Hidden Levels Ep. 2: Stick It to 'Em

In this second episode of Hidden Levels, Amory traces the history of the humble-yet-genius joystick — from early 20th century aviation, to 1970s video game consoles like the Atari 2600, to the Nintendo 64 thumbstick in the 1990s, to what some consider the joystick's greatest implementation: the dual-thumbstick controller. This optimal interface has changed the game, and not just the video game. The modern dual-stick controller is now considered an MVP in the military, and in medicine.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Amory Sivertson?

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 0:34Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite?

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 0:41Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 0:47Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm.

• 0:55Speaker 04

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it.

• 1:07Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 1:11Speaker 06

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

• 1:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, alright.

• 1:18Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're getting warm. You're getting warm. Um, 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.

• 1:48Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 1:54Speaker 06

  Totally.

• 1:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  It was made by the Japanese entertainment company Konami. And Gradius, uh, 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, um, 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.

• 2:23Speaker 06

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

• 2:29Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 2:38Speaker 06

  Having 30 lives helps.

• 2:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  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'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.

• 2:58Speaker 06

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

• 3:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 3:39Speaker 06

  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.

• 3:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 4:08Speaker 06

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

• 4:16Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 4:31Amory Sivertson?

  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 him since he made the longer flight, sorry, Orville.

• 5:15Amory Sivertson?

  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. 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.

• 5:57Amory Sivertson?

  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. But just a few years later, in 1907, a French aviation pioneer, Robert Esno Peltier, 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.

• 6:43Amory Sivertson?

  Ezno Peltore 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 and machinery, but also in arcades and homes around the world. I'm talking about the joystick.

• 7:07Amory Sivertson?

  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 claimed 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 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.

• 7:46Amory Sivertson?

  It's simply the exhilaration, the joy of taking flight.

• 7:54Amory Sivertson?

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

• 8:00Speaker 04

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

• 8:03Amory Sivertson?

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

• 8:09Amory Sivertson?

  Maybe some sort of forklift or construction vehicle? Or, most likely... I want this guy with the crazy blue hair. Ludwig. Ludwig. How do I select? A video game.

• 8:23Speaker 04

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

• 8:26Amory Sivertson?

  This is my friend Philip. Oh, top right is jump. My other friend Kelly. Hey. Oh, sorry. I'm sorry.

• 8:33Amory Sivertson?

  And my husband Mike, all bearing with me. Oh, I feel like I'm ignoring a lot of pits. In baby's first game of Mario Kart. I'm staying on the road.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  It's a miracle.

• 8:44Amory Sivertson?

  Experienced players would agree. The joystick has made video game controllers what they are. Easy, precise, and fun.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  I finished. Hey, you got, you've advanced. You're advanced.

• 9:00Amory Sivertson?

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

• 9:05Speaker 07

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

• 9:17Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 9:36Speaker 07

  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.

• 9:49Amory Sivertson?

  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. The electronic game of the future. Odyssey easily attaches to any brand TV, black and white or color, to create... The Odyssey's controls were knobs that you'd twist to do things like play a game of tennis. 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. I don't know.

• 10:31Amory Sivertson?

  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?

• 10:50Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 11:00Speaker 07

  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.

• 11:36Amory Sivertson?

  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. So where does the joystick's power come from?

• 12:21Amory Sivertson?

  What makes it so great? It starts with a term you hear a lot when talking joysticks with an expert like David O'Grady.

• 12:28Speaker 07

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

• 12:32Amory Sivertson?

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

• 12:38Speaker 07

  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?

• 12:57Amory Sivertson?

  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?

• 13:10Speaker 07

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

• 13:19Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 13:35Speaker 07

  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, um, so, uh,

• 13:55Amory Sivertson?

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

• 14:01Speaker 07

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

• 14:06Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 14:17Speaker 07

  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?

• 14:31Amory Sivertson?

  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...

• 14:53Speaker 07

  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.

• 15:04Amory Sivertson?

  This was just the pep talk I needed before taking a field trip to a joystick wonderland.

• 15:11Speaker 06

  So everything's usable, but it does go chronological.

