The Arcade Stick: Function, Philosophy & Industrial Design.

in this video we're dealing with three
different questions three different problems you might want to fast forward if you're only interested in hearing the answer to one out of those three number one the difference between sanwa and say mitsu buttons this stick is all sanwa components and this one this one that i can barely lift these are say mitsu buttons installed custom this stick does not come with zemetsu out of the box okay that comparison other people have made youtube videos doing that before i think all those videos suck so i'm giving you my perspective on the matter here and now real quick question two is about the particular industrial design of this joystick and the other one why well for one thing both of these are available for sale right now and by them now 2020 early 2021 probably at an okay price probably within another year after that they're going to become priceless collectors items like everything else on the internet the price is going to go up and up and up these were available for about 100 us dollars like the day before yesterday i had a fan write in and say he bought one for 250 although with two small control pads included in a bundle i'm sorry but the control pads aren't worth more than 30 40 bucks 250 is a lot to pay for this so these things their prices change and they change dramatically partly because there is so much sentimentality attached and i guess i guess that's part of the the third and final portion of this video i want to talk about why anyone would want to use such an enormous seemingly clunky and inefficient piece of machinery why you want to use an interface that hasn't changed in 50 years in an era when computers are being more miniaturized when you know the size of a cell phone keeps going down and so much of our interaction with digital technology is through this kind of tiny touch screen interface on a cell phone on a portable computer or or what have you um my interest in arcade sticks is not nostalgic but this the reason why this is going to get more expensive is partly because so many people are a nostalgia of the design if you don't recognize it this is retrofreak reinventing the aesthetic and design of the old ascii stick so ascii where was the company and the original ascii stick made for the famicom collector's item warships you know people call it what heard another youtube recruiter as a a god-tier joystick right but the original stick is only two buttons it only has an amv button right in terms of the main button then select and start like everything else for the nes uh just to mention that stick the stick that inspired this design this strange graph paper does not makes it look like a scientific instrument that's kind of geometric layout that stick was not for the american nes it was for the original japanese famicom the american nintendo entertainment system you could plug in a new controller the famicom you could not the controllers were hardwired in right so if you think you can just buy that stick and use it on a north american setup or a european set no but yes obviously if you google it now people will sell you an adapter or sell you a modification people obsess over this stuff and that again is why the price is gonna go up and up and up this is gonna become a collector's item uh in its turn okay so first things first what i see most of the other youtubers doing is just demonstrating the clicky sound like like oh yeah you're going to judge the quality of this product and then i add some adjectives some really useless adjectives like mushy like oh yeah the samoa but it's more mushy whereas the the semitsu button is more clicky okay look if you play the guitar only one part of the sound of the guitar is created by the string the hollowness the hollow wooden space of the guitar is a significant part of sound this joystick has a lot of hollow space it's really like a drama or a guitar in its shape so that's that's part of where you're not really comparing the sound of the button you have to just click the button alone but what does the sound tell you and these adjectives like mushy what do they tell you okay here's i'm going to break down for se matsu versus samwell these are say mitsu buttons the minute you see them this is natural light i have no lighting on this is just sunlight coming in through the window the minute you see them at any angle they light up the room and you say wow they make a big first impression when you look at them and in terms of the tactility they make a big impression too you say wow this is not an ordinary button this is something extraordinary okay the first impression of the san juan by contrast is just ordinary if you walked into an elevator and you pressed you know 11th floor you wouldn't say oh wow this is a santa well but no it would be a completely unremarkable normal button you click on you go to the 11th floor and you don't even think about it if you walk into an elevator and the buttons look like this and the buttons feel like this you go wow the landlord for this building man he really he really did something special with this elevator and these but right and that includes there is something special about clicking the submit two buttons that's what a lot of people get okay bad news these are the 1.5 n spring sticks spring strength signature buttons these buttons were designed not for home use not for you to type an essay on right not for long hours bent over your desk doing doing hard work or studying or using applications to memorize chinese vocabulary no these were designed for arcade operators whose attitude was come in put your 25 cents in the