What if button x was the primary activity and button y was the secondary activity? So youre in a room surrounded by enemies - x is to fire your gun, y is to reload. In a burning building being pursued by enemy? x is to use the fire extinguisher, y is to fire your gun...

I'd strongly avoid switching like that. If you're using a controller, why not set all action that's unique to the A button, at the expense of whatever A was before? This way, A is always your "Use Special" button.

Agreed. I was always careful to use the same button setup in Zelda games, because assigning gear to different buttons causes confusion with my muscle memory.

I think youre both right, that it doesn't lend itself to most games but there may be some circumstances where it could work. For instance a game where your activities are constantly changing, and there is no time to learn which button is for which activity - perhaps you are trying to escape a burning building.
Your activities might include shooting, using a fire extinguisher, climbing a ladder, jumping over a collapsed floor, rolling around because youre on fire... The precise setup would have to be intuitive and you would have to get the player's trust but if you got it right it could be great. It would be great because there is no learning period for learning the controls, and the activities could change frequently throughout the game without requiring relearning.

Of course it'll require learning - every time the controls change. You can't make controls that diverse be intuitive on a joypad - can you really imagine someone playing the game for the first time and thinking "oh no, I'm on fire! I'll press Y to roll around on the floor, that feels like the right button to press". And the Iron Chef is exactly right; switching buttons around just confuses the player. One second they're shooting with X, then at some point the game decides that there's enough fire around to designate the building they're in as "on fire" and they're now doing something else, and it'll be a little while before they realise Y is now shoot. Chances are that if they've been playing the previous section long enough they'll go back to pressing X by mistake. Sorry, but it's really not a very good idea :)

I don't mind when a single button changes, for example a general "action" button - but not when two buttons switch or completely change. Unless of course, there was a specific reason i.e. changing characters. Even then, basic actions like jump and walk should be similar, if not the same.

@hymerman, the point is that the game must be designed with this in mind, not as an afterthought. For instance the game shouldn't be 90% shooting, with shooting as x then switch to one area where shooting is y. And there mustn't be any grey areas where a user is in doubt about which button will do which activity.
As a fall back it could be possible to have an on screen display of which button corresponds to which action in the current context (the more I think about this, the more this seems important).
Again, this isn't meant as an alternative to traditional game controls, its intended as a control system for a more mature type of game, where the actions you perform are constantly changing in order to provide a varied experience. One minute you might be paddling a raft down a stream, next minute picking a rose, next minute putting up a tent, next minute shooting a helicopter with a bazooka.
Would you prefer to have a button for each of these tasks, or have to cycle through a list of actions, or have to assign actions to buttons? Can you see how doing so would adversely affect immersion?

@GMX "Unless there was a specific reason i.e. changing characters" - this is actually where this idea is coming from, that a change of context warrants changing the controls.

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Original post by thelovegoose Again, this isn't meant as an alternative to traditional game controls, its intended as a control system for a more mature type of game, where the actions you perform are constantly changing in order to provide a varied experience. One minute you might be paddling a raft down a stream, next minute picking a rose, next minute putting up a tent, next minute shooting a helicopter with a bazooka.

Yeah. I think your larger problem is making a game like that work on any level except that of a series of minigames, unless that's what you're going for. How do you expect to smoothly transition from one "experience" to the next?

This is the ultimate question, and please do give what I'm saying some serious thought...

First of all - interaction is the unique and quite wonderful language of computer games that raise it above all other forms of media. If you start to think of interaction as a language - like the words of a book are its language, or the scene compositions of a film are its language then you can start to exploit the potential of computer games as a medium and you can suddenly see why computer games are not appealing to the mass market.
Interaction has its adjectives (fast button presses, requires good timing, difficult to see what youre doing), its verbs (pick, hammer, shoot), nouns (rose, tent peg, bazooka).

To create rich experiences that will thrill, move, sadden, make audiences laugh, the author of the game needs to call apon a variety of elements of language and use them in intelligent combinations and patterns. Repeating the same few elements of language over and over is not going to do anything except feed young men's hunger for more and more violence and explosions. This is the same as a one dimensional action film.

So a poor author will create something that is little more than a series of minigames, a genuine game designer talent will create a rich dynamically interactive experience.
Of course, this is an embryonic discipline, so we don't have any accomplished designers yet - but you can see that maturing designers are trying it with varying degrees of success : (Sid Meiers Pirates, Will Wright's Spore). And you can actually see it to different extents in the majority of games that moved you (Final fantasy VII, Metal Gear solid)...

So to answer your question to transition from one to the next you would need to ensure that the player did not have to "re-learn" controls, and that all of the activities were basically all part of the grand plan.

This is all a work in progress :)

One way to lessen the level of confusion, is to keep each type of action on the same button. If the player knows that hitting X will result in a violent action, compared to hitting Y which results in a technical action, and so forth, things become simple. Even if the player does not know what the specific action is, knowing only that the answer to their problem is technical over violent, mental over physical, or some other combination thereof, it changes the experience.