Losing the W
Monday, through an unfortunate series of events, a small stack of wood smashed the tip of my middle finger on my left hand. Nothing was broken, no bleeding under the fingernail, just a puffy, painful bruise (thus far). After the initial pain went away, I expressed gladness that at least it wasn’t either of my index fingers or thumbs – those would be much worse to lose the use of for general computing.
…unless, as I quickly realized, you are a PC gamer. Turns out the W and S are pretty key components of the whole WASD control scheme. And, you know, WASD is prevalent in just about every survival game.
So, yeah, sucks for me for a while. Technically, I could use a controller, as long as the left trigger button isn’t too critical, but that’s definitely not what I would prefer using with first-person titles. Perhaps I should just use this opportunity to catch up on TV shows or play some Rimworld or something.
Hmm. Wonder how Neuralink is coming along…
Posted on September 4, 2024, in Miscellany and tagged Injury, Neuralink, PC, The Weakness of My Flesh, WASD. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
In An Age 
Reminds me of back in the dawn of 3D games, the first Quake. Before WASD was some kind of standard.
Me and my friends had invented out own standard for shooters.
It was pretty simple and lazt.
Move forward with right mouse buttons and shoot with the left one, and drink coffee with your left hand.
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Ha, I was about to ask how that worked, but… yeah. I can see it. In fact, I do appreciate it when other games (typically MMOs) allow you to run forwards by holding down left & right click on the mouse. I think it was Guild Wars 2 most recently where I did that? Let me browse Reddit with my other hand while going to the next gathering node or whatever.
It is funny thinking back to those early FPS games, when you didn’t ever have to bother aiming up or down.
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Sorry about your finger!
It reminded me of something I’d forgotten that I ought to work into the EQ25 series I’m doing somehow. It was a long time, probably years, before I started using WASD in EverQuest or any other game. The manual that came in the box had the cursor keys marked for movement and that’s what I used. I used to control the character with my left hand on the cursor keys, with the keyboard slanted at an angle and my right hand controlling the mouse. It was not at all natural but I found WASD even less comfortable for a while when I started using it. NAtural as breathing now, of course.
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I primarily played consoles growing up (NES, SNES, etc), but we did have a family computer that I ended up buying a few games for. Of those, I think Doom 2 (on like eight 3.5″ floppies) was the only FPS I had at the time. And, yeah, it was played using the arrow keys for movement. I remember it being awkward even back then, as controllers had you use your left hand for movement instead of the right. Later on, I think a few other games that used the arrow keys defaulted some actions to the Numpad to closer mimic a controller.
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