Phil Harrison may be out of Sony but he’s not out of the game, not by a long shot. He and Peter Molyneux of Microsoft talked about their feelings regarding the complexity of current video game controls.

Harrison offered a more outspoken opinion regarding this issue. "You hand somebody a game controller and it’s like you’ve handed them a live gun or a hand grenade with the pin taken out.” Molyneux agreed, but not in the same terms, that current controller technology can be best described as too button crazy. His own design teams “don’t use half the buttons on the 360 controller. The whole dream I’ve got is that someone will sit down to play Fable 2 who has never played a game before and they can play with someone who’s played games the whole of their lives.” He also went onto add that he would prefer it if “there wasn’t so many buttons on the controller” because it’s crucial “to approach that in design terms by thinking you’ve only got one button."

Harrison again touted Nintendo’s Wiimote device as a “non-game centric device" that was a force for “democratisation" in the world of video gameplay.

Another piece of hardware that Harrison found favorable with was Apple’s iPhone, due to its supremely user-friendly design. Harrison said that he personally observed an instance “a few weeks ago where a two year old was playing with an iPhone and he knows how to get the pictures up of mum and dad.” After this, the child “intuitively thought that all electronic devices worked like that. He’s pressing the TV to change channels."

Harrison stated finally that “"He’s right and the rest of us are wrong – that should be applied universally. Apple should be applauded for that innovation.”

Harrison does have a point: control schemes on numerous game controllers can be, and in many ways always have been, complicated; anyone who tried to execute the multistep combo moves in games like Mortal Kombat or Tekken, Dance Dance Revolution, or the more recent Guitar Hero games knows that. It seems uncertain how much this sharp learning curve is due to the controller itself. Perhaps instead it is more to do with the evolution of games in general, games that today can do more, show us more, and in turn ask more of us in return.