machine play for 30 seconds and get the hell out play for two minutes these were meant to be used for a short period of time the i'm amazed anytime i use these buttons for two minutes three minutes five minutes i'm laughing out loud to my girlfriend saying i can feel it in my shoulder i can feel it in my chest like the amount of work the amount of pressure the just the the strain for your hand and for your whole upper body usually it's astounding to me i laugh out loud at how tough these buttons are and i mean you know it's special it's remarkable it's also completely counterproductive now maybe it's a good thing maybe you like myself want to take a vow that you're never going to play video games for more than 15 minutes in a day and this is going to remind you about the passage of time if you play anything we're expected to bang on the buttons like our type or something you know like any of these any of these games you are it's just mind-blowing how much work and i bench press over 200 pounds at the gym i do 200 push-ups in a day not every day many days i do over 200 okay i'm in okay shape i'm not i'm not i'm not here keeling over telling you that the same itsu buttons are going to be the death of me are gonna give me a heart attack okay i'm not it's not my some of you maybe when you think about how much your hand has to spread out i'm six foot three i got big hands my girlfriend has smaller hands to play a game where you got four you know you're doing using all four fingers you're putting that much pressure there is a reason there is a reason why the so-called mushy unremarkable aesthetically unappealing buttons from samwa is what all the video game addicts use okay in terms of the buttons in terms of functionality sadly i gotta hand it to to say like it's it's kind of it's kind of the winner that way right with that having said why would you spend a whole bunch of money for a button that's unremarkable and i remember like honestly if you take the time to order these special and then install them you're going to feel ripped off you're going to feel disappointed because there's nothing special about them there's nothing remarkable about them and what's worse they have the exact opposite problem from the same itsu buttons which is like when i'm going through a menu and setting options like let's say i'm using a program because i've posted this on instagram i try to use these things to do a memorization of chinese i was trying to use them for french language practice actually try to do productivity apps with this stuff i wish i could use uh joystick to do youtube video editing in the video editing suite instead of using a mouse and a keyboard i try to make product music but i'm using an app that only uses two buttons and then i go into the options screen i'm amazed to see i'm setting off the other buttons actually i'm not even seeing them doing not even noticing it right that actually brings those back to the design of the original ascii stick the original ascii stix design was kind of perfect for assembled buttons because it was just two buttons and then a an ocean of smooth metal this is a straight metal surface right there was lots of space for your hand you're not going to accident though accidentally triggering these buttons is a problem they have a light touch they're a hair trigger and by contrast with the same itsu buttons that is not the problem okay there is going to be no digression in this video talking about the stick itself that this one down here this is a uh a legit sanwa stick my honest opinion about the joystick itself narrowly defined this piece of metal i think anyone who's in business today in 2020 whether they are in korea japan china or spain any of these manufacturers they all make good joysticks there's nothing worth obsessing about there look people can obsess go ahead obsessed i don't mind maybe 10 years ago maybe 20 years ago you could say that this the actual stick made by sanwa or made by say mitsu was so much better than the alternative that it was worth obsessing over today i just think the gap has really closed down so when people talk about the small difference between san juan other and other choice manufacturers they're talking about how much travel the stick has so after you hear the click how much further can you press the stick before it hits the limit if you want to obsess over that knock yourself out what i'm saying is in the year 2020 all these people are making good hardware and that's because this ain't new this is an incredibly simple device manufactured out of steel you can make it yourself you can literally assemble your own joystick in your garage don't try to make your own cell phone don't try to make your own tablet or you know laptop computer don't try to make your own car but this is a mechanism so simple you actually could make it yourself be a lot good luck making your own uh coca-cola dispenser machine you know like a machine that a can vending machine or something a vending machine that would be really tough this you can make it yourself and there are tons of hobbyists to do right so just recognize so i mean this is one of the great things this is like an obsolete piece of technology that's still here with us in 2020 and that's going to be 0.3 at the end of this video moving on to 0.2 because again right now you could buy either of these joysticks this one has been customized you guys probably know it doesn't come with this translucent uh purple ball top out of the box doesn't come with semi two buttons out of the box um that was my hard work if you like that was my my modification of the design terrible design worth buying anyway the first thing i want to