Gamers have long had it too easy. I for one applaud Quantic Dream’s approach to cybernetics, as revealed in Edge 193’s preview of Heavy Rain. If you want to hide, the system dictates that you keep a random, awkward combination of buttons held down. The discomfort you feel in your fingers mirrors the discomfort of your character, folded up into an airing cupboard. And so you relate to your character because you share her pain. This is an excellent idea, and it only remains for other courageous developers to take the next logical steps. I for one am working on a design document for an interactive-storytelling extravaganza, provisionally entitled Chubby Drizzle, which will be packaged with a £150 peripheral that you attach to the ceiling above your sofa and connect to a nearby tap. The game will then squirt cold water down on you while you are playing, so you feel that you really have entered a world where it is always raining.

This is only the beginning, of course. Perhaps a razor-sharp spring-loaded katana peripheral could slice your hand off at the wrist when you lose a bout in Soul Calibur. Developers would naturally want to avoid the lawsuits that would arise if they actually killed too many players, of course. Maybe if your character dies in a shooter, the console would pepper you with a hail of rubber bullets rather than real ones.

The idea is not new. Back in 2001, two students at Cologne’s Academy of Media Arts built the original PainStation, a tabletop Pong clone that gave the players electric shocks or whipped their hands with wire; a second version also used blinding flashes of light to disorient players. The point of this, though, was not to immerse the players better in some hyper-realistic digital universe: quite the opposite. “One major aspect of pain in the game is to distract the players from the actual gameplay,” they explained.

Indeed, discomfort as often alienates the player - as the struggle with the hunk of moulded plastic in her hands wrenches her attention out of the virtual space as it increases her empathy with her gameworld avatar. What is difficult is to decide when this is going to be the case, and when by contrast it can be a useful technique. Mention the absolutely stunning “corridor scene” to those who have completed MGS4 and they will nod sagely - it’s the best excuse for button-mashing since Track & Field.

But the last act of MGS4 also makes surprising use of Quicktime Events, which seems to be addressing a related cybernetic problem: how do you let the player do something really cool if it’s basically going to be a one-off, so that there’s no point incorporating it into the already massively complicated control scheme? Kojima turns it into a test of timing. This actually works well in the particular context of martial arts, when a trained body has various “automatic” moves programmed into the neuromuscular system and their timing is critically important.

On the other hand, it is possible that the increasing fashionability of QTEs in high-concept games is born of an understanding among developers that our current videogame control systems are increasingly impotent when called upon to support new artistic directions. Some of the most progressive designers are attempting to move away from a paradigm in which the player combines discrete simple physical actions - hit, shoot, duck — that can be permanently assigned to separate buttons. But what would a controller for a richer, more analogue form of virtual life look like? Motion sensing a la Wiimote or Sixaxis is not the answer to this problem - after all, I don’t actually want to have to crouch awkwardly on my living-room floor so that my character can crouch awkwardly under the virtual stairs.

A QTE does have the strong advantage of what I have before termed “amplification of input” — the satisfaction that comes from the contrast between the ease of a button press and the complexity of an in-game action — but since QTEs are context-dependent (pressing triangle does a completely different thing in a different point of the game), the sense of predictable control, of the player having her own repertoire of action, is lost. Essentially you end up choosing actions from a different pre-set menu every time. It’s a retrograde step for cybernetic immersivity.

In the end, the absurdity of having to press an uncomfortable sequence of buttons in order to make your character hide in Heavy Rain can be seen as a special instance of the general problem now facing the most visionary designers. You want to allow the player to do new things, but how will she do them? Maybe the joypad is exhausted. If so, what will replace it?