Hidden Levels #2: Stick It to 'Em

Summary

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99% Invisible - Hidden Levels #2: Stick It to 'Em

Host: Roman Mars
Air Date: October 10, 2025
Theme: The evolution, design, and enduring influence of the joystick—from the earliest days of flight to game consoles, the military, and medicine.

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Overview

This episode explores how the joystick—a simple yet powerful interface for human-machine connection—originated in early aviation, shaped the world of video games, and is now influencing everything from military technology to medical instruments. The episode also reflects on what makes the joystick’s design so intuitive and “joyful,” while questioning the rise of touchscreens as the dominant interface of our era.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Konami Code: The Joystick’s Cultural Ubiquity

• [01:06]–[03:49]
  Roman Mars quizzes co-host Ben Brock Johnson about the legendary Konami code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right...), initially used in the 1986 game Gradius for power-ups and later immortalized in Contra.
  • “It’s this wink from gamer to gamer that you both know this piece of video game lore.” — Roman Mars [02:42]
  • Discussion reveals how joystick input patterns became both a cultural meme and a physical experience.

2. The Origins of the Joystick: From Flight to Play

• [04:22]–[08:54]
  Amory Sivertson recounts how early flight required intense bodily contortions to control aircraft—until 1907, when Robert Esnault-Pelterie patented the joystick, offering intuitive, one-handed control. The term’s origin is murky, but the “joy” refers to the thrill of control, not crude jokes about its between-the-legs position.
  • The joystick’s spread from aviation to arcade games, cranes, and even claw machines illustrates its foundational role in intuitive interface design.

3. Early Video Game Controllers and Their Evolution

• [09:04]–[12:55]
  David O’Grady of UCLA explains how early game controllers were side projects for engineers at companies working on military tech.

  • “It was a way to kind of use your downtime to develop something other than some kind of military application or a missile tracking system.” — David O’Grady [09:35]
  • Early home consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey used knobs—awkward, unintuitive—and early attempts at video game joysticks (e.g., Ralph Baer’s prototypes).

• [12:58]–[15:03]
  The Atari joystick (1977) marked the first mass adoption of a true joystick for home entertainment:

  • “This is kind of the first moment where the joystick becomes…something that all of us have access to.” — David O’Grady [10:58]
  • The Atari 2600 transformed TV play into a tactile, almost magical act of agency.

4. Why Joysticks “Feel Right”: Affordance and Intuition

• [12:31]–[14:30]
  • O’Grady introduces the idea of affordance—how an interface invites use. Joysticks map physical motion directly to in-game movement, making them feel “invisible” and almost telepathic.
    • “We want the interface to disappear. We want to look at where we're pointing, not at the hand that's doing the pointing.” — David O’Grady [13:34]
    • The “perceived affordance” of joysticks—“You see one, and you know exactly how to use it.” — Amory Sivertson [14:30]

5. A Visit to Joystick Wonderland: Tactile Lessons from the Past

• [15:03]–[17:53]
  Amory visits Jeff Boojack, owner of a vast retro game collection.
  • The Atari joystick is “stiff to the point where it hurts my wrist minutes into the game.” “Oh, it is rigid. I'm having a hard, like, it's not as responsive as I thought it would be.” — Amory Sivertson [17:38]
  • Despite discomfort, the Atari 2600 remains iconic (later humorously defended by Ben near episode’s end [42:33]).
  • Design evolution: Nintendo 64’s “thumbstick” enabled greater comfort, longer play, and more nuanced movement.

6. Two Sticks: Meeting the Demands of 3D Space

• [19:58]–[23:17]
  As games grew from 2D to 3D (GoldenEye 007, Medal of Honor), movement and camera needed to be split. The PlayStation DualShock controller (1997) perfected the two-analog-stick setup.
  • “Basically, one joystick is your eyes, the other your legs.” — Amory Sivertson [23:17]
  • Xbox and others would iterate, but the form factor has remained strikingly stable, proof of an optimal design.

7. Beyond Gaming: Joysticks in the Military and Medicine

• [29:04]–[35:25]
  Journalist Jared Keller details how modern military vehicles and weapon systems (e.g., the Air Force’s RADBO, Army’s Short Range Air Defense, and even drone systems in Ukraine) use controllers that mimic PlayStation and Xbox layouts.
  • “Gen Z and Gen Alpha…have grown up on these systems. So why waste time building a new one?” — Jared Keller [32:58]
  • The military benefits from intuitive, precise, and already-perfected private-sector designs.
  • The joystick also powers life-saving tools: endoscopic surgery performed across continents and bronchoscopy systems—now using Xbox-style controllers.

