The PlayStation 4’s Share button changed the way we play together
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/6/20998610/playstation-4-ps4-share-button-social-play-sony-25th-anniversary
Reported today in The Verge.
The PlayStation 4's Share button changed the way we play together
Nobody games alone anymore. That's never been strictly the case, anyway. Video games have always been relatively social, despite the old basement-dwelling, Cheeto-stained stereotypes. It's 2019: we're all gamers now. Part of that is because video games are more accessible now than they ever have been - smartphones are just tiny consoles! - but another part of it is also that games are more visible now. They go viral just like everything else does. (Honk!) That second bit, however, is relatively new. Games are more visible because the way we share them with each other has changed. And a big reason for that is the PlayStation 4.
It all started with the console's design. Back in 2010, according to our friends over at Polygon, its designers decided to make sharing a key part of the system's architecture. In a 2018 interview, designer Toshi Aoki said that a button dedicated to sharing was just an obvious, easy thing to understand. "But more than that, it's a message for the PlayStation side of things, that users can share out, connect, show other players their epic moments. It just matched up," he said. And at the time, that wasn't easy to do without a lot of expensive technology. Aoki and the rest of the team settled on redesigning the PlayStation's signature DualShock controller as the best way to accommodate the console's new sharing features. They got rid of the Start and Select buttons and turned them into "Options" and "Share," respectively. It was a quiet revolution. ("The joke is that Start never starts the game, and Select doesn't select anything," Aoki told Polygon.)
Here's what the button does: when you press Share on the controller, it brings up a menu that allows y