【I Am a Plaything (2025)】

Sony's slowly unfolding PlayStation 5 reveal marches on.

A few details are I Am a Plaything (2025)now clearer. It's coming in holiday 2020 (that was pretty much assumed already). It's called "PlayStation 5" (duh). And its controller has an assortment of new features. All of this is laid out in a Tuesday morning blog post from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan.

Setting aside the name and release window, the announcement focuses on two specific aspects of the coming console's new controller. The first is "haptic feedback," which is basically a 2.0 version of the rumble feature you're probably familiar with in modern controllers.

The use of haptics isn't a new idea in gaming – in fact, it was a headlining feature of Nintendo's Switch Joy-Cons, which called it "HD Rumble." Haptics add some nuance to the more generalized shaking you get from traditional rumble.

"[So] crashing into a wall in a race car feels much different than making a tackle on the football field," Ryan's post offers as an example. "You can even get a sense for a variety of textures when running through fields of grass or plodding through mud."

The PS5 controller will also support something that PlayStation has dubbed "adaptive triggers." Just like the more generalized haptic rumble, the new triggers aim to bring additional nuance to your gaming. They let developers program resistance into your trigger "pull," so you might feel it more when you're drawing a bow in-game.

There's a new Wiredinterview with PS5 system architect Mark Cerny that speaks favorably about the controller improvements. The story's author got to play with the controller in Gran Turismo Sport, as well as a number of custom-made demos, and his account of the experience lines up with the kinds of scenarios Ryan described.

It's important to remember a couple of things. First, features like these depend on developers supporting them. There's no question that PS5 exclusives, at least the early ones, will lean in on showcasing these features, but what about third party studios?

We're all getting better as a fandom at recognizing the human cost of game development, specifically the many people and hours required to get the biggest blockbuster ready for a release date. And any new feature is going to add more to the to-do list that needs to be checked off before a game can ship.

If the enhanced controller features are popular and contribute to a booming success for PS5, that makes it easier for teams to devote resources to supporting them. But history has shown more than once that control gimmicks are just that: temporary objects of fascination.

Nintendo's Wii is maybe the most prominent example. Its revolutionary motion controls were like nothing the world had seen, and it helped propel massive sales – more than 100 million over the course of its life. But that innovation came at the cost of processing and graphical horsepower.

Over time, the Wii helped cement the perception of a misleading casual-hardcore divide between games enthusiasts that still persists today. Really though, the Wii's problem was that it couldn't compete with the latest and greatest games. Mainstream gamers want Madden and Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, and they want those games to look and run as well as they do on the competing console. The Wii's paradigm-shifting controllers weren't enough to change minds.

Nintendo innovated again with the Switch Joy-Cons, adding haptics in the form of HD Rumble. It was a well-received feature when the console launched, but I can't think of a single game sincelaunch that's made or broken by HD Rumble. Notably, the newly released, more portable Switch Lite does away with rumble completely.

I don't mean to drag Nintendo here. The Wii was a monster success by all measures, and Switch seems poised to exceed it. But in both cases, my feeling is that success came in spite of the control changes rather than because of them.

Let's look at an example from Sony's own history. The new Wired feature points out that GT Sport, the current version that anyone can play right now, lacks a rumble feature of any kind. As the story notes: "User tests found that rumble feedback was too tiring to use continuously, so the released version of GT Sportsimply didn't use it."

Even basic rumble, a feature that's been kicking around in games for more than 20 years, isn't really thatpopular. It's just old, and ubiquitous (if increasingly less so).

The fact is, the standard modern game controller is proven to the point that efforts to reinvent it haven't often worked. I didn't even mention the Wii U and its tablet-like GamePad, or the much-hyped but little-used DualShock 4 touchpad on PS4. Or any of the other possible examples.

None of this is meant to suggest that PlayStation 5 is doomed because Sony is trying to innovate with its controller. The console is almost certain to succeed on some level. But Sony's efforts to hype these new control features as part of its slow-reveal campaign can't hide an inescapable truth: if reinventing game controllers is the gamble, history is not on PlayStation's side.