Gamepad vs. Touchscreen: A Comparison of Action Selection Interfaces in
Computer Games
Masaki Oshita∗
Kyushu Institute of Technology(a) Gamepad interface

Hirotaka Ishikawa†
Kyushu Institute of Technology(b) Touchscreen interface

Figure 1: User interfaces for the gamepad and touchscreen for action selection that are implemented in our experiment. (a) Gamepad
interface. In addition to the 8 primary buttons, their combinations (pushing two buttons simultaneously or in sequence) are used to allow
many types of actions. (b) Touchscreen interface. The virtual buttons are arranged in the bottom half area of the screen. The virtual buttons
for page switching are also used to allow many types of actions. The tradeoff between the number and size of buttons is controlled (left andright).

Abstract
In this paper, we compare gamepad and touchscreen interfaces foraction selection tasks in computer games. Touchscreens are now
widely used for computer games on tablets, smartphones and handheld game consoles. However, in general, game players are considered to prefer a gamepad over a touchscreen. The motivation
for this research is to compare gamepad and touchscreen interfaces.
Our results show that the touchscreen interface achieved better thanor similar results to the gamepad interface. We believe that our results can provide a guideline for choosing and designing interfaces
for computer games.
CR Categories: I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Methodology andTechniques—Interaction techniques;
Keywords: ser interface, touchscreen, gamepad, computer game,
game design

1

Introduction

A gamepad has been the common input device for computer games
for decades. Recently, as tablet computers and smartphones havebecome more common, touchscreens have also been widely used
for computer games on such devices. In addition, recent handheld game consoles such as the PS Vita, Nintendo DS and Wii U∗ e-mail:oshita@ces.kyutech.ac.jp† e-mail:ishikawa@cg.ces.kyutech.ac.jp

have both a gamepad and a touchscreen. The game developers haveto choose which device they employ in their games. In general,
it is believed that game players (especially core gamers) prefer a
gamepad over a touchscreen, because gamepads are considered tobe more accurate and responsive. The question is, how valid is
this assumption? The motivation for this research is to compare a
gamepad and a touchscreen as an input device for computer games.
In this research, we compared gamepad and touchscreen interfaces
for action selection tasks which are very common operations incomputer games. We implemented simple interfaces as shown in
Figure 1. We also implemented a game-like interactive systemfor our experiment. We measured the performance of these interfaces. In addition, we tested several versions of each interface. For
the gamepad interface, when combinations of multiple buttons areused, there is the option of pushing buttons simultaneously or in sequence. For the touchscreen interface, there is the option of using
smaller buttons on one page or larger buttons on multiple pages.
In summary, our results show that the touchscreen interface
achieved better or similar results to the gamepad interface.
Although we implemented standard gamepad and touchscreen interfaces, there are many variations to these interfaces. Moreover,
the results may vary depending on the conditions and applications.
However, since it is impossible to evaluate the interfaces under all
possible conditions, we chose a standard condition on which we
conducted our experiment. Even though the results may vary depending on specific interface designs and conditions, we believethat our results can provide guidelines for choosing and designinginterfaces for computer games.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews
related work. Section 3 describes our experiment design. Section 4
presents the results of our experiment and Section 5 discusses them.
Finally, Section 6 presents the conclusions to this study.

