Button number is irrelevent

 That’s a spicy take and that’s one of the point where I kinda wonder if arcade game player don’t live on a different planet.

OK take one of the most well known controller out there : the keyboard

Crazy number of buttons there ? And that’s not all there is, most keyboard have functions button, a few additional utilities button, and even a num pad.

Surely, this is ridiculous. Granted, keyboard are not primarly video game interface, but it should be possible to transfer some of the principles to that overbloated piece of plastic. Here is my proposal :

There we go! Now instead of using 26 buttons to represent the whole alphabet, by a clever use a push and pauses, we can only use one! This use less buttons and therefore is more intuitive and elegant according to people arguing about button number on social networks.

The number of buttons doesn’t limit anything

My exemple was a bit silly but I wanted to highlight something : there is no real upper limit to the number of action you can put on a small number of buttons if you’re willing to use a control scheme convulted enough. My initial idea was trying to make a diagram on how you could map all of devil may cry 5 actions to a single button but I think the morse code comparaison get the idea across just fine. Here is a few actual tricks, used by actual video game that technically decrease the number of buttons while still keeping or even increasing the complexity of the control scheme.

Virtual buttons

A personnal name to the common trick of asking the player to perform two actions at once (usually pushing two buttons, but can also apply to button + command move), resulting in a third actions with no real link to at least one of the buttons pressed.

An exemple of that is the superjoy in final fight. By pressing both the jump and attack buttons at the same time, the character will use a special attack that will consume a little bit of life, hit all enemies around him, and give a few frames of invulnerability. It’s an attack, so I can see why it ask to press the attack button, but you have to admit that the link to the jump button is really tenuous.

In practice, the superjoy is for all intends and purpose a third button. It’s not physically there, but you think of it like a button, and configuration that use a separate button for the superjoy don’t really end up being more complex or overwelming. The buttons was always there in a way.

Not all buttons combinaison are necessarly virtual buttons. Taking back the keyboard exemple, it would be stupid to say that having an additional keyboard for capital letters would be equivalent. That’s because both of the buttons used are linked in the action of creating a capital letter; you use the upper case button and the corresponding button at the same time. In video games, it would be the equivalent, for exemple, of getting a jump attack when pressing jump and attack at the same time, dodge attack in virtua fighter 3 or getting hadoken of various strength depending on the button pushed.

(keyboards technically also have a lot of virtual buttons with some keyboard combinaison with altgr and other ctrl buttons but that’s because keyboard as they are already stretch a lot the maximum amount of button it’s physically possible for a human to interact with. Controller still have margin, at least on a physical level, buttons at the back are barely used)

Mode shift

Another exemple on how to create a confusing control scheme have while still having a low number of physical button is creating a button that after each press completely change the function of other buttons. This is fairly similar to buttons combinaison except that it doesn’t require both buttons to be pressed at once, letting the door open for even more available actions and a player struggling to get control back on his character. A good exemple of that would be fortnite inventory mode, that completely swap around the functions of at least all face buttons. You loose a lot of control over your character and have to learn an entirely new control scheme until you manage to find the button to close the menu. 

A less egregious offense would be style switch in Devil may cry 4 and 5 that change mid battle the functions of the style button to either an offensive or a defensive action. Even better, in devil may cry 4, pushing the button corresponding to an already enabled style would make dante switch to a special 5th style, meaning that the mode shift button could themselves be subjected to a mode shift. Style switching doesn’t technically decrease the number of buttons used, but I think it’s easy to see how using a similar system to change an existing control layout towards more simplification could result in something more confusing.

Unbloating your buttons is a waste of time, unbloat your actions instead.

Most of the common trick used for getting rid of buttons bloat, like using directions + buttons or motion input, while they can have their own side benefit, imo don’t really achieve any kind of actual simplification by themselves. It’s not really a hard trick, because putting more action on a limited controller is something anyone can do and don’t really have a upper limit to it (nightmare circus is infamous for his control scheme that map a billion actions to the 3/6 buttons of the megadrive). The root of the problem is that the player have too many actions available, resulting in either some pointless ones that only cause additional confusion or some broken one that can be used in place of a strategy

What exactly does walking dead need? does it need to have some kind of weird trick to map light heavy and adrenaline attack to a single button? Or does it need to not have a "adrenaline attack" "crouch", "heal" and "camera" button in a fucking beat’em up? Why does AM2R have a control scheme dedicated to allow the player to run or try to let him shoot in top of him while moving in a damn metroid game ? Why do fortnite have a damn complete inventory mode in the middle of battle ??? If you want game to get simpler, point how ridiculous some of theses actions are. We don’t need them mapped to QCF + YB.