Why do controllers have the "back" button?
- Thread starter Dirty Hipsters
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Well, if you are going off of that, then it should be called the 'pause' button.GiantRaven said:
Mostly for design i'd say and it's convenient to make it a score or inventory button. With an xbox controller, you have your main X button right in the middle, start to the right and then what... nothing to the left? It would look awkward from a design point of view.
What is this back button you speak of? Where I come from there is only a select button. And for that matter, why did the button naming gods, when adding two new buttons, choose X and Y before any of the other letters, huh? These are the important questions.
You know what is legitimately annoying though? The fact that the a/b/x/y layout is different for the Xboxes and the SNES.
You know what is legitimately annoying though? The fact that the a/b/x/y layout is different for the Xboxes and the SNES.
As someone who frequently has to map PC game controls onto a 360 controller, I dont look at it as a back button, so much as another viable button that can be used to assign a relevant function.
Usually on games like Dragon Age/witcher it gets relegated for bringing up menus, though due to its placement it is usually the last button to get mapped.
Usually on games like Dragon Age/witcher it gets relegated for bringing up menus, though due to its placement it is usually the last button to get mapped.
Probably, but since X is confirm and O is cancel in most western games (which makes no sense) I think it's possible to live with illogical controller button names/functions.ssgt splatter said:
"Start" replaces the old 1P/2P/whateverP buttons on arcades. A lot of NES era titles did make you use the start button.
Plus, it's a "cross" button, not actually an "X."
Unless you think of an "X" as a "tick mark" and a circle as "unticked."GiantRaven said:
Plus, it's a "cross" button, not actually an "X."
The cross button is the angriest on the controller.
Re: Nintendo's ABXY and Microsoft's ABXY, it's probably a legal thing.
Re: Select/Back button: Once upon a time, the select button actually let you select different things on the title screen. Number of players, options, sound test. Programmers started duplicating this functionality to the directional pad because it was just easier. Compare using the tab key to tab-index your way through the elements of a page when someone introduces you to a mouse. These days, the 'Back' button still has a purpose, it just rarely lets you go back to things.
Re: ESC being renamed menu, ESC is ESC because it sends the control character ESC. If you rename it Menu, and start teaching kids that the Menu key sends the ESC control character, people are going to get really confused. Convention for the sake of maintaining convention, IMO.
Re: Nintendo's ABXY and Microsoft's ABXY, it's probably a legal thing.
Re: Select/Back button: Once upon a time, the select button actually let you select different things on the title screen. Number of players, options, sound test. Programmers started duplicating this functionality to the directional pad because it was just easier. Compare using the tab key to tab-index your way through the elements of a page when someone introduces you to a mouse. These days, the 'Back' button still has a purpose, it just rarely lets you go back to things.
Re: ESC being renamed menu, ESC is ESC because it sends the control character ESC. If you rename it Menu, and start teaching kids that the Menu key sends the ESC control character, people are going to get really confused. Convention for the sake of maintaining convention, IMO.
you'd have to ask Microsoft, as the only one i've seen a back button on is a 360 controller, as the PS3 didn't have oneDirty Hipsters said:
That's not entirely accurate. A whole bunch of them wouldn't respond to anything other than the "start" button in the main menu, and you couldn't even move the cursor in the menu a lot of the time (in games that had one) using the d-pad because they only acknowledged the "select" button for that. We're spoiled now that we can just push whatever the hell buttons we feel like and have it probably do something reasonable in response, instead of having to use exactly the one and only option they programmed in (obviously with some exceptions both then and now).Dirty Hipsters said:
Pretty much this. It's really not for a specific reason, but because the buttons needed designators. They could've just as easily been called "left" and "right" rather than "selected/back" and "start." With the Xbox, specifically, I think it has more to do with the console's software, rather than with games. The back button was originally used on the Xbox's dashboard in order to return back to the menus (at least, to my memory, which admittedly may be faulty, it's been quite some time since I've used an Xbox).redisforever said:
As to the Playstation/Nintendo, I believe those are more tradition than anything else. When originally designing the controllers, they used a certain configuration, and the configuration hasn't drastically changed since then. In the original NES days, start brought up the "start menu" which would lead to the naming (though this may be a "chicken and the egg" type thing, where it's not easy to tell which name came first). The select button also was used to select things on the menu in the early days, though I'm sure that changed quickly.
I see a lot of games that use the back button. Halo uses it in some or all of thier games. ME1 used it. Those are just the two that come to mind, but others use it as well.
I believe it's only the Xbox controller that has a 'back' button and really what the button is labeled is completely arbitrary as it's mostly for human reference anyway. You could call it the 'buttsecks' button for all the difference it makes. It's what the thing does in the game that's important and that varies depending on the game. If you don't like it being called the 'back' button, stick a piece of masking tape over the label and then relabel it something like the 'buttfuck' button or whatever suits you.
It's because Xbox didn't want to be 'copying' every other system with a 'select button' which even during the NES days was never used to 'select' anything. They might as well have called it the 'map button.'
It comes from the NES. On really early NES games, "Select" and "Start" did exactly what you might think they did. You can see this on any old Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridge; you have to use the select button to move between menu items, and you use the start button to choose them. NES developers eventually realized that that was kind of a stupid use for the select button when they had a fully functioning D-pad at their disposal, but the name was still there.Dirty Hipsters said:
Incidentally, the Start button's name may have been chosen thanks to the way arcade machines were set up; they usually did have a literal start button that you pressed after putting in your quarters to start the game. That way, arcade ports to the NES could keep the "press start to continue" screens intact. As for the 360 controller, the back button was originally used to go back in menus, just like the name would suggest. I guess it didn't take long for people to just start using it the way you use a select button on everything else, but the name did make sense at the time.
Or in other words, it's just convention. Calling it "start" and "select" makes about as much sense as calling the face buttons ABXY or Triangle, Circle, Square, X; it's arbitrary, and doesn't have as much effect on the buttons' use as the placement of the buttons and the needs of the game does.