2

Related Work

Touchscreens are widely used in many devices and applications.
There is considerable research on enhancing the target selection
task such as using the touchscreen to shift [Vogel and Baudisch2007], rubbing and tapping [Olwal et al. 2008], or finger orientation [Wang et al. 2009]. These methods are designed to select a small target object among many nearby objects. Although
we deal with only single touch in this research, multi-touch inputs[Moscovich and Hughes 2008] can be used to enhance user interactions. Other than using virtual buttons, various methods specifically for action selection using a touchscreen (touch/pen/mouse)have been proposed, such as stroke-based [Oshita 2005], gesturebased [Thorne et al. 2004] and sketch-based [Li et al. 2006] methods. Although these methods do not require the system to show virtual buttons on the screen, in general it takes more time to select anaction and is not suited to action games. In this research, we chose
to employ the most common approach which simply shows virtual
buttons on part of the touchscreen, because many existing computer
games employ a similar interface. Although a gesture-based interface is employed in some computer games on a touchscreen device,it has limitations in the number of actions it can enable because ofrecognition accuracy and difficulty in remembering all the gestures.
Various research studies have been conducted on the evaluation oftouchscreen interfaces and devices. These researches [Vogel andBaudisch 2007] [Olwal et al. 2008] [Wang et al. 2009] include comparisons between the proposed and standard methods. Lee and Zhai
[Seungyon Lee 2009] evaluated the performance of virtual buttons
on small touchscreen devices compared with hard buttons. However, to our knowledge, there are no comparisons of gamepads andtouchscreens focused on action selection tasks, even though this isa very important issue in designing computer games.

3

Experiment Eesign

In this section, we describe our experiment design for action selection tasks. We implemented simple gamepad and touchscreeninterfaces, and a game-like interactive system in which the user canmake a character perform various actions by selecting from a set ofpre-defined actions using these interfaces. For our experiment, we
defined 24 types of actions including walk, kick, punch and so on
which are common actions in typical action games.
In the rest of this section, we describe the interface design for a
gamepad and a touchscreen and then the experimental procedure.

3.1

Gamepad Interface Design

We used a standard gamepad device with 8 buttons as shown in
Figure 1(a). Although there were additional side buttons and analog sticks on the gamepad, they were not used in this research.
We used the 8 primary buttons which consisted of 4 buttons usually pushed by the left thumb and 4 buttons usually pushed by theright thumb. Eight actions are assigned to these buttons. To perform more than 8 actions, combinations of two buttons are used.
We used combinations of two buttons being pushed simultaneously
and in sequence. These types of combinations are commonly usedin computer games. Our mapping between actions and buttons isshown in Appendix A.

3.2

Touchscreen Interface Design

For the touchscreen interface, we used virtual buttons where eachbutton represented an action as shown in Figure 1(b). We divided
the screen into the scene view and the interface area. The virtual

Figure 2: Screenshot of the system for our experiment. The nameof an action is displayed on the screen and the subject is expected
to execute the action using a specified interface.

buttons were arranged in a grid form on the interface area of thescreen. The tradeoff between the number and size of the buttons
could be controlled. To execute a large number of actions, requiring more than the number of buttons that can be displayed at thesame time, the concept of a page was introduced. The actions could
be assigned to multiple pages and the page being displayed on thescreen was switched by pushing the specific virtual buttons (nextand previous buttons). These types of virtual buttons and pages arecommonly used in computer games. Although more sophisticateddesign may be used in actual computer games such as arranging
buttons on the edges of the screen and using shift button or swipe
for page switch, the function of the interface is basically the same.
In the tradeoff between the number and size of the buttons, we used
two configurations. Through several tests, we chose to use 6 virtual buttons (3 columns and 2 rows) and 24 buttons (6 columns
and 4 rows) as shown in Figure 1(b). In our environment, because
we used a 12 inch touchscreen, the size of the buttons was either
3.5×3.4 cm (6 buttons) or 1.6×1.5 cm (24 buttons). We chose thesesizes by referring to existing applications and through several tests.
Our arrangement for the virtual buttons and pages is shown in Appendix A.

3.3 Experimental Procedure
We developed a game-like interactive system for evaluating the userinterface as shown in Figure 2. During the experiment, the name ofan action was displayed on the screen and the subject was expected
to execute the action using a specified interface. The selection timefrom when the name of an action was displayed until the subject
selected the action was measured. In the case when the subject
selected wrong actions, the number of errors until the correct action
was selected was also measured.
The subjects used in our experiments were 5 undergraduate andgraduate students. They were all male and their ages were between
20 and 24. They all became familiar with using both gamepad andtouchscreen devices.
We used a laptop PC that had a 12-inch touchscreen (Lenovo
ThinkPad X61 Tablet). The touchscreen was a surface capacitive
type which is in common use in newer devices. The resolution of
the touchscreen was 1024×768. The PC was placed on a desk. (Although in general users sometimes hold the tablet, smartphone or
handheld game console device while they play games, in our experiment, we placed the screen on the desk, to keep the same viewing

