The Shape Was Made for the Hand, and the Hand Stayed

The Shape Was Made for the Hand, and the Hand Stayed

A flat controller wears flat. The Famicom pad, the Super Famicom — hold one that has seen years of use and you find a single smooth spot under the thumb, the way stone steps dip where feet have passed. For a long time I thought every controller aged that way. Then the PlayStation controller taught me otherwise.

Its designer, Teiyu Goto, did not draw that strange two-pronged shape to look new. The PlayStation was built for three dimensions, and he felt a flat pad belonged to a flat world. He moved the fingers onto shoulder triggers to reach into depth, then added the grips so a hand could wrap around something and feel it was inside the game's space. Sony's president, Norio Ohga — a man who flew planes — understood it at once: a controller should feel like a control stick. Three years later they added the analog stick itself, chasing the 3D games that had finally arrived.

So the controller stopped being a flat tile a thumb rests on. It became a thing a whole hand climbs into. And a thing the hand climbs into does not wear flat. It wears in three dimensions — the grips darkened where palms closed around them, the stick gone pale and loose where a thumb pushed, again and again, into a space that was not really there.

I am not the one who wore them down. They reach me already shaped twice — once by the men who built them for the hand, once by a stranger whose hand pressed back. I hold each one the way it was meant to be held, clean the places another hand made smooth, and send it on. The shape was made to pull a hand into three dimensions. It turns out it kept a little of every hand that ever went there.