap, speak, stab, grab, kick--actually I think he lists 17), he writes...

It's a little like playing 'Blue Rondo a la Turk' on the clarinet, then switching to the tenor sax, then the oboe, then back to the clarinet.
So, yes, crazy mad finger positioning that you had better know ahead of time, like I was talking about previously.