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I've somehow been WASDing wrong my whole life
Pretty delightful article. He has carried it well with a sense of self-deprecation. It's not like there is an objective wrong or right, so if you read beyond what I included in the quote box you see just how deep the hipster can go with things like this.By Wes Fenlon a day ago
Well, this is embarrassing.
Last week, I tossed a comment about my pinky into the PC Gamer Slack channel, and it was like I'd just walked into a room and mispronounced the word bagel. I'd said something so immediately, obviously wrong to everyone but me that the five dudes and one woman up in orbit right now probably felt the shockwave of wrong reverberate through the International Space Station. Somehow there were no casualties, except my innocence.
Until 5:34 pm, I'd assumed I play PC games like a Totally Normal Person.
I do not.
Okay, so, look. Here's the thing. Like most kids who grew up in the '90s, I mainly learned to type on PCs and Macs in keyboarding class, and to this day I'm a home row typist. Around the same time I was learning to type, most games still defaulted to the arrow keys for movement. I definitely played Wolfenstein 3D with the arrow keys, and rarely played other PC shooters until years later. I was too busy with Command & Conquer and Warcraft.
So whenever I got back around to games with WASD controls—it might've been Halo: Combat Evolved around 2004—I did what my brain considered natural. I kept my fingers on the home row, and moved my ring finger from S up to W to walk forward and backward. This seemed perfectly normal. But, um.
Here's how I play PC games, which was quickly coined The Wes Maneuver:
I hope this revelation hasn't caused you physical or mental pain. Honestly, I'm still reeling. Not at the thought of doing it wrong, because the great thing about PC gaming is we can customize our games however we want. If you prefer to move with ESDF, that's perfectly fine! But it did not even occur to me, until last Wednesday at 5:34 pm, that anyone else would press the WASD keys differently. Then everyone started typing at once.
- A: Pinky
- W/S: Ring finger
- D: Middle finger
- R/F/C/etc.: Index finger
My pinky goes where?
No one on staff could remember how they learned to position their fingers for WASD, but the general consensus seemed to be that the pinky is weak.
If you'd asked me to guess how most people positioned their fingers on WASD, I'd have be totally stumped. What else would even feel natural? My way is so obvious. As the rest of the team reacted to my heretical fingering, I had to Google around for what I was missing and found tons of photos like this. The pinky lives on Shift???....
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