When you play games wrong your whole life

Madmick

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I've somehow been WASDing wrong my whole life
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.

missing-image.svg


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.

missing-image.svg

Here's how I play PC games, which was quickly coined The Wes Maneuver:

  • A: Pinky
  • W/S: Ring finger
  • D: Middle finger
  • R/F/C/etc.: Index finger
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.


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???....
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.
 
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I’m a bit of an odd one myself. I’ve never done WASD, instead l’ve been doing ASDX which is basically the same idea except A is forward instead of W, and X is backward instead of S. I’ve been playing this way since Quake II in 1997 which was the first time I started using the mouse in an FPS. Prior to that I just used the arrow keys from my Wolfenstein and Doom days all the way to Duke Nukem 3D and Quake 1.
 
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 the is a 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.
Weird, I never thought of doing it like that but just placing my fingers that way it seems like you could have a lot more things mapped within reach of your index finger than you can if you do it the 'conventional' way. It would be a little trickier to use the number keys though.
 
I haven’t played an FPS on a pc in so long I thought people still used the arrow keys and Modded the number pad
<45>

I think quake 2 was the last one for me though, and I used a controller then since it just feels more natural, after decades more hours with a controller in your hand.

I’m getting a controller for my new pc build
<Moves>
 
Weird, I never thought of doing it like that but just placing my fingers that way it seems like you could have a lot more things mapped within reach of your index finger than you can if you do it the 'conventional' way. It would be a little trickier to use the number keys though.
It is, and that's why he's not so "dumb". We've gotten so comfortable with groupthink in our culture we forget just how wide the variance of tactical intelligence can be when left to solve a problem completely on its own. He chose closer to the center which any chess player could appreciate on first glance. He controls more keys-- more space.

The problem from a practical point of view, perhaps not so much for FPS players, is that all the "modifier" keys that game developers program into their games are bound to the Shift/Alt/Tab/Ctrl schemes that are concentrated in the lower left quadrant of a standard keyboard. This is huge to MMO players with a large number of hotkeys, and while traditionally we think of that with games from non-shooter genres like Dota 2, WoW, or Starcraft this also includes shooters these days (ex. Fortnite, Overwatch). With the best games you can move just about anything around, but with most, you can't.
 
Ya’ll been playing wrong???

I am a lefty.. been trying to shift that WASD location more to the right to take advantage of the whole keyboard but alas habits die hard...
 
The only weird thing I've ever done control wise was specific to WoW. I got my first mouse with extra buttons so I could move backwards in addition to doing all my forward movement and strafing with my mouse. Then I treated the nine keys on the left end of my keyboard like the number pad, which let me hot key 18 abilities by tossing in shift. It made mouse turning a lot easier without needing to move my fingers around so much to reach my hot keys.
 
I'm more of an oddity than most when it comes to FPS.

I use the arrow buttons to move except I use mouse button 2 to go forward and up arrow to jump.

The reason is I was able to totally dominate MOHAA online because I used the delete/page down to lean left/right and had a keyboard that didn't have that gap between the up arrow and delete/end/page down that most keyboards have now. Even other great players had nothing on me I was constantly accused of hacking and was banned from many servers.

Doesn't do much for me with FPS these days but it sure did with MOHAA so I just got used to that button combo.
 
I guess a typist would initially do what's comfortable and natural to them, but I don't know why you simply wouldn't adjust if it didn't feel right for gaming.

Although, this does remind me a bit of the people who didn't know how to hold an N64 controller the right way for analog control when it first came out, and would be reaching over for the stick from the left side of the controller, instead of using the middle grip. Old habits die hard, I guess.
 
What a dipshit.

I mean, most games require you to use Shift or Ctrl a fair amount - how tf was he sprinting or crouching and moving at the same time? Not well I assume.

Also, it's not groupthink, it's practicality ffs but I'm sure that's not gonna stop me from being @'d. I don't even know how that term can work it's way into this conversation - even he says most people were never 'taught' WASD, they just did it intuitively and it should say something that 99% of us do it the same way intuitively.

If we want to talk about groupthink, we can discuss why arcade stick is still seen as the apex of fighting game controls. Just because someone put a joystick on a box in the late 70s doesn't mean it's the most efficient input method. Using keys for movement is actually much more practical and precise. Just go into practice mode and enable inputs and you'll see with a stick there's a lot of wasted input that's ust part and parcel with the control scheme - switch over to a key input and it's literally point for point.
 
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I never understood how WASD became a thing. Ive always used ESDF. You get a lot more buttons in reach, and its already your natural typing position.
 
I never understood how WASD became a thing. Ive always used ESDF. You get a lot more buttons in reach, and its already your natural typing position.

Well that's easy, your little finger rests on the shift, and is within reach of ctrl

I cant remember where or when, but i have never used anything other than arrows, and then wasd, i didnt actually think anyone ever played any differently
 
I’m a bit of an odd one myself. I’ve never done WASD, instead l’ve been doing ASDX which is basically the same idea except A is forward instead of W, and X is backward instead of S. I’ve been playing this way since Quake II in 1997 which was the first time I started using the mouse in an FPS. Prior to that I just used the arrow keys from my Wolfenstein and Doom days all the way to Duke Nukem 3D and Quake 1.

<SelenaWow>
 
Iirc, there's an esports personality who uses only two fingers for wasd. Can't figure out who, though
 
If we want to talk about groupthink, we can discuss why arcade stick is still seen as the apex of fighting game controls. Just because someone put a joystick on a box in the late 70s doesn't mean it's the most efficient input method. Using keys for movement is actually much more practical and precise. Just go into practice mode and enable inputs and you'll see with a stick there's a lot of wasted input that's ust part and parcel with the control scheme - switch over to a key input and it's literally point for point.
There are so many high profile players playing on pad at this point that anyone pretending you have to play on stick is going to sound like he hasn't been paying attention. Capcom Cup has been won by a pad player for two years in a row.
 
It is, and that's why he's not so "dumb". We've gotten so comfortable with groupthink in our culture we forget just how wide the variance of tactical intelligence can be when left to solve a problem completely on its own. He chose closer to the center which any chess player could appreciate on first glance. He controls more keys-- more space.

The problem from a practical point of view, perhaps not so much for FPS players, is that all the "modifier" keys that game developers program into their games are bound to the Shift/Alt/Tab/Ctrl schemes that are concentrated in the lower left quadrant of a standard keyboard. This is huge to MMO players with a large number of hotkeys, and while traditionally we think of that with games from non-shooter genres like Dota 2, WoW, or Starcraft this also includes shooters these days (ex. Fortnite, Overwatch). With the best games you can move just about anything around, but with most, you can't.

Agreed, how the fuck would you use the shift button to run?

I just tried putting my fingers as he described it and while its natural for me to type this way, it's so completely foreign for me to use for a FPS... I'm already needing anti-anxiety meds just thinking about it if I had to swap to it.
 
Iirc, there's an esports personality who uses only two fingers for wasd. Can't figure out who, though

That would be a great advantage since you don't need to use more than two buttons at a time anyway.
 
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