Over a couple of days in November, around 2.5 million households worldwide acquired an impressive new piece of furniture. At approximately 15.4 x 10.24 x 4.09 inches, and weighing around 9.9 pounds, the Sony PlayStation 5 is the first new video game console in recent memory that appears hefty enough to sit on.
That is, if you place it horizontally, making it look like a relative of Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan, with its swooping curves and warped façade, white matte plates sandwiching a glossy black core. Alternately, you can position the object vertically, so that it’s as commanding and inscrutable a presence as the “2001: A Space Odyssey” monolith.
In short, it is a forceful, dazzling art object—the game machine as sculpture—certain to be an attention-seizing addition in any living room. But it isn’t even the most remarkable piece of hardware in the package.
That would be the PS5’s DualSense controller. Maintaining the monochrome color scheme of the console, it too, looks bigger than its predecessors, though it somehow manages not to feel bulkier; the rounded taper of the handles is both aesthetically and ergonomically pleasing, suggesting the eminently grippable geometry of a banana. (The dimpled texture on the handles’ undersides is actually comprised of triangles, crosses, circles and squares–the iconic geometric shapes associated with the PlayStation, rendered very nearly microscopically. That’s right: even the controller has Easter eggs.)
“In all, we went through several concepts and hundreds of mockups over the last few years before we settled on this final design,” Hideaki Nishino, the senior vice president of Platform Planning & Management at PlayStation, wrote on the PlayStation blog earlier in the year. “Our goal with DualSense is to give gamers the feeling of being transported into the game world as soon as they open the box. We want gamers to feel like the controller is an extension of themselves when they’re playing.”
Video game controllers have been agitating the palms of players since the Nintendo 64 Rumble Pak in 1997. Twenty-three years later, the DualSense has a much more expressive haptic vocabulary than any controller before it. It can indeed “rumble” more powerfully, but also, at other times, with more nuance. The overall effect is that the player “feels” the game at a higher resolution than ever before.
“Based on our discussions with developers,” continued Mr. Nishino, “we concluded that the sense of touch within gameplay, much like audio, hasn’t been a big focus for many games. We had a great opportunity with PS5 to innovate by offering game creators the ability to explore how they can heighten that feeling of immersion.”
“Immersion” may be the most overused entertainment buzzword of the age. But it’s undeniably true that the feel of the DualSense, combined with the visuals and the audio (including the audio emanating from the controller itself), does something funny to the psychological boundary between the on-screen world and the off-screen one. The thing feels—literally—like a game-changer (literally and figuratively).
In “Demon’s Souls,” for example, a player can feel the crackle of conjuring magic, the satisfying metallic jolt of a successful parry, or the low seismic rumble of an imminent boss battle (the tactile equivalent of ominous music). In the upcoming “Ghostwire: Tokyo,” the haptics are said to evoke the specific recoil action of a machine gun, which reasonably contrasts with the specific recoil action of a shotgun.
The tech can be used for more delightful, non-violent ends too. “Astro’s Playroom,” the charming 3D platformer that comes bundled with the PS5, is a touchy-feely textural wonderland, conveying the sensations of a gust of wind or the crunch of sand, the pitter-patter of raindrops or the smashing of glass, even the refreshing splish-splash of water. In “Sackboy: A Big Adventure,” you can hop into a bubble and feel the deeply gratifying pop as you do so.
It’s the triggers, though, that take the DualSense to the next level. The L2 and R2 shoulder buttons are “adaptive,” meaning that, depending on what might be going on in the game, they offer varying degrees of resistance. You could say that, when the game is so inclined, the buttons fight back.
The most cited example of the technology is the way a trigger might mimic the tension and release of a bowstring when you’re shooting an arrow. (The visceral feature has been added to the most visceral game of the year, “The Last of Us Part 2.”) But there’s a range of other uses (including in as yet unreleased titles) which give you a sense of the myriad possibilities.
In “Bugsnax,” the trigger emulates the simple clickability of a camera shutter button, while in “Gran Turismo 7,” it will simulate the way a vehicle’s antilock brake system works, releasing brake pressure intermittently. in “NBA 2K21,” an exhausted player needs to be pushed harder to sprint, while in “Sackboy” certain objects will require more effort to pick up and carry than others.
All great examples of how a controller might be, as well as an input device, a useful output device. The upcoming game “Deathloop” will do something even more interesting: it will “lock” the trigger when your weapon jams. As the game’s director Digna Bakaba has explained, the player will feel this happen before they see it, the physical signal occurring before the corresponding animation plays out on screen.
It gives an idea of how a game, by tapping into the exquisite intelligence of our touch receptors, might not just augment, but truly alter the gameplay experience. At its most profound, this feels like a sign of the future of games that engage the somatosensory cortex, the part of your brain that brings the world of physical sensation to life.
“I tried turning haptic feedback off once,” Nicolas Doucet, the studio director of “Astro’s Playroom” developer Team Asobi, has said, “and could not believe how much I missed it.”
At the very least, it feels really cool.
No greater philosophical authority than Aristotle raved about the power of humans’ sense of touch. “While in respect of all the other senses we fall below many species of animals,” he wrote, “in respect of touch we far excel all other species in exactness of discrimination.” He would have really dug “Astro.”
