Hidden Levels #2: Stick It to 'Em

From airplanes to Pac-Man to the battlefield, the joystick has quietly shaped the way humans connect with machines.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

  This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year. The first school drop-off, the first sweater-weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions: crunching leaves in Maine-made Bean Boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean: Be an Outsider.

• 0:36Roman Mars?

  If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed-sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs. 99% Invisible is presented by Acura. Curating and designing the perfect experience takes meticulous craft, an obsession with detail, and a love for innovation.

• 1:20Roman Mars?

  Just like museum designers, Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience for drivers. That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel: that flutter in your heart, the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles. And that is precision-crafted performance.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Roman Mars, when I say Konami code, does this mean anything to you?

• 1:56Roman Mars?

  Ben Brock Johnson, it means zero to me, actually. I have no idea what you're talking about.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Okay, alright.

• 2:03Roman Mars?

  I mean, when you say code, maybe, maybe I think of a cheat code. That's, that's about it. That's all I got.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  You're getting warm. You're getting warm. We were, you know, we were mentioning all these kind of Easter eggs and cheat codes at the end of our first episode about NBA Jam. And this is maybe the most famous, I would say, at least in some circles, so-called cheat code of all time. And it originated in a game called Gradius in 1986.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  So Gradius Roman is this spaceship shooter game, which I think both you and I enjoy.

• 2:39Roman Mars?

  Totally.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  It was made by the Japanese entertainment company Konami. And Gradius, it had this code in it. The code would give you power ups in the game. So like bigger guns, more shields, things like that, to help you fight the bad guys. To access this cheat code, there's a series of buttons and movements. And this code became a signature of Gradius and it was so popular, it was copied into other games. So for example, Roman, you might know this as the Contra code.

• 3:08Roman Mars?

  Yes. That sounds more familiar. Yeah. That, that's a side-scrolling shooter, Contra, right?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And if you use this cheat code, you get 30 extra lives, which was important for Contra because Contra was a, could be a hard game.

• 3:23Roman Mars?

  Having 30 lives helps.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  So this code is now so popular. It's also been reused, for instance, in Google Home. If you put this into Google Home, you'll get an interesting response. It, it's almost become its own kind of meme or reference. It's this wink from gamer to gamer that you both know this piece of video game lore.

• 3:43Roman Mars?

  Okay, so if this cheat code is everywhere, like, how do you access it?

• 3:46Speaker 01

  It is a series of moves on the controller. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, button or select, Roman, or B or A, depending on, you know, what controller you're using, what game. But the constant here, Roman, is the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, which admittedly sounds like gibberish. When we say it out loud, but the difficulty of executing this particular cheat code really depends on the controller. It could definitely cramp your fingers on the Nintendo, but this code was so much easier for consoles that use an actual joystick.

• 4:24Roman Mars?

  I could totally see it being easier on a joystick because, you know, it's just, that's what a joystick is for, is for going up and down. It's kind of the ur controller. And a lot of things are designed around the joystick itself.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  That's right. There's so much that flows out of the joystick's development. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. This is Hidden Levels, our series about how the video game world has changed the world beyond video games. And today, we're going to find out how the joystick was created and why it has endured.

• 4:54Roman Mars?

  Hidden Levels is our collaboration between 99% Invisible and Ben's podcast from WBUR, Endless Thread.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  And my Endless Thread co-host, Amory Severson, brings us this one. Enjoy.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  It was mid-December 1903, on the northern coast of North Carolina. Two brothers, known at the time for a thriving bicycle business, were about to change the world. Orville and Wilbur Wright were about to go from pedaling to piloting an engine-powered airplane. Now, I remember hearing about the Wright brothers in school, but what I did not know until recently is how they flew this thing. It was a full-body activity. Rather than sitting upright, the pilot was in a prone position. Wilbur Wright, we'll go with