8. The Future: Joystick vs. Touchscreen and the Value of Tactility

• [37:04]–[41:26]
  The Finnish Museum of Games curators discuss the joystick’s tactile joy—and the shift to touchscreens, which lack “perceived affordance” and physical feedback.
  • “Touchscreens are scarily monolithic…a metaphor for the influence of big tech companies.” — Nikolas Nuland [38:50]
  • “You kind of become one with the joystick. And I think that's something that stays in people's muscle memory…we want to be able to be very precise.” — Miko Hinonen [41:00]
  • The episode ultimately defends the diversity of interface design: different tasks may call for different affordances.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the joy of intuitive control:
  “We want the interface to disappear. We want to look at where we're pointing, not at the hand that's doing the pointing.” — David O’Grady [13:34]

• On the physicality of the joystick:
  “You kind of become one with the joystick… we want to be able to sort of use our bodies for controlling…” — Miko Hinonen [41:00]

• On military tech adopting gaming controllers:
  “The military is basically saying, well, [gaming companies] did the job for us. Let's build these systems so that this next generation of warfighters can adapt those skills seamlessly to a military context.” — Jared Keller [34:14]

• On the tactile joy of joystick design:
  “The nail on the head—more like the thumb on the stick.” — Amory Sivertson [19:35]

• On the rise of touchscreens:
  “Touchscreens are scarily monolithic…everything is put into the same type of interface.” — Nikolas Nuland [38:50]

• On iconic, if uncomfortable, design:
  “This iconic device sucks. It's stiff to the point where it hurts my wrist...” — Amory Sivertson [17:41]
  Immediate lighthearted rebuttal from Ben Brock Johnson:
  “The Atari 2600 joystick is a beautiful piece of design...That is your problem, that is not Atari 2600’s problem.” [42:33]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Konami Code/Joystick culture: [01:06]–[03:49]
• Aviation origins: [04:22]–[08:54]
• Early video game joysticks: [09:04]–[12:55]
• Interface design & affordance: [12:31]–[14:30]
• Atari nostalgia and critique: [15:03]–[18:25]
• The Nintendo 64 & thumbsticks: [18:48]–[20:20]
• Rise of the dual-stick controller: [22:46]–[23:17]
• Military & medical adoption: [29:04]–[35:25]
• Finnish Games Museum & touchscreens: [37:04]–[41:26]
• Joy of physical interfaces: [41:00]–[41:26]

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Conclusion

“It’s about having the tool that affords what you need. Versatility, specificity, convenience, precision. It all depends on the game.” — Amory Sivertson [41:26]

The episode offers a rich meditation on how one humble stick—first designed to make flight easier—continues to influence technology, culture, and even our bodies. As touchscreens flatten our digital world, the joystick endures as a symbol (and tool) of embodied, intuitive human-machine connection.

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Next time on Hidden Levels:
How the US military uses video games to recruit a new generation. [43:35]

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Transcript

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[Ben Brock Johnson]

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[Roman Mars]

Roman Mars. When I say Konami code, does this mean anything to you?

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Ben Brock Johnson it means zero to me actually. I have no idea what you're talking about. I mean, when you say code, maybe I think of a cheat code. That's about it. That's all I got.

[Roman Mars]

You're getting warm. You're getting warm. We were mentioning all these kind of Easter eggs and cheat codes at the end of our first episode about NBA Jam. And this is maybe the most fam, I would say, at least in some circles, so called cheat code of all time. And it originated in a game called Gradius in 1986. So Gradius Roman is this spaceship shooter game which I think both you and I enjoy.

[Mikko Hinonen or Nikolas Nuland]

Totally.

[Roman Mars]

It was made by the Japanese entertainment company Konami and Gradius, it had this code in it. The code would give you power ups in the game. So like bigger guns, more shields, things like that to help you fight the bad guys. To access this cheat code, there's a series of buttons and movements. And this code became a signature of Gradius and it was so popular it was copied into other games. So for example, Roman, you might know this as the Contra code.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Yes, that sounds more familiar. Yeah, that's a side scrolling shooter. Contra, right?

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, absolutely. And if you use this cheat code, you get 30 extra lives, which was important for Contra because Contra was. Could be a hard game.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Having 30 lives helps.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah. So this code is now so popular it's also been reused, for instance in Google Home. If you put this into Google Home, you'll get an interesting response. It's almost become its own kind of meme or reference. It's this wink from gamer to gamer that you both know this piece of video game lore.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Okay, so if this cheat code is everywhere, like how do you access it?

[Roman Mars]

It is a series of moves on the controller. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right button or select Roman or B or A, depending on, you know, what controller you're using, what game. But the constant here, Roman, is the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right. Which admittedly sounds like gibberish when we say it out loud. But the difficulty of executing this particular cheat code really depends on the controller. It could definitely cramp your fingers on the. But this code was so much easier for consoles that use an actual joystick.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

I could totally see it being easier on a joystick because, you know, it's just. That's what a joystick is for, is for going up and down. It's kind of the er, controller and a lot of things are designed around the joystick itself.

