Why Do Video Game Controllers Have The D-Pad On The Left: A Quick History Of Video Game Controllers

It's long been known that the difference between someone's dominant and non-dominant hand is far more complex than the hand that's good at stuff and the hand that isn't. Each hand is actually specialized for a different action. The dominant hand is very skilled at fine movements - small, delicate motions that require a lot of accuracy. The non-dominant hand is specialized at gross movements - large motions that tend to require more strength and reaction speed.

This plays into the difference between using a button and a joystick. Joysticks require large, inaccurate movements in one direction at a time. Buttons are significantly more complex, often requiring precise timing and intricate combinations. This requires significantly more dexterity and thus, the most dexterous hand.

Hands are designed to work together to allow people to control movements. The left hand in particular is often used to provide visual feedback that the right hand uses to aim its movements. In this way, any movement of the hands that can be seen requires significantly less control than movement that cannot. This is why it requires less dexterity to stir a pot with the right hand and hold it steady with the left, than it does to press action buttons on a controller with the right hand and move a character with the left. Visual feedback is significantly smaller in most gaming related activities, and the player usually has their visual focus on a screen rather than a controller.

Visual feedback is an important aspect of fine motor control. For most actions, the eye locates the hands and communicates their position between each other, allowing people to perform complex tasks like tying shoes. When using a gaming controller, however, a player's attention is focused on the screen. Not only that, but button presses are very small movements that are particularly hard to locate in the peripheral vision. This means that players have to navigate a controller almost by feel alone, which requires far more dexterity than by feel and sight.

Shooters are a genre that places intense emphasis on pretty much everything over moving. Pulling a trigger to shoot, pressing a button to go into cover, and perhaps most importantly, moving the right stick to aim. Unlike movement, which utilizes the non-dominant hand's specialty (gross movements), aiming requires precise timing for the player to hit their mark. The kind of precision movements that allow a player to stop pushing a stick when the reticle lands on a moving target, facilitates coordination between the eye, brain, and hand. That kind of coordination is especially well suited to the player's dominant hand.

Spacewar!, a student side project at MIT, may be the grandfather of all video games. The game revolved around two spaceships chasing each other through an asteroid field. Originally it used four switches, used to control the computer it ran on, the PDP-1. Due to the layout of the switches, this was both counterintuitive and dangerous to the equipment, as they were dangerously close to the power switch. This led students at MIT to create the first ever video game controller, a simple wooden box with a horizontal and vertical switch, and a single button.

When Atari patented its joystick in 1978, it was not the only one on the market. What set Atari's patent apart from others was the use of a central shaft that the stick pivoted on. This may seem like a fundamental part of the joystick by today's standard, but before Atari's patent, joysticks were often left loose like the Channel F's detonator-like controller. American game manufacturers began realizing that most players prefer to use their right hand for controlling a joystick and their left hand for pressing action buttons. Atari's first joystick reflected that realization, and this convention persisted until the addition of more action buttons to controllers and smaller joysticks.