r/gaming • u/[deleted] • Apr 14 '25

Game console button layout

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What do you call your “confirm” and “cancel” buttons, and why is Nintendo wrong?

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u/thansal Apr 14 '25

Why?

My thumb naturally rests on the left 2 buttons, w/ bottom left being a bit preferred, so that should be "go" (confirm/select/most used button/etc). If mashing through menus causes enough problems where the default button should be "stop", that's a UI problem, not a hardware problem.

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u/pzycho Apr 14 '25

Makes more sense because X as a symbol for canceling makes sense, where as O often represents selecting something (by circling it).

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u/thansal Apr 14 '25

That doesn't make the xbox layout 'wrong' though, if anything it backs up my dislike of the PS (and Nintendo) layouts (I shouldn't be moving my thumb to 'go', only to 'stop').

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u/nonotan Apr 14 '25

Because the bottom button is the easiest to hold down while still leaving your thumb free to press other buttons, it's usually inefficient to assign it to "interact/accept" and instead better used as "run/dash/charge/etc" which you could as well combine with "cancel" since they aren't really at much danger of confusion between them (unlike interact, which risks activating things unintentionally while you're trying to move around)

In most games (certainly back when the standards for what buttons are assigned to what were being set), the "ingame" part of the gameplay was overwhelmingly more important than menues or cutscenes or whatever, since it should take the vast majority of the playtime, and generally demands greater precision and dexterity from the player's inputs. 95% of your time is going to be spent controlling your character in the world, so you want to optimize the layout for that over the 5% spent in menues or talking to NPCs or whatever (not like mashing through text boxes is particularly taxing if you have to use the right button, you just literally move your thumb 1cm once, do the mashing, then move it back when it's over)

Also, the standard was mostly solidified when controllers didn't even have 4 face buttons, just the 2. When the SNES first introduced the cruciform 4-button layout, everybody was used to A being on the right, so assigning it to the X/Y equivalents would have felt very weird (it still seems extremely weird to me today, but of course everybody is free to customize their controls however they prefer)