[Roman Mars]

That's right. There's so much that flows out of the joystick's development. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. This is Hidden Levels, our series about how the video game world has changed the world beyond video games. And today we're going to find out how the joystick stick was created and why it has endured.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Hidden Levels is our collaboration between 99% Invisible and Ben's podcast from WBUR, Endless.

[Roman Mars]

Thread, and my Endless Thread co host Amory Sivertson brings us this one. Enjoy.

[Amory Sivertson]

Let's go. It was mid December 1903 on the northern coast of North Carolina. Two brothers, known at the time for a thriving bicycle business, were about to change the world. Orville and Wilbur Wright were about to go from pedaling to piloting an engine powered airplane. Now I remember hearing about the Wright brothers in school, but what I did not know until recently is how they flew this thing. It was a full body activity. Rather than sitting upright, the pilot was in a prone position. Wilbur Wright. We'll go with him since he made the longer flight. Sorry, Orville. Wilbur's hips were resting in something called the hip cradle, pieces of wood on either side that were connected to the tips of the wings of the plane with wire. So as Wilbur tilted his hips right and left, he was tilting the plane right and left. The up and down tilt of the plane was controlled by a lever in Wilbur's left hand connected by a pulley system. This flight was an incredible feat. All 59 seconds of it. Yep, that's it. Because as the Wright brothers would be the first to tell you, their Plane was really hard to control. They trained for months trying to get that hip lean and lever tilt just right. But it was a little like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, except taking your life in your hands and hips. But just a few Years later, in 1907, a French aviation pioneer, Robert Esnaud Peltieri, suggested a new, streamlined solution for bringing human and machine together. A way to maneuver a plane up and down and right and left with a single stick. All that mobility and control in the palm of one hand, almost like an extension of the self. Ezno Peltieri never experienced this for himself, but he did secure the patent for this new instrument, unaware that what he was patenting would end up in military planes and machinery, but also in arcades and homes around the world. I'm talking about the joystick. The origins of the term joystick are a bit murky. Some credit the British actor and aviator Robert Lorraine, who used it in a diary entry in 1910. Others claim the joystick was originally the Joyce stick, named for a different early 20th century aviator and inventories, James Henry Joyce of Missouri. One thing scholars largely do agree on. Contrary to what you might read on the Internet, the joy in joystick does not have to do with its positioning between the legs of the pilot, like you might see in many World War I era planes. It's simply the exhilaration, the joy of taking flight. Now, most of us haven't personally taken flight, but we've likely controlled something with a joystick. I'm gonna get it.

[Roman Mars]

I'm gonna get it right by the head.

[Amory Sivertson]

Those claw arcade games where you try to grab onto a stuffed animal, maybe some sort of forklift or construction vehicle. Or most likely, I want this guy with the crazy blue hair.

[Roman Mars]

Ludwig.

[Amory Sivertson]

Ludwig. How do I select a video game?

[David O'Grady]

The most important part is the joystick. So use that to steer.

[Amory Sivertson]

This is my friend Phillip. Oh, top right is Jump. My other friend Kelly and my husband Mike, all bearing with me. Oh, I feel like I'm enduring a lot of hits in baby's first game of Mario Kart. I'm staying on the road. It's a miracle. Experienced players would agree. The joystick has made video game controllers what they are. Easy, precise, and fun. I finished.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Hey, you've advanced.

[Amory Sivertson]

You advanced. And yet it's only in recent decades that most of us have even had them within reach.

[David O'Grady]

In many ways, video games and joysticks and other controllers were moonlighting projects for a lot of engineers and early computer scientists.

[Amory Sivertson]

This is David o'. Grady. He's a lecturer in design media arts at UCLA and a researcher in its game lab. And he told me that a lot of the first video games were developed in labs, but these ones were at institutions and companies known for working on technological developments for the military.

[David O'Grady]

You know, it was a way to kind of use your downtime to develop something other than some kind of military application or a missile tracking system. Or you might try to make a game just as a sideline kind of project.

[Amory Sivertson]

One such engineer using his downtime to create a downtime activity was Ralph Bayer, the guy who invented the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, in 1972. The electronic game of the future, Odyssey easily attaches to any brand tv, black and white, or color. The Odyssey's controls were knobs that you'd twist to do things like play a game of tennis. The horizontal knob on the left side of each player control unit allows you to move your player light in a left to right or right to left direction. The vertical knob on the right side of each player control unit lets you move your player light in an up and down direction. I don't know. This sounds a little like the Wright brothers. Rocking their hips to move the plane one way, pulling a lever to move it another. Clunky. Takes some getting used to. But what if, just like in aviation, we streamlined the maneuvering with a single joyful stick? Ralph Baer did actually make a prototype of a video game joystick, but he wasn't the first to incorporate it into a game you'd see on shelves.