(a) Case of 8 actions
Selection time

Number of errors

2

0.12

1st take
2nd take

1.8
0.1

1.6
1.4

0.08

1.2
0.06

1
0.8

0.04

0.6
0.4

0.02

0.2
0

0
gamepadtouchscreen_3x2

gamepadtouchscreen_6x4

touchscreen_3x2

touchscreen_6x4(b) Case of 24 actions
Selection time

Number of errors

3.5

0.7

3

0.6

2.5

0.5

2

0.4

1.5

0.3

1

0.2

0.5

0.1

0

1st take
2nd take0
gamepadtouchscreen_3x2

touchscreen_6x4

gamepadtouchscreen_3x2

touchscreen_6x4(c) Case of 24 actions (gamepad interface)
Selection time

Number of errors

4.5

1.6

4

1.4

3.5

1st take
2nd take

1.2

3

1

2.5
0.8
2
0.6

1.5
1

0.4

0.5

0.2

0

0
total

singlesimultaneoussequence

total

singlesimultaneoussequence

Figure 3: Results of the experiment. (a) Case of 8 types of actions and (b) case of 24 types actions. (c) Further analysis of the results for the
gamepad in the case of 24 actions.

conditions as the gamepad interface.) The subjects were asked tooperate the gamepad connected to the computer or the touchscreenof the computer. We evaluated the interfaces under several conditions, each interface over two steps to see the effects of practicing,and each interface with different numbers of actions (8 and 24) tosee the effects of the number of actions.
The experimental procedure was as follows. We tested each interface in two steps. The first trial was after the subjects were instructed on how to use each interface and given a short time (5minutes) to practice with it. The second trial was after the subjects had been given additional time to get used to each interface.
The subjects were allowed to take time for practicing until they felt

they were used to the interface. They spent about 7 to 10 minutes
for the gamepad interface and about 5 minutes for the touchscreeninterface.

Although players sometime spend hours or days getting used to
an interface, in our experiment the subjects became used to themwithin a short time, because our game-like system and interfaces
were very simple and required less time for practicing. On eachtrial, 50 action selections were performed by each subject for eachinterface. The first 20 actions were randomly chosen from a set of
8 actions and the next 30 actions were randomly chosen from a setof 24 actions.

Table 1: Results of the experiment of each interface on the different numbers of actions on 1st and 2nd takes. The averages and standard
deviations of the results are presented. The first, second and last groups of three rows are shown in Figure 3 (a), (b) and (c), respectively.
Selection time
Number of errors
Num. of actions Interface
1st take
2nd take
1st take
2nd take
Avg.
Dev. Avg.
Dev.
Avg.
Dev.
Avg.
Dev.
8
Gamepad1.42 0.057 1.28 0.046
0.07 0.026
0.02 0.014
8
Touchscreen 3×2
1.75 0.066 1.41 0.053
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
8
Touchscreen 6×4
1.54 0.065 1.23 0.039
0.01
0.01
0.00
0.00
24
Gamepad2.71 0.268 2.25 0.125
0.54 0.104
0.08 0.078
24
Touchscreen 3×2
2.88 0.118 2.37 0.087 0.006 0.007 0.006 0.007
24
Touchscreen 6×4
2.12 0.074 1.73 0.051
0.03 0.017
0.01 0.009
24
Gamepad (single)
1.48 0.051 1.39 0.056
0.08 0.035
0.00
0.00
24
Gamepad (simultaneous) 3.65 0.493 3.42 0.267
1.02 0.198
1.20 0.182
24
Gamepad (sequence)
3.44 0.758 2.06 0.169
0.65 0.277
0.10 0.059