• 5:57Speaker 02

  him since he made the longer flight, sorry, Orville, Wilbur's hips were resting in something called the hip cradle, pieces of wood on either side that were connected to the tips of the wings of the plane with wire. So as Wilbur tilted his hips right and left, he was tilting the plane right and left.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  The up and down tilt of the plane was controlled by a lever in Wilbur's left hand, connected by a pulley system. This flight was an incredible feat, all 59 seconds of it. Yep, that's it. Because as the Wright brothers would be the first to tell you, their plane was really hard to control. They trained for months trying to get that hip lean and lever tilt just right. But it was a little like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, except taking your life in your hands and hips.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  But just a few years later, in 1907, a French aviation pioneer, Robert Esno Pelteri, suggested a new streamlined solution for bringing human and machine together. A way to maneuver a plane up and down and right and left with a single stick. All that mobility and control in the palm of one hand, almost like an extension of the self. Esno Pelteri never experienced this for himself, but he did secure the patent for this new instrument, unaware that what he was patenting would end up in military planes

• 7:39Speaker 02

  and machinery, but also in arcades and homes around the world. I'm talking about the joystick. The origins of the term joystick are a bit murky. Some credit the British actor and aviator Robert Lorraine, who used it in a diary entry in 1910. Others claim the joystick was originally the Joyce-stick, named for a different early 20th century aviator and inventor, James Henry Joyce of Missouri. One thing scholars largely do agree on, contrary to what you might read on the internet, the

• 8:19Speaker 02

  joy in joystick does not have to do with its positioning between the legs of the pilot, like you might see in many World War I era planes. It's simply the exhilaration, the joy of taking flight.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Now, most of us haven't personally taken flight, but we've likely controlled something with a joystick.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  I'm gonna get it. I'm gonna get it right by the head.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Those claw arcade games where you try to grab onto a stuffed animal?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Maybe some sort of forklift or a construction vehicle? Or, most likely...

• 9:01Speaker 04

  I want this guy with the crazy blue hair.

• 9:04Speaker 05

  Ludwig.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  Ludwig. How do I select?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  A video game.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  The most important part is the joystick, so use that to steer.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  This is my friend Philip.

• 9:12Speaker 05

  Oh, top right is jump.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  My other friend Kelly. Hey.

• 9:15Speaker 04

  Oh, sorry. I'm sorry.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  And my husband Mike, all bearing with me.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Oh, I feel like I'm enduring a lot of hits.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  In baby's first game of Mario Kart.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  I'm staying on the road. It's a miracle.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Experienced players would agree, the joystick has made video game controllers what they are: easy, precise, and fun.

• 9:39Speaker 04

  I finished!

• 9:40Speaker 03

  Hey, you've advanced. You're advanced.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  And yet, it's only in recent decades that most of us have even had them within reach.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  In many ways, video games and joysticks and other controllers were moonlighting projects for a lot of engineers and early computer scientists, so...

• 10:02Speaker 02

  This is David O'Grady. He's a lecturer in Design Media Arts at UCLA and a researcher in its game lab. And he told me that a lot of the first video games were developed in labs, but these ones were at institutions and companies known for working on technological developments for the military.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  You know, it was a way to kind of use your downtime to develop something other than some kind of military application or a missile tracking system, or you might try to make a game just as a sideline kind of project.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  One such engineer using his downtime to create a downtime activity was Ralph Bayer, the guy who invented the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, in 1972.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  The Odyssey's controls were knobs that you'd twist to do things like play a game of tennis.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  The horizontal knob on the left side of each player control unit allows you to move your player light in a left to right or right to left direction. The vertical knob on the right side of each player control unit lets you move your player light in an up and down direction.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  I don't know. This sounds a little like the Wright brothers, rocking their hips to move the plane one way, pulling a lever to move it another. Clunky, takes some getting used to. But what if, just like in aviation, we streamlined the maneuvering with a single joyful stick?

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Ralph Baer did actually make a prototype of a video game joystick, but he wasn't the first to incorporate it into a game you'd see on shelves, David says.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  It would actually take until a little later in the 1970s for us to see commercially a device that we would call a joystick today. In fact, it was the Atari joystick, which is absolutely iconic. This little kind of squat, black box with this stock on top of it and a single red button to the side. This is kind of the first, the first moment where the joystick becomes, you know, not just a specialty piece of military hardware or something that airline pilots control when they fly, but something that all of us have access to.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  This accessible joystick came with the Atari VCS, or Video Computer System, first released in 1977, and better known today as the Atari 2600. Don't watch television tonight. Play it. Imagine what it must have been like as a kid back then, to have a game on your TV that you get to control using the same tool that's been used to fly planes. And yet, it's childishly simple to operate, almost no learning curve, just power and possibilities.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  So where does the joystick's power come from? What makes it so great? It starts with a term you hear a lot when talking joysticks with an expert like David O'Grady.

