A new iteration of the joypad timeline, to be presented at a game exhibit in 2012 in Switzerland.
Morning meeting about game pad shapes, d-pad and genealogy trees. New visualizations are slowly being produced. We are trying different diagrams to highlight the different categories of shapes and d-pad, as well as their evolution over time.
Surely some material that we will present at <a href=”http://www.thisisplayful.com/programme-10”>Playful 2010</a> in London.
Recent acquisitions from Nintendo, which correspond to the evolution of basic Game & Watch interfaces to the D-pad that has been re-used in the first Nintendo console (Famicom)
Gamepad memory game
The game controller project moves slowly but we’re definitely onto something. We’ll release soon an iPad/iPhone application that would correspond to a visual corpus to all the joypads. Each pair of pages will describe one of the 42 official joypads along with various data: date, brand, corresponding console, total surface, action button surface, d-pad surface, connector pin type, wire length, weight, etc. But there’s more. 
Given that Laurent Bolli had a curious machine that enabled us to print badges for participants at the Lift10 conference in Geneva, we repurposed it and create a Memory/concentration game with all the gamepad visuals we had. Each card features a graphical representation of the game controller as well as information about the joypad surface (total surface, action buttons, menu buttons, d-pad surface, etc.). A first prototype of the card game here: 
It’s been a while that we have accumulated the material, but we have trouble doing the analysis because of business matters. Laurent and I finally completed a big spreadsheet (see picture above). It’s basically a table with the 42 gamepads we consider as being “official” along with a description of their characteristics: number of buttons, surface, button surface, shape type, d-pad type, connector type, etc. Given our slow rhythm to work on the project, we decided that we will release an intermediary step: a booklet to describe our “visual corpus”, i.e. the structured set of artifacts we are analyzing in our project. This booklet will be both available physically (printed) and as an ipad/iPhone app. It will show a sort of series of identity cards describing the joypads.
The project meeting yesterday was devoted to categorization. We used the vectorized version of the joypad pictures to define various categories of the shapes (side and front) of the controllers. It enabled us to complement the d-pad and buttons archetypes we already defined.
The next step is now to build genealogy trees for: (1) the vectorized versions of the joypads, (2) the archetypes themselves.