[David O'Grady]

David says it would actually take until a little later in the 1970s for us to see commercially a device that we would call a joystick today. In fact, it was the Atari joystick, which is absolutely iconic. This little kind of squat black box with this stock on top of it and a single red button to the side. This is kind of the first moment where the joystick becomes, you know, not just a specialty piece of military hardware or something that airline pilots control when they fly, but something that all of us have access to.

[Amory Sivertson]

This accessible joystick came with the Atari VCS, or Video Computer System, first released in 1977 and better known today as the Atari 2600. Don't watch television tonight.

[Mikko Hinonen or Nikolas Nuland]

Play it.

[Amory Sivertson]

Imagine what it must have been like as a kid back then to have a game on your TV that you get to control using the same tool that's been used to fly planes. And yet it's childishly simple to operate. Almost no learning curve, just power and possibilities. So where does the joystick's power come from what makes it so great. It starts with a term you hear a lot when talking joysticks. With an expert like David o', Grady.

[David O'Grady]

An interface for flying is probably how we would describe it today.

[Amory Sivertson]

Interface, a point where two things, human and machine.

[David O'Grady]

And so a flight stick, a joystick, the kinds of controllers that we use today for video games and other applications, these are all an attempt to solve a fundamental issue, which is how do you provide human input to a device or a machine?

[Amory Sivertson]

In other words, what are the physical instruments that allow us to turn intention into action, that help make a machine feel like an extension of the self? And what the joystick really has going.

[David O'Grady]

For it is this idea of affordance. What does the interface you're using enable? What does it allow you to do?

[Amory Sivertson]

For example, David says, our human biomechanics afford us the ability to walk, to move ourselves through space. A joystick affords us the ability to move something else through space without really having to think about it.

[David O'Grady]

Exactly. I think that's such an important part of interface design, from joysticks to mice to everything else, that in some ways, it is a kind of invisible art. For most applications, we want the interface to disappear. We want to look at where we're pointing, not at the hand that's doing the pointing. Right.

[Amory Sivertson]

We want it to feel like mind control, like we're just controlling things with our mind without having to.

[David O'Grady]

Yeah, exactly. There's something very automatic about it. Right.

[Amory Sivertson]

What David's getting at here is really another meaning of affordance. It's not just about what an interface allows us to do. It's knowing how to do it intuitively.

[David O'Grady]

There's a kind of direct manipulation quality to it. Do you want to move forward on a screen? Press the stick forward? Do you want to move backwards within the environment of the screen, pull the stick backwards. Do you want to go left?

[Amory Sivertson]

The joystick has what's called perceived affordance. You see one, and you know exactly how to use it. Compare that to those knobs on the Magnavox Odyssey. Sure, you can imagine that you should probably twist them, but what does that motion have to do with moving through space? Now, with a joystick, the motion of.

[David O'Grady]

Your hand and arm deeply corresponds with what's happening on screen. You don't really need to read an instruction manual to do that.

[Amory Sivertson]

This was just the pep talk I needed before for taking a field trip to a joystick wonderland.

[Jeff Boojack]

So everything's usable, but it does go chronological.

[Amory Sivertson]

Jeff Boojack is the owner of Prodigy an 8,000 square foot game room in western Massachusetts with a glow in the dark mini golf course in the center. Hell yeah. And a perimeter of more than 6,000 retro video games and their consoles dating back to the late 70s.

[Jeff Boojack]

It's pretty much just my collection. I'm an organized hoarder.

[Amory Sivertson]

Jeff has all matter of retro video game accessories too. The Nintendo Power Glove. A short lived, ill performing motion control device that made you look like a space movie badass from the forearm down. Jeff's got it.

[Jeff Boojack]

This was horrible because for every game you had to put in a different code.

[Amory Sivertson]

The Logitech Netplay. Basically a full sized keyboard scooched between two halves of a modern ish game controller. Jeff has that too.

[Jeff Boojack]

This was the. Hey, let's just combine everything. Because computers at this point were starting to really take off.

[Amory Sivertson]

But most importantly, Jeff has the Atari 2600.

[Jeff Boojack]

I mean this is, this is a beast. This is probably the best built controller.

[Amory Sivertson]

I'd driven two hours to see one of these nearly 50 year old home consoles in person. And they're boring looking. They're like, I mean they're furnishing. I'm sure they were very exciting for the time. But it, yeah, this looks like this could be your, your grandpa's radio or something.