4

Results

The summary of results is shown in Figure 3 and Table 1. (Although
the figure and table show the same results, we have presented bothto provide specific values and intuitive comparisons.) The ”touchscreen 3×2” presents a display of 6 relatively larger virtual buttons
on the screen including two buttons for page switching (Figure 1(b)left), while the ”touchscreen 6×4” presents a display of 24 relatively smaller virtual buttons on the screen (Figure 1(b) right).
In the case of 8 actions in Figure 3(a) the results of the gamepad(using a single button) and the touchscreen 6×4 (using a single
page and smaller virtual buttons), were almost the same. However,
the touchscreen 3×2 (using two pages and larger virtual buttons)
took longer compared to the other interfaces. This is understandable considering this interface required additional time for a pageswitch.
In terms of the number of errors, because the touchscreen showslabels even when the subjects do not remember the mapping, there
was a small number of errors, although there was also a small number of errors with the gamepad. The size of the buttons did not causemuch difference in the conditions of our experiment. Although theselection times become shorter after practice, there was not muchdifference in the comparison of the interfaces.
We then evaluated the results in the case of 24 actions as shownin Figure 3(b). Comparing the results for the gamepad (using one
or two buttons) and touchscreen 3×2 (using four pages and larger
virtual buttons), the results were almost the same. However, thetouchscreen 6×4 (using a single page and smaller virtual buttons)
took a shorter time compared to the other two interfaces. This isunderstandable considering this interface did not require additionaltime for a page switch or pushing multiple buttons. In addition,
the number of errors was small in the case of the touchscreen 6×4.
The touchscreen 6×4 was better than the gamepad and touchscreen
3×2.
Finally, in the case of 24 actions, we further evaluated each method
for the gamepad interface: pushing a single button, two buttons simultaneously and two buttons in sequence. Obviously, pushing asingle button was the fastest. Comparing the two other methods,
pushing two buttons in sequence achieved a better result than pushing two buttons simultaneously, especially in the second trial, eventhough it required two steps. We consider that this was because
both thumbs had to be controlled when pushing two buttons simultaneously while only the right thumb was used when pushing two
buttons in sequence in our mapping. The result improved on pushing two buttons in sequence because their mapping was not intuitiveand it took some time for the subjects to master it, while the map-ping for pushing two buttons simultaneously was straightforward.

5 Discussion
In summary, the touchscreen interface (touchscreen 6×4) achieved
better results than the gamepad interface. Even the touchscreen interface with a small number of virtual buttons and page switching(touchscreen 3×2) achieved almost the same result as the gamepad
interface. Considering these results, the overall touchscreen interfaces are relatively good compared to the gamepad interface despite the latter being the preferred option by game players in general. However, showing many buttons (such as the 24 buttons in thetouchscreen 6×4 in our experiment) may not be practical for actual computer games. The number of buttons shown on the screen
at the same time can be chosen based on the tradeoff between therequired selection time and affordable area on the screen depending on the applications. Although the result may vary depending
on conditions and applications, our results should encourage gamedevelopers to employ a touchscreen interface.
The results may also vary depending on the users. In our experiments, all the subjects became familiar with using both the gamepad
and touchscreen devices. Conducting further experiments with awide range of subjects is planned in future studies. We expect that if
the subjects do not become familiar with both devices (such as older
people), the touchscreen interface will achieve much better results
than the gamepad interface, because it is considered that gamepads
require practice.
In our experiments, subjects were asked to perform single actions at
a time. After the subject selected one action, he was given enoughtime to prepare for the next action. However, in actual computer
games, the players sometimes need to execute a series of actions
quickly. In such cases, the results may also vary. Conducting further experiments covering such cases is also planned in future studies. We expected that the results for the comparison between theinterfaces would not vary much from the results in our experiment,
because the subjects’ configurations before and after action selection were not significantly different.
We did not use a gesture-based interface for the touchscreen, because it required more time for task selection and was limited in
the number of actions as discussed in Section 2. However, it has
the advantage that players do not have to look at the buttons andcan focus on watching the game screen as well as the gamepad interface. This feature can be important in some action games where
players have to focus on the game screen and respond quickly. Conducting further experiments on such game systems is also for future
study.

