Car steering in racing games: similar performance with joysticks and keyboards

Abstract

Many gamers use keyboards for playing computer games. Yet it is a commonly held belief that the control of the game is better with a more dedicated input device such as a joystick. This study set out to explore the effect of using keyboard and joystick for a car driving game. A car racing game experiment with n = 20 participants was set up. The results show that there is no difference between the two input devices. In fact, the spread in the measurements were larger for the joystick.