1)You see a Ms Pac man machine before 1985. Knowing there’s about a 3 second song to start between the time you press One Player Start and the game actually starting, do you
A) Start with your left hand on the joystick as soon as you press the player one start button with the right index finger pressing the Player One Start button?
B) Just touch the Player 1 Start Button with your right index finger and during the time the song plays, grab the joystick with your right hand?
C) Start the first few levels on the recessive hand, and then during the post Apple-intermission switch to your dominant hand. Don’t want to tire out that wrist/elbow/shoulder.
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You’re designing a fight stick in the SNES/Genesis era. You see stats about Street Fighter II Lefty Vs Righty machines in 1992 (aka A “Mexican Machine”) The machine owners tells you their stats, and on average, when given a choice, there’s 5 times as many credits entered in the player slot with the joystick on the left compared to the joystick on the right. If you don’t differentiate between whether it was a busy mall arcade or a rural single machine at a county road general store, what’s your default explanation?
A) There are 5 times as many left handed people as right in this location, therefore the default joystick for the home version should be left handed.
B) The right handed player wins many games over people who are uncomfortable using the left hand. Since Revenue for Capcom’s home joystick sales is not dependent on credits played at home, and enough people buy joysticks as legal performance enhancement over the pad, the way that most people win most times, right-handed, should be the default arrangement.
C) People are willing to play either way. Maybe they’re always stuck on the left hand side because of dominant righties and that’s what usually opens up, and maybe have developed some joystick muscle memory in the left hand, they’d hate to relearn it in the right, but, then again, maybe the right is a more natural way to hold the joystick. I don’t know for sure, so let me have both bases covered. Make it ambidextrous. -
How do you determine which off-the-shelf joystick to buy (or whether to buy one)?
A) Whichever one contours to my button hand best, or whichever one looks the coolest. (unless you make money of gaming good, then it’s custom)
B) Even if they left you flop the joystick (like either on the Xbox One OS, or in SF30, Game options) any off-the-shelf joystick is going to “smile” at you, when a frown is more natural with index and ring finger being longer than index and pinky. Forget that, I’m getting mine custom. Right handed. If my machine bricks because of the custom joystick, because no system-authorized off-the-shelf joystick has it in my arrangement, I’m going to sue on the basis of Americans with Disabilities Act.
C) Find a Rectangular 4x2 arrangement joystick off the shelf, (if you’re handy with electronics:) swap north and south, swap east and west, swap each punch with corresponding kick, and for any unusual other game, hope there’s a button reconfigure option. Swap back when I want the other way. -
You’re an executive at Hori or Mad Catz, etc. Joystick sales are down. What do you do:
A) Make a new joystick licensed off the characters of the next popular fighting or otherwise joystick-optimized game. That character will sell the same joystick over and over.
B) No one’s made a System-authorized ambidextrous joystick since the Beeshu Genesis Gizmo. So many generations have been neglected for right handed sticks, make a right handed stick using the same contour as the left but horizontally flipped, and sell optional adapters for all previous systems in the family of systems (Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, etc.)
C) Some people play left handed only, some play right handed only, and some prefer one way, but learn too many habits on a few games to switch going the other way. I don’t want to do the research and find out how many people want a right handed fight stick vs a left, make 2 separate versions, and run into shortages or surpluses if I’m wrong. It’s like selling separate joysticks for men and women or for different races, unless there’s a biological difference (like maybe the difference between men’s facial hair and women’s leg hair, or maybe barbers catering to one specific uniquely different hair for different races, some people know how to cut white hair and not black, others vice versa, If you don’t want to limit your customer base, you do a good enough job at both to not turn otherwise willing customers away.), if a design can have the preferred frown contour for both the left and right hand, let’s make that, add a couple extra circuits to do the flip remapping, What’s the difference between $150 for a joystick and $160 when quite a few more will sell, just because it’s ambidextrous. You limit your market more by making it left handed only than not having the right character or button contour. The custom joystick is for the competitive expert who competes for money or Twitch fame. The pad is for the dabbler and basic gamer. This stick is mass enough market to mass produce, but less mass market than standard pads. It’s for fight fans who ASIPRE to play well on them. The right handed stick would be a bigger improvement for more gamers than slight contour differences. The ambidextrous joystick is the safe route to accommodate everyone and turn no one away, and is the best of both worlds, except the “professional market” who make a living off reaching a button a millisecond sooner.
