Will the Keyboard and Mouse Ever Die Off?
By: A. Ko (they/them)
If you’re like many gamers, the way you play is a huge part of your gaming experience. Some players swear by their cherished purple Gamecube controller, shelling out for adapters to play modern Nintendo Switch titles. Others will argue the relative supremacy of the newest Xbox or PlayStation controller ad infinitum, citing button placement and ergonomics. PC players have contributed loudly to this discussion, of course. We all know that one friend who touts the keyboard and mouse as the ultimate medium for game interaction; I’m guilty, to be sure, of extolling the virtues of the gaming mouse’s capacity for tracking and accuracy in shooters. For a long time, the keyboard and mouse have reigned as PC gaming’s go-to input peripherals.
With all that being said, there is one ever-assertable truth to gaming, as in many other things, and that is the inevitability of change. Today, people communicate by email instead of the post, and consult Google, not their bookshelf encyclopedia. In the future, could the keyboard and mouse be replaced?
The most immediate challengers are the manual inputs. These include joysticks, controllers, touch screens, and other forms of input devices that we interact with using our hands. This is the category of inputs most familiar to the gaming community, and represent both old and relatively new technologies.
Of these, the controller is perhaps the most iconic as a gaming peripheral. This input has been around since the beginning of household video games and still continues to enjoy huge popularity as the go-to input devices for game consoles like the Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch. In fact, the controller is in many ways the symbol of gaming. Right off the top of my head, I think of Discord’s logo, which looks like the outline of a game controller with eyes, and the Google Play Games icon, which features a green controller; this is not to mention, of course, the whole host of “Let’s Play” and game review YouTube channels that feature controller-related imagery. As the biggest modern contender in the gaming input arena, does the controller have any prospects for taking over PC gaming and banishing the keyboard and mouse to mere memory?
I would argue no. Yes, controllers are big, and they are certainly here to stay for the foreseeable future. However, they offer a big gap in performance at the competitive level for certain genres, like the MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) and FPS (first person shooter). Despite all the advances made in controller technology, tournaments are still mostly dominated by players who find it easier to achieve competitive-level speed and accuracy using a mouse and mousepad. This is not to say that controllers aren’t viable for both competitive and casual gameplay; however, this input isn’t anywhere near completely usurping the keyboard and mouse, especially if you also consider the fact that it proves to be a clunky medium for typing (an important consideration for a multi-purpose device like the personal computer). That being said, it could be interesting to see what benefits a reimagined controller could bring, especially products like the CharaChorder that replace the keyboard and can be used in conjunction with the mouse.
What about the touch screen? By now, the touch screen is a tried-and-true mainstay, both for the personal device and for gaming. This tactile format’s main advantage is its prized intuitiveness. Pretty much everyone you know carries a touchscreen phone in their pocket, and even the obligatory joke one could make about their grandparents still having a flip phone has become more or less defunct. Tablets find themselves widely favored in the workplace, from construction sites to the hospital room, and many modern laptops now come in a “2-in-1” format that includes both a keyboard and a touchscreen.
Touch screens have also seen widespread application for gaming. Mobile games are quickly becoming a dominant entertainment market, and they are mostly played via touchscreen from a wide array of portable devices. Even the newest handheld consoles, such as the Nintendo Switch and Valve’s upcoming Steam Deck, feature fully functional touchscreens. So, the touch screen seems to be a strong contender in both the gaming and personal use fields; could this usurp the keyboard?
I’m less sure on this one, and am hesitant to say no. After all, the touch screen is a much more versatile input medium than the keyboard and mouse (as it isn’t physically bound to, say, a specific format of buttons, and will register more types of manual interaction such as multi-touch actions like pinching or rotating around a fixed point), and it has quickly overtaken all other input devices across many facets of life. My instinct says that the keyboard and mouse still provide higher ceilings of performance for specific tasks, such as the physical ergonomics for faster and more comfortable typing, or flicking out headshots (for the late-night sessions). That being said, additional research and data in the future, along with advancements in touch technology and increased familiarity with the tech in upcoming generations, may succeed in proving this hunch wrong.