say maybe the last thing i want to say about arcade stick design is that you can't just look at the surface at the top look at this crap can you see this all right the the power switch is located here on the side with about four different buttons and another what would you call that kind of switch a slider for about four options any any interaction between the user and these things aside can and will accidentally switch the whole thing off you think that that's a minor problem it's not it's not a minor problem you want to talk about a minor problem this relies on you owning and not losing this poorly designed usb a usbc adapter all right now this is this is such a lousy piece of industrials i bought a new one made out of metal that i thought was better quality for amazon doesn't work they want you to use this one that comes that's really really bad industrial design it's still a wonderful product but in some obvious ways the design is unforgivably terrible why is it so enormous because this is designed so you can use it either on a desktop or directly on your lap without having a desk or a table that's it's bigger than a pillow it's absolutely enormous right terrible industrial design terrible this looks a little bit more clean looks a little bit more tidy industrial design right but you can't really use it on your lap right what they've given up and going for the smaller form factor is now you can only use it on a table okay unlike the design it's an homage to or ripping off the ascii stick no empty space the buttons take up so much of the space right there's nowhere really to put your hand so we got specific and the worst thing of all is the surface matters so here you get an actual i don't know if it's steel or aluminum get a metal surface right in your hands everything is great i think that's wonderful right surface matters when you look past the surface the rest of this is just this is an ugly poorly manufactured look at that crap look at that garbage whenever you look at the other sides of this thing it's it's terrible and i gotta have this incredibly long usb cord bundled up it's no way to retract it or modify the length it's it's a huge encumbrance makes it on the plus side i already praised the actual surface i think that's great i think the throwback to the 1980s it is an 1880s design from ascii it's great and you get a whole bunch of buttons smaller buttons here at the top that you can assign so if you're a nutcase like me who actually wants to try to do something productive want to study languages use memorization apps maybe uh you know like anki uh where they shuffle the cards and you're doing repeat memorization you want to study with this you want to use some kind of having so many buttons that you can assign different functions to at the top you know functions you may only use once as well huge advantage right so and to me i mean it's kind of ugly and beautiful at the same time there's something very appealing about this to me uh that as i'm about to get into most technology in the 21st century lacks okay again both of these you can buy it now they're probably going to double or triple in price later and oh let's give a compare point of comparison this is currently cheaper than the very similar closely comparable arcade stick put out by sega sega's put out a brand new 1k stick with apple green san juan joystick and buttons i hope they're true to their word if people have pre-ordered that and they get it and then it's not san juan parts they'll be really disappointed but a very plain in my opinion ugly uh joystick arcade stickers just came up from sega but uh allegedly with with samwa parts i'd wait for the reviews and that's significantly more expensive it's more expensive than both of them actually and yeah i don't know you don't get a whole lot bang bang for your buck there okay why would anyone drag this kind of technology with them into the 21st century for me it is in part despite the tendency towards mineral miniaturization it's in part because of it all right um i've studied many different languages can i do the whole list cree ojibwe pali in the study of pali i was typing in burmese cambodian laotian uh several others well of course thai oh right yeah ashokan did i i don't think it's i skipped sri lanka similes all right it's like from the computer's perspective i was sometimes using six different languages just in studying one language i've typed in japanese chinese one studying this language i have a little bit of experience with korean all right not to mention french and german okay our conventions with the keyboard and mouse they're very poorly suited to any one language if you can just take a step back and be honest with yourself how does this keyboard and most thing relate to the english language it's poor at best but when you have that comparative awareness like okay i have experience typing and memorizing the layout for languages indigenous to india southeast asia japan china like i really kind of profoundly appreciate how awful 21st century computer conventions are and how most of them have developed in an unexamined way or you can say they've devolved in an unexamined way from like things that were short-term conveniences in the late 1970s right when these computer standards first emerged so you can look at keyboards it's a little bit of experimentation 1970s early 1980s then we've established a kind of orthodoxy as to what computer interfaces are more recently the arrival of the smartphone again there's an early period of experimentation you can look at the original palm pilot you can look at the original apple newton shout out to anyone old enough to remember apple newton