6

Conclusion

In this study, we compared gamepad and touchscreen interfaces forthe action selection task. The results show that touchscreen interface achieved results that were better than or similar to the gamepad
interface. Although further experiments are anticipated, we believethat our results can be a guideline for choosing and designing interfaces for computer games, especially when developers have tochoose a device on a handheld game console such as PS Vita, Nintendo DS and Wii U, which has both a gamepad and a touchscreen.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Syogo Kurogi for his help in implementing the interface and system. The authors would also liketo thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.
This work was supported in part by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific
Research (24500238) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science (JSPS).

References
L I , Q. L., G ENG , W. D., Y U , T., S HEN , X. J., L AU , N., AND
Y U , G. 2006. Motionmaster: Authoring and choreographingkung-fu motions by sketch drawings. In ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2006, 233–241.
M OSCOVICH , T., AND H UGHES , J. F. 2008. Indirect mappings ofmulti-touch input using one and two hands. In CHI ’08, 1275–
1284.

Table 2: The mapping between actions and buttons on the gamepad
interface.
ActionButton(s)Walk forward
Up
Walk backward Down
Walk left
Left
Walk right
Right
Kick
⃝
Jump
×
Punch
2
Check
△
Run forward
Up +⃝Run backward
Down +⃝Run left
Left +⃝Run right
Right +⃝
Roll forward
Up + ×Roll backward
Down + ×
Roll left
Left + ×
Roll right
Right + ×
Dash and kick⃝→⃝
Dash and Jump ⃝ → ×
Strong kick
×→×
Drop kick×→⃝
Uppercut
2→×
Strong punch
2→2
Shoot
△→2
Pick up△→⃝

O LWAL , A., F EINER , S., AND H EYMAN , S. 2008. Rubbing andtapping for precise and rapid selection on touch-screen displays.
In CHI ’08, 295–304.
O SHITA , M. 2005. Motion control with strokes. Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds 16, 3-4, 237–244.
S EUNGYON L EE , S. Z. 2009. The performance of touch screen
soft buttons. In CHI ’09, 309–318.
T HORNE , M., B URKE , D., AND VAN D E PANNE , M. 2004. Motion doodles: An interface for sketching character motion. ACM
Transactions of Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2004) 23, 3, 424–431.
VOGEL , D., AND BAUDISCH , P. 2007. Shift: A technique for
operating pen-based interfaces using touch. In CHI ’07, 657–
666.
WANG , F., C AO , X., R EN , X., AND I RANI , P. 2009. Detecting and leveraging finger orientation for interaction with directtouch surfaces. In UIST ’09, 23–32.

A

Details of Interface Design

The details for the mapping between actions and buttons for the
gamepad and touchscreen interfaces in our experiment are shown
here.
Table 2 shows the list of actions and the mapping between actions
and buttons in the gamepad interface. There are 8 buttons used (Up,
Down, Left, Right, ⃝, ×, 2 and △). First, 8 actions (group 1)
were assigned to a single button. Second, 8 actions (group 2) wereassigned to a combination of two buttons being pushed simultaneously. Third, 8 actions (group 3) were assigned to a combinationof two buttons being pushed in sequence. To realize intuitive mapping, we assign special moving actions (running and rolling) to two
buttons being pushed simultaneously, combinations of a button forgroup 2㻌㻌group 3group 1㻌Figure 4: Arrangement of virtual buttons on the touchscreen interface (24 buttons).

specifying the direction of moving (left side button) and a button
for specifying the action (right side button). We assigned special
combat actions to two buttons being pushed in sequence, combinations of two buttons for specifying two corresponding actions (rightside buttons).
The virtual button arrangement for the touchscreen interface isshown in Figure 1 (b). For the touchscreen 3×2, we divided theaction lists (Table 2) into 6 groups (pages) based on the orders in
the table. There was 1 group for walking, 1 group for standard actions, 2 groups for special moving actions, and 2 groups for special
combat actions. For the touchscreen 6×4, we divided the button
arrangement into 3 regions as shown in Figure 4. The walking andstandard actions (group 1) were placed in the center. The special
moving actions (group 2) were placed in the left side and corners.
The special combat actions (group 3) were placed in the right side
and corners.