The Pennyfarthing Effect

A true gentleman's ride of predilection

You're partaking in an older game for any number of reasons: maybe your friends recommended it to you incessantly for years, maybe you've recently gotten interested in the series or genre it's part of and want to go back to the source, or maybe you got it on a Steam sale as part of one of their gigantic all-inclusive packs. Anyhow, this is an old game.

While you can certainly see its quality, there's just something in it that's bugging you. There's a gameplay mechanic that is not only outdated, but needlessly complicated compared to the equivalent you would most likely find in a modern game. You can't help but wonder: how could anyone come up with this extremely complicated version of a simple concept, years before the simple one appeared?

For example, imagine if for decades a popular American dessert was apple and carrot pie (let's assume that carrots would in no way improve apple pie, just in case it turns out they would). For decades everyone would love their mom's apple-carrot pie and nobody would even think that just apple pie would be good. Then at some point someone comes up with good ol' apple pie, and it turns out that, to everyone's delight, apple pie is much, much tastier than apple-carrot pie. The absence of carrots in apple pie would then be obvious in hindsight - it takes an extra degree of invention to put carrots in it and therefore make the pie worse.

The correct, simple way to do things is obvious in hindsight. It's not just that the old way to do things is outdated, or that a crucial gameplay development that made games much more convenient to play hadn't yet been invented, it's that somehow it seems like the old way took more effort to invent than the new way.

Another way to put it is that these are essentially Real Life examples of Schizo-Tech.

Almost always a side-effect of Technology Marches On, and a frequent cause of Seinfeld Is Unfunny.

Compare Hilarious in Hindsight, contrast Older Is Better.

Examples of The Pennyfarthing Effect include:

Video Games

• Playing older Role-Playing Games such as Final Fantasy VII that don't support analog control and must be moved with the D-Pad while holding down a separate button at all times to run.
• Free mouselook in First-Person Shooters. Until the late 90s, somewhere around Quake II, if your typical FPS even supported mouse input (which itself wasn't all that common until around the same time), it was likely that the mouse controlled the same thing the arrow keys did: forward and backward movement, and left/right turning. If you were really lucky, the game would let you configure it to something close to modern mouselook, but it was generally clumsy (severely limiting vertical tilt or requiring holding a button to even allow it).
  • And in a related issue, having the main left/right input control strafing instead of turning. Until mouselook became common, pressing left or right would usually turn, and two other keys would need to be pressed for strafing, or it had a key you would need to hold down to temporarily change your "turn" keys into "strafe".
• WASD controls, again mostly in First Person Shooters. This took even longer to become commonly accepted, and many games as late as 2000 or 2001 still used the arrow keys (or, slightly better, the numpad) as their default movement keys, sometimes not even giving the player the option of changing them. It's slightly baffling that it took anyone this long to realize that WASD is where your left hand naturally rests on a keyboard, and that it puts a dozen other keys within easy access of the same hand without having to move it away from movement.
  • This issue is probably linked to the previous one; in the days when all controls were on the keyboard, left-hand movement control was not needed.
  • For that matter, in much older games, WASD controls in general. Odd schemes like OPQA for movement (OP for left/right, QA for up/down) were used in a lot of 8-bit computer games because cursor keys tended to be inconveniently positioned and, in the case of the ZX Spectrum, Atari 8 Bit Computers and Commodore 64, required modifier keys.
• Speaking of first-person shooters, Marathon has no jump key. Especially Egregious given that you need to Rocket Jump to get to certain points; in fact, at one point, it's even required if you can't cross the gap the "correct" way.
• Go back to some very early Real Time Strategy games (for example, Warcraft 1), and you'll be shocked to discover you can't drag a selection box around your units. At least not with just your mouse - most of the time holding the Ctrl key will let you do it (though you'll still have to deal with Warcraft 1's cripplingly limiting 4-unit groups). Clicking and dragging the mouse without holding any keys at all? Does absolutely nothing. It's just an extra button press that makes an already convoluted interface a nightmare to use for absolutely no reason at all.
  • Trope Codifier Dune II has no grouping at all. If you want to move a lot of units, you'll have to click each one, move across the map to where you want to send it, move back to the next one and do the same again.
• If you played any PC game with a mouse cursor interface that was made prior to them becoming commonplace (sometime around the mid-to-late 90s), and it's a game that involves being able to identify items you can interact with and differentiate them from the background, you'll be annoyed to discover that there's bound to be no hint, identification or highlighting on the objects when you hover your cursor over them. Then, after you've played around with the game's interface for a bit and gotten used to it, you'll be even more annoyed to discover there's an alternate cursor or function that you have to manually activate in order to get feedback when you hover over usable objects. It's seemingly just there as an extra layer of obfuscation between you and playing the game, and there's absolutely no reason the game couldn't just give you that line in its interface that says "This is a needle" when you're hovering your regular interaction cursor over the haystack. Early SCUMM games like Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders and the original two Fallout games are made particularly unplayable because of this.
  • The early SCUMM games would tell you what objects were interactable with, you just had to select the command "What is". This was a pain, but a BIG leap forward on text games (at least you didn't have to guess the parser).
• In the world of point-and-click adventure games (and some RPGs), older games have something like a dozen verbs you must cycle between in order to interact with objects (ex. "Talk", "Pick up", "Examine", "Use", etc.), never mind that in the vast majority of them, only one usually-obvious verb does anything interesting per object. (Probably a holdover from text adventures, where the alternate verbs would have to be typed into meaningful sentences, but still rather unnecessary in graphical games.) Newer games only ask you what you'd like to do with an object after you select it, and even then only if there's a good reason to have multiple things to do.
• Players going back in the Ratchet and Clank games will find difficulty with one particular problem - quick weapon switching. You see, the first game didn't have a dedicated button for it, so you had to go into the quick select menu every time you wanted to use a different gun. Speaking of which, the quick select menu was rather... restricting in earlier installments due to there only being eight slots in it - far fewer than the number of guns you would have around midgame. Starting around Up Your Arsenal, they began adding a secondary window, and the Future series added a third.