• 13:13Speaker 04

  An interface for flying is probably how we would describe it today.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Interface. A point where two things meet: human and machine.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  And so a flight stick, a joystick, the kinds of controllers that we use today for video games and other applications, these are all an attempt to solve a fundamental issue, which is how do you provide human input to a device or a machine?

• 13:42Speaker 02

  In other words, what are the physical instruments that allow us to turn intention into action, that help make a machine feel like an extension of the self? And what the joystick really has going for it?

• 13:55Speaker 04

  Is this idea of affordance. What does the interface you're using enable, right? What does it allow you to do?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  For example, David says, our human biomechanics afford us the ability to walk, to move ourselves through space. A joystick affords us the ability to move something else through space without really having to think about it.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  Exactly. I think that's such an important part of interface design, from joysticks to mice to everything else, that in some ways it is a kind of invisible art. For most applications, we want the interface to disappear. We want to look at where we're pointing, not at the hand that's doing the pointing, right? That's, so.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  We want it to feel like mind control, like we're just controlling things with our mind without having to.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. There's something very automatic about it, right?

• 14:51Speaker 02

  What David's getting at here is really another meaning of affordance. It's not just about what an interface allows us to do, it's knowing how to do it intuitively.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  There's a kind of... Direct manipulation quality to it. Do you want to move forward on a screen? Press the stick forward. Do you want to move backwards within the environment of the screen? Pull the stick backwards. Do you want to go left?

• 15:17Speaker 02

  The joystick has what's called perceived affordance. You see one and you know exactly how to use it. Compare that to those knobs on the Magnavox Odyssey. Sure, you can imagine that you should probably twist them. But what does that motion have to do with moving through space? Now with a joystick.

• 15:38Speaker 04

  The motion of your hand and arm deeply corresponds with what's happening on screen. You don't really need to read an instruction manual to do that.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  This was just the pep talk I needed before taking a field trip to a joystick wonderland. So everything's usable. Okay. But it does go chronological. Jeff Boojak is the owner of Prodigy, an 8,000-square-foot game room in western Massachusetts with a glow-in-the-dark mini-golf course in the center. Hell, yeah. And a perimeter of more than 6,000 retro video games and their consoles dating back to the late 70s. It's pretty much is my collection. I'm a organized hoarder. Jeff has all matter of retro video game accessories, too. The Nintendo Power Glove, a short-lived, ill-performing motion-control device that made you look like a space movie badass from the forearm down? Jeff's got it.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  This was horrible because for every game you had to put into different code. The Logitech Netplay, basically a full-sized keyboard scooched between two halves of a modern-ish game controller? Jeff has that, too. This was the, hey, let's just combine everything because computers at this point were starting to really take off. This was like. But most importantly, Jeff has the Atari 2600.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  This was probably the best built controller. I'd driven two hours to see one of these nearly 50-year-old home consoles in person. And?

• 17:14Speaker 02

  They're boring looking. They're like, I mean, they're, I'm sure they were very exciting for the time, but yeah, this looks like this could be your, your grandpa's radio or something. Exactly, yeah. Just black and brown and nothing that says like, "Spend a lot of time with me." But Jeff kindly fired it up for me. And then of course you have to turn it down because it's incredibly loud. So I could experience the Atari joystick for myself in a game of Pac-Man. And then you just move a joystick. That's it. What's the button for then? Nothing. With a little square joystick panel steadied on my lap with my left hand and my right fist white knuckling

• 17:54Speaker 02

  the joystick, I jolt it right, left, forward, back, trying to gobble up as many little Pac-Man pellets as I can, until... You're being thrown right in. I'm supposed to avoid the ghosts. Okay. Yeah, you're supposed to get the small pellets. I meet a demise so swift, I think even Jeff is surprised. But I try again and pretty quickly I realize something that he'd actually warned me about with the Atari joystick. It is rigid. I'm having a hard, like, it's not as responsive as I thought it would be. Nope. No! This iconic device sucks. It's stiff to the point where it hurts my wrist minutes into the game. Could you imagine hours? No.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  But back when the Atari joystick was a novel thing in the late 70s, people did spend hours with it. Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Adventure, you could play 1,300 different game variations with this one joystick console. Have you played Defender? It's the newest of the smash-hit home video games that just keep coming. Before people had home computers or the internet, or even just a wider variety of TV channels, this was the epitome of joy.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  This is all you did. I mean, I'm sure when a family got this, kids were playing with these joysticks for seven... Seven, eight hours at a time. Their hands and wrists must have gotten massive fatigue, like massive fatigue. I can only play these for maybe 10 minutes. And that's where this frees that up. By this, Jeff means an entirely different controller he's now holding.