That isn’t the limit to what manual input technologies can offer us, but are there other avenues we can explore? There certainly are always new frontiers being pushed in kinesthetic inputs, or those that take in and track body movements and positions. From the then-revolutionary motion tracking remotes for the Wii console to the modern controllers fashioned for VR headsets like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, we have seen a lot of development in kinesthetic systems. Here, my already-tenuous knowledge falls off sharply, but one of the major short-term obstacles I could imagine for this technology would be accessibility in terms of space requirements. Just by general principle, inputs controlled by full-body or even partial-body movements require more space than their manual counterparts; logically speaking, strictly manual inputs compact the physical scope of what the user needs to do to send commands to their device, narrowing it to minute movements of the fingers for keypresses or at most a sweep of the hand across a mousepad. On the other hand, the way we envision modern kinesthetic systems usually incorporates larger movements, such as waving the arms or rotating the entire body around in relation to some fixed point; this, by necessity, requires ample space, a fact that VR users who have bruised themselves on furniture are well aware of.
As modern kinesthetic and motion-capture inputs currently stand, they also seem somewhat prohibitive in terms of the startup process for using your personal device. With inputs like the keyboard or the controller, all one has to do is sit down and take them in hand; with VR sets, one also has to delineate a valid area of play, either with physical motion sensors placed around the room or by drawing a virtual space (as seen with the Oculus Go). As to other kinesthetic input concepts, such as wearable haptic technology, the user is introduced to a necessary suiting-up step that doesn’t exist with simpler (and admittedly less immersive) manual technologies. I will acknowledge that these are questions that could be resolved through continuing software and hardware advancements; however, for the near future, kinesthetic inputs fail to make sitting down and immediately getting started on your work or play quite as simple as you may find with a keyboard and mouse.
Are there other input systems, besides the manual and kinesthetic? Certainly, although my commentary will become even more speculative, since input systems revolving around something apart from the tactile sense tend to be rarer. For example, take sound. As a mainstream input? Speech recognition is a skyrocketing technology, but with caveats.
The mass dissemination of the household AI assistant has certainly accelerated speech recognition’s popularity as a personal device input, but anyone who has had to spar with Alexa to turn on the lights instead of playing “Livin’ on a Prayer” can attest to the technology’s still limited function. There are still metrics to gauge the future of this input, however. The average typing speed is ~40 wpm (words per minute), with professional typists typically reaching around 70-100 wpm. By comparison, the average speaking speed is around 100-150 wpm. With the refinement of voice recognition software and language prediction programs, it isn’t too far-fetched to believe that the keyboard and other manual forms of text input will be usurped by speech-to-text sometime in the future; if the technology allows for spoken input to be understood and transcribed with reasonable accuracy, it would certainly become a faster (and hands-free) alternative for sending out a quick email or dictating a short story.
Fine, it has a future as a mainstream input. But as a gaming input? Could it challenge the keyboard and mouse? Well, speech controlled games have some virtues, including accessibility for those who do not have the means to easily navigate conventional manual input systems; however, efforts by voice assistants to push audio-and-speech-only gaming seem to be falling flat for the moment. Perhaps this is because speech-controlled gaming lacks the visual interactivity that so robustly engages what is the main physical sense for most humans. Or, perhaps, speech control simply lacks the range to tackle popular game genres of the modern era, especially the FPS (first person shooter). After all, how would that play out? It becomes hard to imagine a speech-controlled battle royale match being anything more than obnoxious shouts of “dodge left, swap to pistol, shoot him, SHOOT HIM COME ON” at 2 in the morning. In the spirit of the jest, of course, I simplify the issue, but the fact is that even with a more regimented sound input system that would, hypothetically, take in single syllables as commands, the keyboard and mouse provide a much more versatile, rapid, and intuitive means of interacting with what happens on the screen. To float back to accessibility, speech control could make games for people with visual or physical impairments much more navigable; however, as a mainstream game input, I don’t see it going much farther than narrative adventures or social/communications sims.
There could be other alternative input systems to develop in the future, such as eye-tracking or neural interfaces. I’ll refrain from discussing them, mainly due to my lack of knowledge; they’re also fairly nascent and in early development, so it’s hard to envision what role they will take in user input systems for video games without devolving into pure speculation. That being said, there’s a lot of different input options for gaming, both in the near and far future. They all propose different and interesting strategies for tackling the user-input question for your personal devices. Will any of them completely replace the keyboard and mouse? My tentative answer is no, at least for the foreseeable future; the keyboard and mouse is implementable, intuitive enough for all users, and enjoys wide commercial popularity, while also providing gamers at both the casual and competitive level with what they need to succeed. But as we have seen, there are many different technologies out there that proffer unique and exciting advantages… so who knows what the future may hold for us?