[Jeff Boojack]

Yeah, exactly.

[Amory Sivertson]

Just black and brown and nothing that says like spend a lot of time.

[Jeff Boojack]

Definitely. Oh yeah, turn the game on.

[Amory Sivertson]

But Jeff kindly fired it up for me.

[Jeff Boojack]

And then of course you have to turn it down because it's incredibly.

[Amory Sivertson]

So I could experience the Atari joystick for myself in a game of Pac Man.

[Jeff Boojack]

And then you just move your joystick.

[Amory Sivertson]

That's it. What's the button for then?

[Jeff Boojack]

Nothing. This game has.

[Amory Sivertson]

With the little square joystick panel steadied on my lap with my left hand and my right fist white knuckling the joystick, I jolt it right, left, forward, back, trying to gobble up as many little Pac man pellets as I can until you're being thrown right in. I'm supposed to avoid the ghosts.

[Brain Health Advertiser]

Okay.

[Jeff Boojack]

Yeah, you're supposed to get the small pellets.

[Amory Sivertson]

I meet a demise so swift, I think even Jeff is surprised. But I try again. And pretty quickly I realize something that he'd actually warned me about with the Atari joystick. Oh, it is rigid. I'm having a hard like, it's not as responsive as I thought it would be.

[Jeff Boojack]

Nope.

[Amory Sivertson]

No. This iconic device sucks. It's stiff to the point where it hurts my wrist minutes into the game.

[Jeff Boojack]

Could you imagine Hours?

[Amory Sivertson]

But back when the Atari joystick was a novel thing in the late 70s. People did spend hours with it. Pac Man, Space Invaders Adventure. You could play 1300 different game variations with this one joystick console. Have you played Defender? It's the newest of the smash hit home video games that but just keep coming. Before people had home computers or the Internet or even just a wider variety of TV channels, this was the epitome of joy.

[David O'Grady]

Have you played Atari today?

[Jeff Boojack]

This is all you did. I mean, I'm sure when a family got this, kids were playing with these joysticks for 7, 8 hours at a time. Their hands and wrists must have gotten massive fatigue, like massive fatigue. I can only play these for maybe 10 minutes. And that's where this frees that up.

[Amory Sivertson]

By this, Jeff means an entirely different controller. He's now holding. This is the Nintendo 64 that you.

[Roman Mars]

Have in front of you.

[Amory Sivertson]

This is the one with the, like the three little prongs and you hold on to the two outer prongs. Then there's just the one prongs, the handles, let's say. And yes, awkwardly enough, there are three of them on the Nintendo 64 controller. And it's shaped kind of like an upside down trident. Out with the boring block like devices. This controller, which came out in 1996, looked like a little spaceship. And positioned on the middle handle is a whitish protrusion, maybe half an inch high.

[Jeff Boojack]

That's where Nintendo was like. They really hit the nail on the head with that. They made video games extremely addicting at that point.

[Amory Sivertson]

The nail on the head more like the thumb on the stick. This was a new kind of joystick, a thumbstick made for navigating a video game with the intuitiveness of a joystick, but with much greater ease of movement. No more stiff wrists, just smooth thumb circles.

[Jeff Boojack]

Then you're like, oh, okay, I can play for 12 hours now.

[Amory Sivertson]

It wasn't just the interface that was changing around this time. The games were too. As the microprocessing power of video game consoles increased, game worlds were able to go from two dimensions where the characters really only went up and down or right and left, to 3.

[David O'Grady]

You might remember from, I don't know, high school algebra or something. The X axis left and right, the Y axis up and down. Well, now we're on a Z axis moving towards you and the away from you.

[Amory Sivertson]

David o', Grady, again, our game scholar from ucla.

[David O'Grady]

We had whole genres of games that were starting to emerge in the 1990s that used a kind of first person point of view. In fact, we kind of Know them still as first person shooters, were huge in popularizing a way of playing in 3D space.

[Amory Sivertson]

Essentially, games like GoldenEye 007, which allowed a player to weave through, through concrete mazes, up ladders, across bridges.

[David O'Grady]

These games have a point of view where you are the camera essentially. And so you don't really see much of an avatar of yourself on screen or of the character you're playing other.

[Amory Sivertson]

Than your gun toting hand.

[David O'Grady]

In this case, it pretty much is.

[Amory Sivertson]

You and you are immersed going right, left, up, down and deep in virtual reality. So we have the genius of the joystick right at our thumbtips. We have the ability to move through games with visual depth until we hit a wall, literally, because with just one thumbstick that controls movement, we don't have an easy way to look where we're going first. So now David says we need to.