• 19:39Speaker 06

  This is the Nintendo 64 that you have in front of you?

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:42Speaker 06

  This is the one with the like, the three little prongs? And you hold on to the two outer prongs, then there's just the one.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Prongs, the handles, let's say. And yes, awkwardly enough, there are three of them on the Nintendo 64 controller. It's shaped kind of like an upside down trident. Out with the boring block-like devices, this controller, which came out in 1996, looked like a little spaceship. And positioned on the middle handle is a whitish protrusion, maybe half an inch high. That's where Nintendo was like, they really hit the nail on the head with that. They made video games extremely addicting at that point.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  The nail on the head, more like the thumb on the stick.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  This was a new kind of joystick, a thumbstick, made for navigating a video game with the intuitiveness of a joystick, but with much greater ease of movement. No more stiff wrists, just smooth thumb circles. And you're like, oh, okay, I can play for 12 hours now. It wasn't just the interface that was changing around this time. The games were too. As the micro processing power of video game consoles increased, game worlds were able to go from two dimensions, where the characters really only went up and down or right and left, to three.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  You might remember from, I don't know, high school algebra or something, the X-axis, left and right, the Y-axis up and down. Well, now we're on a Z-axis, moving towards you and away from you.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  David O'Grady again, our game scholar from UCLA.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  We had whole genres of games that were starting to emerge in the 1990s that used a kind of first-person point of view. In fact, we kind of know them still as first-person shooters, were huge in popularizing a way of playing in 3D space, essentially.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Games like?

• 21:41Speaker 02

  GoldenEye 007.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Which allowed a player to weave through concrete mazes, up ladders, across bridges.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  These games have a point of view where you are the camera, essentially. And so you don't really see much of an avatar of yourself on screen or of the character you're playing.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Other than your gun-toting hand, in this case.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  It pretty much is you.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  And you are immersed, going right, left, up, down, and deep in virtual reality.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  So we have the genius of the joystick right at our thumb tips. We have the ability to move through games with visual depth until

• 22:30Speaker 02

  we hit a wall, literally. Because with just one thumbstick that controls movement, we don't have an easy way to look where we're going first. So now, David says.

• 22:42Speaker 04

  We need to separate out movement from looking. These are two fundamental things that we tend to do in our lives and also in games, which tend to simulate things that come from our lived experience.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  In real life, we don't have to move in a particular direction whenever we look that way. Like, now I'm looking over here, here I come. Now I'm looking over here, here I come. And we can move in one direction while looking in another. Now, it's not that you couldn't look and move distinctly or strafe on the N64 controller, but it was inelegant, involved more buttons, specifically the D-pad, or directional pad, the up-down-left-right cross-shaped one, which just isn't as easy or precise as the thumbstick. And so?

• 23:34Speaker 04

  The long and short of it is we came up with a two thumb solution. Two analog thumbsticks that sit underneath each of your thumbs.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Analog, meaning you are controlling the degree of motion with how hard you press the thumbstick in a particular direction. And two joysticks to physically separate the looking from the going.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  The right thumbstick typically is sort of pointing the way to go, and the left thumbstick is actually doing it. It's the movement.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Basically, one joystick is your eyes, the other, your legs. The pioneer of this two thumb solution? Sony PlayStation's Dual Thumbstick Controller, which came out a year after the Nintendo 64 in 1997, with, yes, two thumbsticks symmetrically positioned, that afforded you the ability to move very precisely and aim very accurately. Like in Medal of Honor, a World War II combat game created by Steven Spielberg and inspired

• 24:44Speaker 02

  by his then-recent film Saving Private Ryan, and, according to a couple of his collaborators, by watching his son play GoldenEye 007. It was among the first games to really integrate both thumbsticks into its gameplay. With a second thumbstick, it was easier than ever to make your on-screen avatar do exactly what you wanted it to, as close to mind control as a controller could get. The gaming industry had reached peak interface, and the proof is in the play. Because while the video game industry has continued to iterate on the design, Xbox

• 25:28Speaker 02

  moved the thumbsticks diagonally, the tactile experience has become increasingly buttery, as I felt for myself in Jeff Boojak's game room. Oh, these thumbsticks are very joyful, very smooth. The dual-stick controller itself hasn't changed all that much, functionally or stylistically, in the nearly 30 years that we've been using it now to navigate 3D space. What has changed in that time are the spaces we're using it to navigate. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. In fact, just throw it to your troops. Coming up, video game thumbsticks go from game world battlefields to real ones.