• 15:15Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 15:32Speaker 06

  It's pretty much is my collection. I'm a organized hoarder.

• 15:36Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 15:49Speaker 06

  This was horrible, because for every game, you had to put in a different code.

• 15:53Amory Sivertson?

  The Logitech Netplay, basically a full-sized keyboard scooched between two halves of a modern-ish game controller. Jeff has that, too.

• 16:02Speaker 06

  This was the, hey, let's just combine everything, because computers at this point were starting to really take off. This was like...

• 16:08Amory Sivertson?

  But most importantly, Jeff has the Atari 2600.

• 16:15Speaker 06

  I mean, this is a beast. This is probably the best-built controller.

• 16:19Amory Sivertson?

  I'd driven two hours to see one of these nearly 50-year-old home consoles in person, and...

• 16:28Speaker 03

  They're boring-looking. They're like...

• 16:30Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  I mean, they're...

• 16:31Speaker 06

  Furnishable.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  I'm sure they were very exciting for the time, but yeah, this looks like this could be your grandpa's radio or something.

• 16:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  Just black and brown and nothing that says, like, "Spend a lot of time..."

• 16:44Speaker 06

  Definitely. Oh, yeah.

• 16:46Amory Sivertson?

  But Jeff kindly fired it up for me.

• 16:53Amory Sivertson?

  So I could experience the Atari joystick for myself in a game of Pac-Man.

• 16:58Speaker 06

  And then you just move a joystick.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  That's it. What's the button for, then?

• 17:02Speaker 06

  Nothing. This game has no...

• 17:03Amory Sivertson?

  The little square joystick panel steadied on my lap with my left hand, and my right fist white-knuckling the joystick. I jolted right, left, forward, back, trying to gobble up as many little Pac-Man pellets as I can, until...

• 17:19Speaker 06

  You're being thrown right in.

• 17:21Amory Sivertson?

  To avoid the ghosts. Okay.

• 17:22Speaker 06

  Yep, yeah, but you're supposed to get the small pellets.

• 17:24Amory Sivertson?

  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. Oh, it is rigid. I'm having a hard, like, it's not as responsive as I thought it would be.

• 17:41Speaker 06

  Nope.

• 17:42Amory Sivertson?

  No! This iconic device sucks. It's stiff to the point where it hurts my wrist minutes into the game.

• 17:52Speaker 06

  Could you imagine hours?

• 17:53Amory Sivertson?

  No. 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.

• 18:29Speaker 06

  This is all you did. I mean, I'm sure when a family got this, kids were playing with these joysticks for 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.

• 18:49Amory Sivertson?

  By this, Jeff means an entirely different controller he's now holding. This is the Nintendo 64 that you have in front of you?

• 18:56Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 18:57Amory Sivertson?

  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. 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.

• 19:28Speaker 06

  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.

• 19:36Amory Sivertson?

  The nail on the head? More like the thumb on the stick.

• 19:43Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 19:59Speaker 06

  And you're like, "Oh, okay, I can play for 12 hours now."

• 20:03Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 20:21Speaker 07

  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.

• 20:32Amory Sivertson?

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

• 20:36Speaker 07

  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.

• 20:53Amory Sivertson?

  Games like GoldenEye 007, which allowed a player to weave through concrete mazes, up ladders, across bridges.

• 21:06Speaker 07

  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.

• 21:17Amory Sivertson?

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

• 21:20Speaker 07

  It pretty much is you.

• 21:23Amory Sivertson?

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

• 21:34Amory Sivertson?

  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

• 21:45Amory Sivertson?

  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,

• 21:57Speaker 07

  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.

• 22:13Amory Sivertson?

  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?

• 22:48Speaker 07

  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.

• 22:58Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 23:10Speaker 07

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

• 23:18Amory Sivertson?

  Basically, one joystick is your eyes, the other, your legs. The pioneer of this two thumb solution?

• 23:28Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 23:52Amory Sivertson?

  Like in Medal of Honor, a World War II combat game created by Steven Spielberg and inspired 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.