Tabletop Games

• Some of the changes that were implemented into Magic: The Gathering years after it first came out are obvious in hindsight - Removing ante, that rarity can't be used as a balancing mechanism (It wasn't that they didn't know how powerful Black Lotus and Time Walk were, its that they thought there not being many of them would work to balance it, failing to predict just how many cards people would purchase), the stack (Or at least something other than the convoluted mess that card timings were implemented with prior to sixth edition), are all examples that spring immediately to mind.

Literature

• In Life On The Mississippi Mark Twain expressed bewilderment as to why in his time their steamboats had no crew uniforms...

It is so manifestly sensible, that it might have been thought of earlier, one would suppose.

• • ...and handled the stages manually.

Next, instead of calling out a score of hands to man the stage, a couple of men and a hatful of steam lowered it from the derrick where it was suspended, launched it, deposited it in just the right spot, and the whole thing was over and done with before a mate in the olden time could have got his profanity-mill adjusted to begin the preparatory services. Why this new and simple method of handling the stages was not thought of when the first steamboat was built, is a mystery which helps one to realize what a dull-witted slug the average human being is.

Real Life

• The Pennyfarthing bicycle, which was popular in the 19th century and which you've probably seen on olde-timey photographs (or, more likely, things that make fun of olde-timey things), was the ancestor of the modern bicycle. Somehow the invention process for the bicycle went through "gigantic front wheel" before it settled on "reasonably-sized wheels of the same size and a seat at a height where the rider can touch the ground and keep his balance when not moving". Trope Namer, and possibly the Trope Codifier.
  • The reason for a gigantic wheel was the absence of this: Without differently-sized gears, a big wheel was necessary to amplify movement.
  • Of course, now the question is "why didn't they think of the gears before?"
• As far as a Trope Maker goes, enter the woodblock printing press, which was invented in the 3rd century and was eventually replaced by movable type printing, which was invented around the 11th century, making this one Older Than Feudalism (at least in China, as it took until Gutenberg and the Renaissance for Europe to catch up, making the European side of this one literally Older Than Print). It took several centuries for printers to figure out it was easier, quicker and more economic to carve out single-character sorts (essentially small stamps each representing a single letter or character, much like the ones you find in a typewriter) than carving out a big stamp out of a single piece of wood for an entire page, making correcting mistakes impossible and requiring a new hand carving for each new page.
  • One reason why moveable type took so long to develop after the invention of the printing press was the vast complexity involved in creating and arranging enormous Asian character sets. The Latin alphabet, with only 26 letters and about as many numbers and common symbols, made moveable type much easier to implement.
• Putting a door on both sides of a minivan. Minivans existed for decades before someone had the bright idea of putting a sliding door on the driver's side as well as the passenger's side. Made loading and unloading much easier, but for some reason no one thought of doing it that way for years.
• The Split pins were originally all of "standard" form, which meant the prongs had to be parted by some other tool before bending with pliers, until someone figured out the extended prong configuration which allowed immediate bending.