• 26:40Roman Mars?

  Instagram teen accounts have automatic protections on by default. Built-in content settings for the content teens can see, contact limits for who can contact them, and time management tools like daily time limits and sleep mode. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts, and teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. This episode is presented by Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort from start to finish. Enjoy priority check-in and boarding, followed by access to peaceful lounges.

• 27:25Roman Mars?

  Onboard, savour menus created by renowned French chefs, paired with wines and champagne selected by sommelier. Stay connected with free high-speed Wi-Fi. Then unwind in a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with a mattress topper developed with Sofitel MyBed, a signature touch of French hospitality. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year: the first school drop-off, the first sweater-weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions:

• 28:09Roman Mars?

  crunching leaves in Maine-made Bean Boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean: Be an Outsider.

• 28:29Roman Mars?

  If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed Sponsored Jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Within a century, we've gone from using a joystick to navigate three-dimensional airspace, to using it to move Pac-Man two-dimensionally, up, down, left, right, on screen, to shrinking it beneath our thumbs, to adding a thumbstick to make maneuvering through a game world feel like moving through the real world. And where we've arrived now, at the modern dual-stick video game controller, is a new period of evolution. Not of the interface itself, but in what we're using it for.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  What makes, in your mind, a video game controller the right tool for operating the kinds of advanced weapons that the military is using it for? It's generally a matter of familiarity.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Jared Keller is a longtime military technology journalist. He wrote a piece for Wired magazine last year called "This Video Game Controller Has Become the U.S. Military's Weapon of Choice." The controller he's talking about is the Freedom of Movement Control Unit, or FMCU. It's rugged, it's designed to be durable and to endure intense environments.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  But to the average observer, it would look like anything that comes with a PlayStation or Xbox.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like shaped like a PlayStation or Xbox controller, but it's like tan in color, you know, kind of your stereotypical military color palette.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yes, coyote tan is what they call.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Coyote tan, okay.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, or sometimes, you know, desert tan, right?

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Right, but really, I cannot stress enough that if these FMCU controllers weren't desert tan, you really would just think they were for Fortnite or Final Fantasy. They have the two thumbsticks, the D-pad, the all-too-familiar trigger buttons on the tops of the handles, except in this case, they are actual triggers.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  The military has been experimenting with video game controllers for the last two decades, but their proliferation and use has really accelerated in recent years as their utility has been demonstrated in various field experiments and tests.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  The Pentagon has confirmed the use of the FMCU controller in the Air Force's RADBO, or Recovery of Airbases Denied by Ordnance Vehicle, a boxy desert tan bomb-finding truck. Also in the Army's Short Range Air Defense System. Picture heavy-duty vehicles, often unmanned, with turrets and machine guns and missile launchers mounted on top to take out low-flying threats like helicopters and small planes. "Every mission is different," the FMCU's product description reads. Shouldn't your controller be as versatile as you are?

• 32:10Speaker 02

  "The FMCU isn't the only game controller that's in the action," Jared says. The Army's Locust Laser Weapon System blasts drones out of the sky using an actual Xbox controller.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  It gives the operator a better sense of control and

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Focus on a system that requires precision to be effective.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  And the US military isn't the only one using video game controllers. The British Army, the Israel Defense Forces, also the armed forces of Ukraine, who Jared says have been using PlayStation controllers to direct armed drones and machine gun turrets at invading Russian forces. So, why? Why video game controllers? One reason, as you heard, is familiarity.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who are going to make up the majority of the armed forces in the coming decades, have grown up on these systems. So why waste time building a new one when you can give prospective troops something they're already familiar with and can use almost instantaneously?

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Another, that precision Jared was talking about. The mobility of the thumbsticks for directing vehicles and weaponry. And the level of responsiveness that, according to the FMCU's product description, can, quote, "be the difference between success and failure."