If you picked mostly A’s you’re for the status quo.
If you picked mostly B’s you want a niche product made for just you and you can spend your money how you like.
If you’re mostly C’s you’d like a cheaper off-the-shelf version of a joystick, if one were to come right handed. Plus you’re a value customer, you enjoy games and like to do well, but don’t necessarily want to be world champ at everything. And you see the value in being a switch hitter and having a joystick that can do the same.
I’d like other people to take this quiz. I admit I’m kind of biased. The first video games I played frequently were made between 1980-1985. But I have the Twin Galaxies World Record for high score on one credit playing The Simpsons (Arcade) with a real unmodified machine, and have built up so much muscle memory, that reversing it when I have clocked a lot of time in that game would fell weird. If I had to compete in it, and I had my ambidextrous joystick on the Xbox 360 verison, I’d play that one as left. I’m a three C’s and one B kind of person, playing Ms. Pac Man with the right. On a superfast version at twice the speed of Ms Pac man and the ghosts, but just as much blue time, my high score at real, back-in-the day machine, but played in the last year, was 166,060 and I got to the second level of the fourth maze.
I can’t see the argument for making it lefty-only. I remember the Intellivison, Colecovision, 5200, 7800, Astrocade, and (only when looking back in retrospective, this is a real forgettable system in the US, never heard of it until I found a cartridge of it at a thrift store:) Arcadia 2001 were all ambidextrous. The Odyssey 2 had hardwired right handed joysticks. The Atari had right handed joysticks, but there were plenty of third party companies (before the advent of licensing started by Nintendo) willing to make joysticks with a button on each side, and passive pin-swap “lefty adpaters”. Vectrex was the weird one with the LEFT handed joystick, but it wasn’t until the Ebay market where people hand made “Righty Adapters” for Vectrex. Maybe someone can suggest a revision which makes the status quo sound more desirable. Keep in mind my perspective. If you can find good reasons to keep the status quo, even after reading this, post here. I’ll modify the quiz, if I can change the first
If you want to read about my personal experiences with the NES basically flipping the standard in mid-childhood, how I saved up and bought a special fight stick during the SNES/Genesis era, and how I dominated for 2 weeks, before the joystick got loose connectors and wasn’t actuating at all due to poor workmanship, and how one of those people I dominated, the one I was best man for at his wedding, a long time neighbor, who in the pre-Twitch gaming world, got his 30 minutes of fame competing on basic cable twice, at least in that monent in time, visit My Dextrous Story and read more about it.
If you’re a joystick maker, maybe you can help me make mine. I’ve had a person quit because my emails and posts are long winded. That’s because I don’t have a 2-way conversation, and no one to confirm they understand me. One person wanted emails because he wanted a text-searchable record of his promises and prices and features. I wanted a phone call because I know I can be long winded (like here 
) without a response channel. A quick ping response gets me to the point more. So maybe a Facebook instant text chat would be the answer, since AIM has gone by the wayside. You can copy and save the conversation, and have your record, and you can stop me when I blab the same things over and over.
By the way, he gave me a legitamate reason why he didn’t want to do mine. He only works with either his own stuff, modding off-the-shelf stuff, or famous stick builders, no small-time less famous builders desired. He ha problems but worked them out, and he doesn’t want me to mentoin his name, so if he wants to, he can bring it up and I’ll confirm it (only from that person him/herself, not third parties mentioning him/her). He read my compromise that gave us both what we wanted, after a little SRK war on a different post, he summarized my 4 main points, and We agreed to Facebook chat. He looked at my shorter post with a (from my perspective, remember I’m the one being criticized) calmer eye, and agreed to talk via Facebook text chat. He took the time to understand my perspective, he listened and talked, and we had a good 2 way conversation once the heat from the extremely long email I sent him was defused. it started bad, but He’s a nice guy, and gave a principled reason not to do it. I guess if I need another model built, I’ll consider him to do fresh work. Just his job works best if he’s familiar. He’s not as an experimental a guy as I’d like, but it should work for most of you if you don’t need ambidexterity.