[David O'Grady]

Separate out movement from looking. These are two fundamental things that we tend to do in our lives and also in games which tend to simulate things that come from our lived experience.

[Amory Sivertson]

In real life. We don't have to move in a particular direction whenever we look that way. Like now I'm looking over here, here I come. Now I'm looking over here, here I come. And we can move in one direction while looking in another. Now it's not that you couldn't look and move distinctly or strafe on the N64 controller, but it was inelegant, involved more buttons, specifically the D pad or directional pad. The up, down, left, right, cross shaped one, which just isn't as easy or precise as the thumbstick.

[David O'Grady]

And so the long and short of it is we came up with a two thumb solution. Two analog thumbsticks that sit underneath each of your thumbs.

[Amory Sivertson]

Analog meaning you are controlling the degree of motion with how hard you press the thumbstick in a particular direction. And two joysticks to physically separate the looking from the going.

[David O'Grady]

The right thumbstick typically is sort of pointing the way to go and the left thumbstick is actually doing it. It's the movement.

[Amory Sivertson]

Basically. One joystick is your eyes, the other your legs. The pioneer of this two thumb solution, Sony PlayStation's dual thumbstick controller, which came out a year after the Nintendo 64 in 1997, with yes, two thumbsticks symmetrically positioned that afforded you the ability to move very precisely and aim very accurately, like in Medal of Honor, a World War II combat game created by Steven Spielberg and inspired by his then recent film Saving Private Ryan. And according to a couple of his collaborators, by watching his son play Goldeneye 007. It was among the first games to really integrate both thumbsticks into its gameplay. With a second thumbstick, it was easier than ever to make your on screen avatar do exactly what you wanted it to, as close to mind control as a controller could get. The gaming industry had reached peak interface and the proof is in the play because while the video game industry has continued to iterate on the design, Xbox moved the thumbsticks diagonally. Diagonally. The tactile experience has become increasingly buttery as I felt for myself in Jeff Boojack's game room. Oh, these thumbsticks are very joyful, very smooth. The dual stick controller itself hasn't changed all that much functionally or stylistically in the nearly 30 years that we've been using it now to navigate 3D space. What has changed in that time are the spaces we're using it to navigate.

[Jared Keller]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. In fact, just throw it to your troops.

[Amory Sivertson]

Coming up, video game thumbsticks go from game world battlefields to real ones.

[Jared Keller]

Article.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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[Amory Sivertson]

Within a century, we've gone from using a Joystick to navigate three dimensional airspace to using it to move Pac Man 2 dimensionally up, down, left, right on screen, to shrinking it beneath our thumbs, to adding a thumbstick to make maneuvering through a game world feel like moving through the real world. And where we've arrived now at the modern dual stick video game controller is a new period of evolution. Not of the interface itself, but in what we're using it for. What makes in your mind a video game controller the right tool for operating the kinds of advanced weapons that the military is using it for?

[Jared Keller]

It's generally a matter of familiarity.

[Amory Sivertson]

Jared Keller is a longtime military technology journalist. He wrote a piece for Wired magazine last year called this video game controller has become the US Military's weapon of choice. The controller he's talking about is the Freedom of Movement Control Unit, or fmcu.

[Jared Keller]

It's rugged, it's designed to be durable and to endure intense environs. But to the average observer, it would look like anything that comes with a PlayStation or Xbox.

[Amory Sivertson]

Yeah, it's like shaped like a PlayStation or Xbox controller, but it's like tan in color, you know, kind of your stereotypical military color palette.

[Jared Keller]

Yes, coyote tan is what they call it.

[Amory Sivertson]

Coyote tan. Okay, yeah.

[Jared Keller]

Or sometimes, you know, desert tan.

[Amory Sivertson]

Right, right. But really, I cannot stress enough that if these FMCU controllers were, weren't desert tan, you really would just think they were for Fortnite or Final Fantasy. They have the two thumbsticks, the D pad, the all too familiar trigger buttons on the tops of the handles. Except in this case, they are actual triggers.

[Jared Keller]

The military has been experimenting with video game controllers for the last two decades, but their proliferation and use has really accelerated in recent years as their utility has been demonstrated in various field experiments and tests.

[Amory Sivertson]

The Pentagon has confirmed the use of the FMCU controller in the Air Force's Radbo, or Recovery of Air Bases Denied by Ordnance Vehicle, a boxy desert tan bomb finding truck. Also in the Army's Short Range Air Defense system. Picture heavy duty vehicles, often unmanned, with turrets and machine guns and missile launchers mounted on top to take out low flying threats like helicopters and small planes. Every mission is different, the FMCU's product description reads. Shouldn't your controller be as versatile as you are? The FMCU isn't the only game controller that's in the action. Jared says the Army's Locust laser weapon system blasts drones out of the sky using an actual Xbox controller.