• 33:37Speaker 02

  But also, the military doesn't have to reinvent the controller. In fact, Jared says, that might be for the best.

• 33:45Speaker 03

  I think we've all heard the joke that a camel is a horse designed by committee.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  I have not heard that joke.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, but and often, you know, a lot of proprietary systems designed by the DOD end up being camels. Not necessarily because of, you know, bad design decisions, but because the knowledge and understanding and research exists out there in the private sector.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Not only does it already exist, Jared says, it may very well have already been perfected.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  The gaming companies, as the technologist Peter Singer put it years ago, spent tons of money developing what is optimal, intuitive, and easy to learn. And the military is basically saying, well, they did the job for us. Let's build these systems so that this next generation of warfighters can adapt those skills seamlessly to a military context.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  The game companies did the job for them. Now, when it comes to the joystick specifically, this full-circle moment is not all that surprising, right? The joystick is part of the military's aviation history and development. It's not new to them.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  The joystick has kind of proven itself over the last several decades as the man-machine interface of choice.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  It's just kept getting better.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  There is no more intuitive, optimized system for delicate, precise control of remotely operated technology than the joystick.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Now, the word remotely is important here because when we're using joysticks to navigate through game worlds, we know those worlds on our screen aren't real. When a soldier is using a video game controller to shoot down a helicopter on a screen, it is real and deadly. We've designed something that makes it easier than ever to execute incredibly consequential tasks.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Then again, these consequential tasks can also be life-saving. Last year, an endoscopy was performed on a live pig in Hong Kong from thousands of miles away in Switzerland using a PlayStation. And momentum behind game controllers in medicine is building. Earlier this year, the FDA approved the latest iteration of the Monarch Bronchoscopy System, which uses a controller adapted directly from the Xbox to maneuver a tiny tube through a patient's lungs to find and treat diseases. It is uncanny. The Xbox-esque black-and-white design,

• 36:45Speaker 02

  the two-handle shape, the two thumbsticks in that familiar diagonal orientation. The same optimized interface from the game room to the war room to the operating room.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  How do you feel about about game controllers being repurposed for things like this?

• 37:09Speaker 07

  Well, I'm always happy when the geeks win.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Miko Hinonen is the creator of the Finnish Museum of Games in Tampura, Finland, and one half of the team behind its 2023 exhibition, "The Joy of Sticks." It featured hundreds of gaming joysticks from Miko's personal collection, but also traced the interface's significance in society, from aviation to medicine.

• 37:37Speaker 07

  Examples like these show that games have always been and are very much connected.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  This is the exhibit's other half, Niklas Nulund, one of the museum's curators. Despite the joy these Finns find in sticks, Miko and Niklas do acknowledge begrudgingly that the next big interface is already here.

• 38:00Speaker 07

  Nowadays, everybody is using the touchscreen for everything.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. The touchscreen. It is ubiquitous. But just because it's big doesn't mean it's better. In fact, what makes the joystick great as an interface is the same thing that makes the touchscreen basically a black box. This idea of perceived affordance. You look at a joystick, you know how to use it. It's an intuitive piece of hardware. You look at a touchscreen, and it's a flat piece of glass. Zero perceived affordance, completely beholden to its software. And so what the touchscreen affords us is really only what the software developers want us to be able to do with it.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  And Niklas isn't particularly happy about it.

• 38:55Speaker 07

  Touchscreens are scarily monolithic, and they sort of become like, I guess, like a metaphor for the... Influence of the big tech companies nowadays. Everything is put into the same type of interface.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  And that same interface is bombarding us with endless possible uses. Apps, maps, games, that each have their own way of using the touchscreen that you have to get used to. From swiping through potential soulmates, oof, not much joy in that, to signing your name with your fingertip. And we all know how well that usually turns out.

• 39:34Speaker 07

  On a touchscreen, you can do a lot of things, but like being very precise is not one of them.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  No, it is not, Miko. But convenience, versatility, those are perhaps the touchscreen's primary affordances. One interface in our pockets all the time that allows us to communicate, shop, split a bill with friends, and crush all the candy.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  But touchscreens have also made life literally flatter. Think of how many dials and buttons we've squashed into extinction. On our phones, our cash registers, in our cars. We're losing our grip on the world. One swipe, scroll, and tap at a time. But the joystick.