• 24:18Amory Sivertson?

  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 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,

• 25:02Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 25:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  If it ain't broke, don't fix it. In fact, just throw it to your troops.

• 25:17Amory Sivertson?

  Coming up, video game thumbsticks go from game world battlefields to real ones.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 26:10Speaker 06

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts, and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 26:37Amory Sivertson?

  Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger, fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays. King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite? Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  Try one.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  Mmm.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 27:32Amory Sivertson?

  There's nothing like it.

• 27:42Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 28:18Amory Sivertson?

  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?

• 28:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's generally a matter of familiarity.

• 28:34Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 28:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's rugged, it's designed to be durable and to endure intense environments. But to the average observer, it would look like anything that comes with a PlayStation or Xbox.

• 29:06Amory Sivertson?

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

• 29:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes, coyote tan is what they call it.

• 29:18Amory Sivertson?

  Coyote tan, okay.

• 29:20Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 29:23Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 29:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 30:02Amory Sivertson?

  The Pentagon has confirmed the use of the FMCU controller in the Air Force's RADBO, or Recovery of Air Bases 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?

• 30:44Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 30:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  It gives the operator a better sense of control and focus on a system that requires precision to be effective.

• 31:07Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 31:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  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?

• 31:51Amory Sivertson?

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

• 32:18Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 32:24Amory Sivertson?

  I have not heard that joke.

• 32:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 32:45Amory Sivertson?

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

• 32:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 33:21Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 33:39Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 33:46Amory Sivertson?

  It's just kept getting better.

• 33:49Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 34:03Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 34:34Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 34:52Amory Sivertson?

  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, 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.

• 35:37Amory Sivertson?

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

• 35:42Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 35:44Amory Sivertson?

  Miko Hinonen is the creator of the Finnish Museum of Games in Tampere, 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.

• 36:10Speaker 06

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

• 36:16Amory Sivertson?

  This is the exhibit's other half, Niklas Nuland, 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.

• 36:32Speaker 06

  Nowadays, everybody is using the touchscreen for everything.

• 36:36Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 37:16Amory Sivertson?

  And so what the touchscreen affords us is really only what the software developers want us to be able to do with it. And Niklas isn't particularly happy about it.

• 37:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 37:42Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 38:07Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 38:13Amory Sivertson?

  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. 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.

• 38:58Amory Sivertson?

  But the joystick...

• 39:00Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 39:04Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 39:29Amory Sivertson?

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

• 39:38Speaker 06

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

• 40:04Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 40:42Speaker 04

  So Emery on the right, those orange things make you go faster. Yes. Oh. It's kind of propelling arrows. You guys were setting me up for failure. We've been competing. Hooray! Ludwig, 12th, 12th of 12.

• 41:11Speaker 06

  Ben Brock Johnson.

• 41:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Roman Mars.

• 41:13Speaker 06

  I love that story, but I have one bone to pick with Emerys Iverson 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.

• 41:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 06

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

• 41:32Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 41:39Speaker 06

  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 to 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.

• 41:59Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 42:08Speaker 06

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

• 42:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 42:31Speaker 04

  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.

• 42:46Speaker 06

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

• 42:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  This episode was produced by Amory Sivertson. It 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 Susi, Kelly O'Connell, and Mike Moskato. And to Henry Lowood for sharing his expertise and tipping Amory off to the Joy of Sticks exhibition.

• 43:23Speaker 06

  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 DeLio, 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 Nestor. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California.

• 43:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  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 Sumit Joshi, production manager Paul Vikes, producers Dean Russell, Grace Tatter and Franny Monahan. We'll see you for a new episode of Hidden Levels on Tuesday.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, executive director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education. I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 44:48Speaker 04

  And just to explain why you're excited about it. Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities,

• 45:03Speaker 00

  for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops. Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 45:39Amory Sivertson?

  Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger, fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays. King's wine cinnamon swirl bite? Taylor Hanson? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  But Taylor Hanson's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 46:24Speaker 04

  Taylor Hanson? Nice. Try one. Mmm.

• 46:31Speaker 04

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it.