um right and you know and then quickly an orthodoxy you know established itself and nobody's thinking about it of course i'm interested in using computers in english that's my main language but i'm also interested in other languages i'm also interested in other kinds of of productivity and a lot gets lost along the way when i look back at my life in computers all right the single most effective and efficient operating system i have ever used was the one built into the sega saturn you know and i used to have experience in the old days you could modify your operating system a lot more than you can now i remember modifying the hell out of what windows 3.1 so that i had a totally different interface like nobody else interviewed you could hack those old versions of windows you know probably why virus is such a big problem yeah my computer didn't connect the internet i did it yeah it was pre-internet before i remember modified the hell out of it so they had a really effective interface and then you know uh i got a sega saturn for free because i was a i was a journalist it was a video game over here you know start up the saturn and there are just about nine options on screen in a grid you get any of them in half a second you know and you look at the mess that modern computing now you know what my macintosh computer looks like what an android phone looks like and just how much meaningless busy work and memorization is imposed on the end user and i've had to explain these things to laotians and cambodians and thai people like oh yeah this is why you have to do you know command f and then this and this like i'm talking them through what whether it's clicking through a bunch of menus or a bunch of arbitrary you know keyboard commands most of them don't make sense to begin with in english and i mean if you've been doing this all your life you may have taken on this burden you may have even raised your own kids and you start teaching your children these arbitrary conventions you don't realize what it is you're you're carrying around with you you know now the history of the joystick begins with a team of engineers who looked at the way you drive a car who looked at the way you pilot an airplane and he said this is and they invented a completely new paradigm for how people were going to pilot a helicopter the development of the joystick is basically the development of how you steer a helicopter right there are a lot of reasons for why they wanted to improve that including that with the joystick you only use one hand all right you can use one hand but this type of non-fixed wing aircraft they needed something intuitive effective and you've got another hand to operate the radio or operate the gun or whatever as you're doing in the military you know there are other things you you need to be doing when you have one hand on the joystick and that is it you know there was no need to reproduce the defects of the way the car steering wheel works you know so on and so forth and i just really feel this need to challenge the complacency of gui design graphical user interface design to challenge the complacency of the keyboard itself to challenge the interface between language and computing and i do my small part doing this for years you know i just sent email the other day to the software company it makes the the applications i use for studying chinese and said hey you know i'd really appreciate it i'd really appreciate it if you stick if you could just optimize it a little bit for joystick use for joystick the joystick based interface and they wrote back to me i had three different companies reply to me within the last week uh one of them was a french guy two of them were were chinese to my knowledge people who wrote back to me and uh all of them said wow we never even thought of that before we didn't know anyone was using it with a joystick click click click all of the inefficiencies in video editing software even in the just finding and opening the applications that are on your hard drive right in that operating mix the operating system menu with that level once you start evaluating it from the perspective of an arcade stack you realize just how dreadful just how wasteful the interface you've already got really is and how much you've imposed on the on the user to submit themselves to this strange soul-destroying discipline you know oh yeah that's how you oh yeah i'm going to do command shift right bracket to align the text on the right really really you know what it's like explaining that to a secretary in cambodia who like barely speaks english or english is their third language you know what's like explaining that to your daughter who's writing a book report say oh yeah i'm just going to take these ridiculous inefficient conventions that like evolved in the 1970s and early 1980s and i'm going to impose them on you you know there could be a better way there should be a better way and we're now stuck in a situation where so much of computer hardware computer software and the role the user has evolved in order to serve the lowest common denominator apps in order to work well with something like facebook that you know we're stuck in a situation where anything you want to do that's more sophisticated more creative more demanding is at the same time more convoluted right more of an imposition on you as the user and it just doesn't have to be so this is my rebellion against the the logic of the 21st century cell phone right the cell phone is tremendously efficient in terms of the materials used to create it in terms of battery life right there there are efficiencies right but it's incredibly inefficient in terms of how it uses your time