A few years ago I remember reading a lot of complaints about the new wave of contextual button-pressing sequences that were making their way into games. Contextual control schemes arguably had been around (and resented) since at least Dragon’s Lair — but they were revived by the adventure game Shenmue in late 1999. Under Shenmue’s influence, platformers and beat-em-ups that had once featured purely “universal” controls (the punch button always punches, the jump button always jumps) were introducing  ”quick-time events“.

Naruto's Shadow Clone Jutsu

With quick-time events, players typically see a button flash on screen and then have to immediately press it in order to execute some contextual action or sequence of actions. By the mid-2000s, such sequences were no longer found exclusively in adventure games like Quantic Dream’s Indigo Prophecy — they were slowly but surely making their way into action series like God of War and Prince of Persia.

Today, in defiance of the complaints, context-driven control schemes are more and more common. Under the influence of rhythm games, with their abstract streams of cues, and fighters, with their complex combos and special moves, players and developers have both become more comfortable with them. In part it’s a response to the need to map ever greater numbers of actions to the same controllers with the same buttons. It’s hard to believe we’re beginning to outgrow 16-button controllers (not to mention gyroscopic input), but it’s true. Titles like Assassin’s Creed are even beginning to use one button like a “shift” key to change the ”case” of the rest of the controller, thereby virtually doubling the number of available buttons to map.

But this trend is about more than controller economy. Game mechanics enabled by contextual controls are becoming better integrated into game flow and more sophisticated. Case in point: I’ve recently been playing Naruto: Rise of Ninja, whose “justsu”-triggered button sequences add a genuinely heart-pumping wrinkle to fights. Naruto’s “jutsus” also innovate by taking the kind of special move button-sequences typically found only in the arena and bringing them into an open-world context. Naruto doesn’t just unleash heavy damage with his “jutsus”, but also climbs walls and wins over villagers, building on social gesture systems like those found in Fable and The Urbz.

Games like Naruto suggest that more complex contextual controls may well be a crucial piece of video gaming’s future. Their flexibility allows them to move between physical, social, and even emotional representation with fluidity and expressive power. We may, in fact, be moving from a “classical” period of “mimetic”, or strictly representational control schemes to a more self-consciously abstract and experimental phase.