So it is too with videogames. As a recent history of the computer as designed object (Computer, by Paul Atkinson) reminded me, a videogame system is a physical object, and you interact with it – the dubious promises of Kinect aside – by manipulating the equipment directly with your hands. So an integral part of the videogame gestalt is the ‘handfeel’ of what is under our fingers.
This is what struck me most about my first experience of PlayStation Move – which, by the way, is impossible to pronounce without prolonging the ‘o’ of Move until one sounds like a sleepy cow (just try it). Start The Party is diverting-enough silliness, and the first time you see the controller’s tip transformed into a three-dimensionally-correct fly-swatter or fan onscreen is a truly impressive moment. But when the games were paused I kept looking back to the controller itself, rolling it around in my hand and caressing it. It has beautiful handfeel. It is reassuringly hefty, like a Shure SM58 stage microphone; the texture is not too glossy and not too matt; the buttons are free of irritating sponginess; even the seams and screws in the casing give a tactile impression of precision Teutonic engineering. It feels almost as though it could be a sonic screwdriver.
The controller, of course, actually looks like a microphone as well, which is a stroke of genius from Sony’s designers, given that they were required to stick a big silly glowing ball on the end: OK, let’s make the whole thing subliminally reminiscent of a piece of rockstar gear. This is possibly the cleverest thing about Move’s positioning with respect to the Wii. The Wii’s controller is modelled on a TV remote control, a familiar rectangular slab that everyone knows how to wield. Well, everyone knows how to wield a microphone too, especially in our karaoke era. And while a TV remote is something you point at a screen simply in order to choose what will be blasted in your face next, a microphone is a tool for mediating your own self-expression.
Handfeel has been an important factor in some of my most intense relationships with electronic objects, and maybe in yours too. One of the first videogame consoles I ever owned was a dedicated LED handheld shooter called Galaxy Invader, whose combination of massive knobbled red matt-plastic fire button and cool steel two-way joystick – the two thumbs thus feeling interestingly contrasting sensations – contributed importantly to its ‘arcade-quality’ aura.
When I recently caved in to imbecilic postmodernity and got a ‘smartphone’, meanwhile, I chose one (the interminably monikered Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro) partly for its delicious handfeel, the rubberised back complementing the perfectly edged glossy plastic of the front, the very slight metallic grain and tactile feedback of the physical keypad, and the inexhaustibly satisfying spring-loaded action of sliding it out and in. (And it fits in the palm. Since when did mobile phones acquire the right to be bigger than a cigarette packet? Why does everyone tolerate massive phones?)
I have, too, owned a cassette Walkman and a portable MiniDisc recorder whose handfeels I can still vividly conjure if I imagine turning them round in my fingers, like some tech-fetishist Gollum. Part of the reason I have never really loved an Xbox must be that I don’t like the handfeel of Xbox controllers, with their roughish plastic and their horns at once too bulbous and too sharp. (What console had the best handfeel in history? The GBA SP.) You can make the world’s greatest gadget, but if it doesn’t feel pleasant and interesting to hold, I probably won’t use it. Handfeel is key.
Do you think that ‘handfeel’ sounds salacious, in conceivable applications such as “Give me a quick handfeel, love”? No more than ‘mouthfeel’, I should say; and anyway I didn’t invent it: there exists a completely serious academic paper from 1990 in the Journal of Sensory Studies entitled ‘Development of Terminology to Describe the Handfeel Properties of Paper and Fabrics’. The word, I conclude, is not only necessary but also rather beautiful.
So, this festive season, don’t merely savour the mouthfeel of your mulled booze and roasted birds, but pay attention to the panoply of subtle sensations that arise during your everyday manual handling of the world, electronic and otherwise. Happy handfeels, everyone.
Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life Of Videogames. Visit him online at stevenpoole.net.