There are no working joysticks in the house.

I thought I had one, but it’s buggy. It won’t register the top right at all, and it has no gradients whatsoever. It’s all or nothing when I try to turn, and it’s like steering a brick.

Maybe it’s the USB adapter that’s attached to whatever long-defunct port the stick uses that isn’t on the back of my computer. Maybe the stick got damaged in a move. I have no idea. I’ve honestly never even tried to use the thing before, not once since my old roommate gave it to me because he didn’t need it anymore. The house is full of games, but there’s not a joystick to be had.

Let’s face it: Joysticks may be indelibly identified with gaming, but as the medium evolves, they’re rapidly becoming the human appendix of controllers.

Part of this is because the genres that use joysticks, flight sims and space sims, have fallen out of favor. It’s MMOs, first-person shooters and RTSes that are the last bastions of PC gaming these days, and those are all mouse and keyboard jobs. The venerable Microsoft Flight Simulator is still hanging in there, but Microsoft no longer makes the SideWinder joystick. Overall, games that use joysticks can be described as a “niche market” at best and “dead” at worst.

The space sim genre is pretty much gone these days. The Wing Commander franchise went out with Prophecy in ‘97 and its corpse was repeatedly violated by the film in ‘99. At the same time, X-Wing Alliance proved to be the last installment in LucasArts’s X-Wing series. There’s Freelancer in 2003, but that was mouse-driven.

I’d quite literally dusted off my joystick because I wanted to try Freespace 2, oft-mentioned as the pinnacle of space sims and one of the greatest games of all time. It’s been free for some time now, and I figured I was overdue to sit down with it. Apparently it’s possible to play it with a mouse, but the hell with that.

Joysticks were the basis for the Atari 2600, the console that introduced the United States to the idea of consoles in the first place. Nintendo eliminated them in favor of the d-pad, only to bring them back in diminished form with the Nintendo 64 controller.

In fact, you could argue that the joystick lives on in every modern controller in the forum of the analog thumbsticks, but it’s just not the same. A joystick should be a big, meaty thing, the centerpiece of the control scheme, not just some little nub on a larger controller.

As for me, I still want to play Freespace 2, so I’m going to order a Saitek Evo. I guess I’m not ready to get my gaming appendix removed quite yet.

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