[Jared Keller]

It gives the operator a better sense of control and focus on a system that requires precision to be effective.

[Amory Sivertson]

And the US Military isn't the only one using video game controllers. The British army, the Israel Defense Forces, also the Armed forces of Ukraine, who Jared says have been using PlayStation controllers to direct armed drones and machine guns turrets at invading Russian forces. So why? Why video game controllers? One reason, as you heard, is familiarity.

[Jared Keller]

Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who are going to make up the majority of the armed forces in the coming decades, have grown up on these systems. So why waste time building a new one when you can give prospective troops something they're already familiar with and can.

[Amory Sivertson]

Use almost another that precision. Jared was talking about the mobility of the thumbsticks for directing vehicles and weaponry and the level of responsiveness that, According to the FMCU's product description, can, quote, be the difference between success and failure. But also, the military doesn't have to reinvent the controller. In fact, Jared says, that might be for the best.

[Jared Keller]

I think we've all heard the joke that a camel is a horse designed by committee and, you know, not often. Yeah, but. And often, you know, a lot of proprietary systems designed by the DoD end up being camels, not necessarily because of, you know, bad design decisions, but because the knowledge and understanding and research exists out there in the private sector.

[Amory Sivertson]

Not only does it already exist, Jared says it may very well have already been perfected.

[Jared Keller]

The gaming companies, as the technologist Peter Singer put it years ago, spent tons of money developing what is optimal, intuitive, and easy to learn. And the military is basically saying, well, they did the job for us. Let's build these systems so that this next generation of warfighters can adapt those skills seamlessly to a military context.

[Amory Sivertson]

The game companies did the job for them. Now, when it comes to the joystick specifically, this full circle moment is not all that surprising, right? The joystick is part of the military's aviation history and development. It's not new to them.

[Jared Keller]

The joystick has kind of proven itself over the last several decades as the man machine interface of choice.

[Amory Sivertson]

It's just kept getting better.

[Jared Keller]

There is no more intuitive, optimized system for delicate, precise control of remotely operated technology than the joystick.

[Amory Sivertson]

Now, the word remotely is important here because when we're using joysticks to navigate through game worlds, we know those worlds on our screen aren't real. When a soldier is using a video game controller to shoot down a helicopter on a screen, it is real and deadly. We've designed something that makes it easier than ever to execute incredibly consequential tasks. Then again, these consequential tasks can also be life saving. Last year, an endoscopy was performed on a live pig in Hong Kong from thousands of miles away in Switzerland using a PlayStation. And momentum behind game controllers in medicine is building. Earlier this year, the FDA approved the latest iteration of the Monarch bronchoscopy system, which uses a controller adapted directly from the Xbox to maneuver a tiny tube through a patient's lungs to find and treat diseases. It is uncanny. The Xbox esque black and white design, the two handle shape, the two thumbsticks in that familiar diagonal orientation. The same optimized interface from the game room to the war room to the operating room. How do you feel about game controllers being repurposed for things like this?

[Mikko Hinonen or Nikolas Nuland]

Well, I'm always happy when the geeks win.

[Amory Sivertson]

Miko Hinonen is the creator of the Finnish Museum of Games in Tampere, Finland, and one half of the team behind its 2023 exhibition, the Joy of Sticks. It featured hundreds of gaming joysticks from Mikko's personal collection, but also traced the interface's significance in society, from aviation to medicine.

[Mikko Hinonen or Nikolas Nuland]

Examples like these show that games have always been and are very much connected.

[Amory Sivertson]

This is the exhibit's other half, Nikolas Nuland, one of the museum's curators. Despite the joy these Finns find in Styx, Mikko and Niklas do acknowledge begrudgingly that the next big interface is already here.

[Mikko Hinonen or Nikolas Nuland]

Nowadays, everybody is using the touchscreen for everything.

[Amory Sivertson]

Oh boy, the touchscreen, it is ubiquitous. But just because it's big doesn't mean it's better. In fact, what makes the joystick great as an interface is the same thing that makes the touchscreen basically a black box. This idea of perceived affordance. You look at a joystick, you know how to use it. It's an intuitive piece of hardware. You look at a touchscreen and it's a flat piece of glass. Zero perceived affordance, completely beholden to its software. And so what the touchscreen affords us is really only what the software developers want us to be able to do with it. And Niklas isn't particularly happy about it.

[Mikko Hinonen or Nikolas Nuland]

Touchscreens are scarily monolithic, and they sort of become like, I guess, like a metaphor for the influence of the big tech companies. Nowadays, everything is put into the same.