• 40:27Speaker 07

  It's very different because you actually use your body when controlling.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  It offers us a physical, human-machine connection, Niklas says. The tactile, empowering experience of maneuvering an actual object to explore 3D space in a self-controlled way. Whether we're flying a plane or driving Mario's cart. Poorly, in my case. I think I'm crushing it.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  It's our bodily affordances and machine affordances coming together in joyful, sometimes exhilarating harmony.

• 41:05Speaker 07

  You kind of become one with the joystick. And I think that's something that stays in people's muscle memory or bodily memory. Like, we want to be able to be very precise, or we want to be able...

• 41:17Speaker 02

  To to sort of use our bodies for controlling and and sort of joysticks maybe remind us of this, that there's options, the breadth of of different ways is is good for us.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  You know, I too think maintaining a physical connection to our physical world with a physical interface like the joystick is good for us, just like it's good to use our own software and hardware, our brains and bodies, and to be able to move those heads and bodies separately. So it's not really about one interface replacing another, or it shouldn't be. It's about having the tool that affords what you need: versatility, specificity, convenience, precision. It all depends on the game.

• 42:09Speaker 05

  So Emery on the right, those orange things, they could go faster.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:12Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  It's kind of propelling arrows. You guys were setting me up for failure. We've been competing.

• 42:19Speaker 05

  Hooray!

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Ludwig, 12th, 12th of 12.

• 42:37Roman Mars?

  Ben Brock Johnson.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Roman Mars.

• 42:39Roman Mars?

  I love that story, but I have one bone to pick with Emery Severson because I'm here to tell you that the Atari 2600 joystick is a beautiful piece of design that you're like, weak-wristed millennials get tired using it.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:55Roman Mars?

  That is your problem. That is not Atari 2600's problem.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  To say nothing of the rich mahogany veneer on the outside of this thing. It really is a beautiful piece of machinery.

• 43:06Roman Mars?

  The machine is gorgeous. You could throw it down three flights of stairs. You could fry an egg on it and it'll still play. That thing is a gorgeous piece of the pinnacle of design. And so like, when she goes that, she's like, I don't like it. Like, what the hell is going on there? But anyway, I'll let her have her say. She is a great reporter.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  So, Roman, your letters and everybody else's letters about Emery's thoughts on the Atari 2600, I'll happily bring them directly to her.

• 43:34Roman Mars?

  Forward to her, because I will not have any of this Atari slander in my house.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  But of course, Amory talked about some much more serious stuff that we're going to pick up in our next episode, and that is military applications for video game technology. For episode three of Hidden Levels, we're going to tell you how the US military uses video games to recruit.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  So, you're probably wondering to yourself, "The US Army has an esports program? Why? And how do I join?" The US Army Esports Program is a recruiting outreach tool to help the Army connect with the fast-growing esports audience.

• 44:13Roman Mars?

  That is the next time on Hidden Levels from 99% Invisible and Endless Thread.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by Amory Severson, was edited by Meg Kramer, mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski, additional mixing by Martine Gonzalez, music composition by Paul Vikes, series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vikes, fact checking by Laura Bullins. Special thanks to Amory's Mario Kart opponents, Philip Susie, Kelly O'Connell, and Mike Moskato, and to Henry Lowood for sharing his expertise and tipping Amory off to the Joy of Sticks exhibition.

• 44:49Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible's executive producer is Kathy Too. Kurt Colstead is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Jason DeLeone, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Laishma Dawn, Jacob Medina Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nester. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR. The rest of our team tackling unsolved mysteries, untold histories, and other wild stories from the internet includes managing producer Summit Tajoshi, production manager Paul Vikes, producers Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, and Franny Monahan.

• 45:37Roman Mars?

  We'll see you for a new episode of Hidden Levels on Tuesday.

• 45:46Speaker 02

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• 46:31Speaker 07

  Time for a quick break to talk about McDonald's. It's the tangiest time of the year. For a limited time, head to McDonald's and get a McRib sandwich. Make it a meal by adding a medium fries and a soft drink like an ice cold Diet Dr. Pepper. So grab a McRib sandwich and embrace the tang. Save time by ordering ahead on the app at participating McDonald's for a limited time. Dr. Pepper is a registered trademark of Dr. Pepper, 7-Up Inc.