I've been thinking a lot lately about elegant control schemes, ways to simplify inputs to just the bare essentials. When I'm doing this thinking the Nintendo DS is the system that my mind keeps wandering back to.

Now, I don't own a DS, and I don't intend to buy one (I probably will at some point, I own a GP32 afterall), but I want to play DS games. Not the games that are out mind you, those all look like garbage. I want to play the games that could be made for it. I admit to being skeptical of the DS's functionality when I first saw it, and I know that around the office nobody really had a clue what to do with it (by the looks of the games that are out, that seems like it was true even at Nintendo). But now I believe that real, complete, non-tech demo games could be made for this system and I want to play them. I want to play games that eschew the D-pad and buttons and go all in with the touch screen in fun and ingenious ways. I want to play something new, something different.

Different. That's where the trouble starts.

Any game made for the DS, I mean specifically made to use it's special features, is necessarily a DS exclusive. This isn't true of any other console. Every console has buttons, every console has a D-pad, most have analog sticks, no other console has a touchscreen. If you develop a game to be really cool to play on the DS it's going to be a lot of work to make it not suck anywhere else, so you can't port it. That's called putting all your eggs in one basket, and that's something risk averse game publishing companies do not do. Especially not with the PSP hanging around.

We won't know until May what Nintendo intends to do with the Revolution (and maybe not then either) but they keep promising, well, a revolution. If some of the rumors are true and the Revolution has a completely different control scheme Nintendo could find themselves in a tough situation. They could have consumers getting upset playing inferior multi-console ports meant for an Xbox or a PS3 controller, but publishers unwilling to make games that are effectively Revolution exclusives. That's exactly what's happening in miniature on the DS already. Few of the DS games make good on the system's promise and many consumers are dissatisfied.

Does this mean that inventive new controller schemes are doomed to failure. I don't know. I hope not, but I'm too negative a person to believe not.