[Amory Sivertson]

Type of interface, and that same interface is bombarding us with endless possible uses. Apps, maps, games that each have their own way of using the touchscreen that you have to get used to, from swiping through potential soulmates. Oof, not much joy in that. To signing your name with your fingertip. And we all know how well that usually turns out on a touchscreen.

[Mikko Hinonen or Nikolas Nuland]

You can do a lot of things, but, like, being very precise is not one of them.

[Amory Sivertson]

No, it is not, Mikko. But convenience, versatility, those are perhaps the touchscreen's primary affordances. One interface in our pockets all the time that allows us to communicate, shop, split a bill with friends, and crush all the candy. But touchscreens have also made life literally flatter. Think of how many dials and buttons we've squashed into extinction on our phones, our cash registers, in our cars. We're losing our grip on the world one swipe, scroll and tap at a time.

[Mikko Hinonen or Nikolas Nuland]

But the joystick, it's very different because you actually use your body when controlling.

[Amory Sivertson]

It offers us a physical human machine connection. Niklas says the tactile, empowering experience of maneuvering an actual object to explore 3D space in a self controlled way. Whether we're flying a plane or driving Mario's kart poorly, in my case, I think I'm crushing it. It's our bodily affordances and machine affordances coming together in joyful. Sometimes exhilarating harmony.

[Mikko Hinonen or Nikolas Nuland]

You kind of become one with the joystick. And I think that's something that stays in people's muscle memory or bodily memory. Like we want to be able to be very precise or we want to be able to sort of use our bodies for controlling and sort of joysticks maybe remind us of this, that there's options, the breadth of different ways is good for us.

[Amory Sivertson]

You know, I too think maintaining a physical connection to our physical world with a physical interface like the joystick, is good for us. Just like it's good to use our own software and hardware, our brains and bodies, and to be able to move those heads and bodies separately. So it's not really about one interface replacing another, or it shouldn't be. It's about having the tool that affords what you need. Versatility, specificity, convenience, precision. It all depends on the game. So Emory, on the right, those orange things make you go faster?

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Yes.

[Roman Mars]

Oh, it's kind of propelling arrows.

[Amory Sivertson]

You guys were setting me up for Philly.

[Jeff Boojack]

We've been competing.

[Narrator/Edward Jones Advertiser]

Hooray.

[Amory Sivertson]

Ludwig 12. 12 of 12.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Ben Brock Johnson, Roman Mars. I love that story. But I have one bone to pick with Amrehorson. Because I'm here to tell you that the Atari 2600 joystick is a beautiful piece of design. That you're like weak wristed millennials get tired using it. That is your problem. That is not Atari 2600s problem.

[Roman Mars]

To say nothing of the rich mahogany veneer on the outside of this thing. It really is a beautiful piece of machinery.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

The machine is gorgeous. You could throw it down three flights of stairs, you could fry an egg on it and it'll still play. That thing is a gorgeous piece of the pinnacle of design. And so like, when she goes to that, she's like, I don't like it. Like, what the hell is going on there? But anyway, I'll let her have her say she is a. A great reporter.

[Roman Mars]

So, Roman, your letters and everybody else's letters about Amerie's thoughts on the Atari 2600, I'll happily bring them directly to.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Her, forward to her, because I will not have any of this Atari slander in my house.

[Roman Mars]

But of course, Amerie talked about some much more serious stuff that we're gonna pick up in our next episode, and that is military applications for Video Game technology. For episode three of Hidden Levels, we're gonna tell you how the US military uses video games to recruit.

[David O'Grady]

So you're probably wondering to yourself, the US army has an esports program. Why and how do I join? The U.S. army esports program is a recruiting outreach tool to help the army connect with the fast growing esports audience.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

That is the next time on hidden levels from 99% invisible and endless threat.

[Roman Mars]

This episode was produced by Emery Sivertson. It was edited by Meg Kramer, Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski Additional mixing by Martine Gonzalez Music composition by Paul Vikas Series theme by Swan Rao and Paul Vikas Fact checking by Laura Bullens Special thanks to Amarie's Mario Kart opponents Philip Susi, Kelly o' Connell and Mike Mosqueto and to Henry Lowood for sharing his expertise and tipping Amory off to the Joy of Sticks exhibition.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

99% Invisible's executive producer is Kathy Too. Kurt Kohlstedt is our Digital Director. Delaney hall is our Senior Editor. The rest of team includes Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Lashma Dawn, Jacob Medina Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg and me, Roman Mars. The 99 Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast Family Now. Headquarters quartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.

[Roman Mars]

Endless Thread is a production of WBUR Boston's npr. The rest of our team, tackling unsolved mysteries, untold histories and other wild stories from the Internet, includes Managing Producer Samata Joshi, production Manager Paul Vikas, producers Dean Russell, Grace Tatter and Franny Monahan.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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