“Immersion” is a funny word that gets thrown around a lot in the modern video game industry. Somewhere along the lines, some fools in the development team got it in their rotten minds that immersive gameplay equated to motion-control gameplay. Which first resulted in the Nintendo Wii, and subsequently led to the Playstation Move, Xbox 360 Kinect, and Nintendo Wii Plus all vying for the title of having the best controls.

And they’re all wrong.

Okay, I get it. Immersion is a very sexy concept. I’ve had more than my fair share of bouts with the whole “immersion” thing in the movie realm. Dictionary.com calls immersion “a baptism in which the whole body is submerged in the water.” That’s not the best definition. Being truly immersed in a game—movie, book, anything—means I’ve lost any active recognition of the medium. I’m just there.

I can see the sketchboard appeal in motion gaming. From a 3rd person point of view, it looks more immersive. The developer thinks, This looks more like the player’s swinging a tennis racket, therefore it must feel more like swinging a tennis racket. But when push (literally!) comes to shove, no motion gaming system amounts to much more than an exhaustive effort in random flailing. If I’m swinging wildly hoping for my controller to effectively communicate, immersion is lost. Or if swooping my arm a little too high results in my forehand not registering, and I’ve got to consciously monitor the swoop, pitch, and speed of my input, then immersion is lost, too. If I’m breaking a sweat in anything but an exercise game (and only then, because I’m running in place, not because I’m attempting (and failing) to communicate accurately with the receptor), then the system is broken, not enhanced.

Finding true immersion ought to be easy enough: simply follow the path of least resistance—whatever results in gameplay that’s as quick and accurate as possible.

At any point during gameplay, there’s a three-party transaction going on between my brain (who says to the controller “I need to wallop that fellow over there with a hammer”), the controller (who says to the console “input these complicated commands and algorithms per my instructions (which, presumably, it’s correctly received) from that guy’s brain”), and the console (who makes the blob on the TV screen swing his hammer per the controller’s instructions (which, presumably, it too has correctly received)). Motion gameplay subjects all three parties to lag (I’ve got to swing my arm instead of pressing the A-button) and error (the controller brain wonders, “did he swing overhand for a hammer smash, or jab forward for a rocket punch?”)

Consequently, in my opinion, the medium of least resistance is actually the much-scoffed and often-maligned…Nintendo GameCube controller.

Feast your eyes on the most immersive video game controller in history. Surprised?

The GameCube suffered and ultimately failed because (no duh, haven’t you been reading the rest of my crap?) of a marketing problem. The controller and system itself were widely panned by critics. Why? Because everything on the controller is small. The D-Pad (the grey “+” looking thing on the left side) is small. The yellow C-stick has a small top and became disaffectionately referred to as a “nub.” The controller itself was slightly smaller than its Sony and Microsoft counterparts. Core gamers (male, 14-25, ish) like things that are big—a projection of their genitalia, naturally—and don’t typically take to things that are purple.

Problem is, the size of the controller was never properly explained as an attribute—nay, an asset—of the controller. A small controller minimizes finger movement and exhaustion, and close buttons minimize the amount of time fumbling needed to try to find the one you’re hoping to press. Because the D-pad is small, you don’t need to press Up, Down, Left, or Right individually, you can simply rest your thumb in the middle and tilt. By making the C-stick “nub” shaped instead of full-size, it could be moved closer to the ABXY buttons and minimize accidental presses. B, A, X, and Y are all different shapes—small, big, tall, and flat, respectively—so you’d never confuse pressing one for the other. There’s an obvious and comfortable resting position for your right thumb on A, the most important button. Other controllers (like the PlayStation controller, here) have a diamond-shaped button pattern. Aesthetically, this makes sense. Logistically, this means your thumb probably rests on the X button, and you’ve got to reach all the way up to hit Triangle. Sounds totally silly even as I’m typing it. But on a mass-production scale, even the centimeter difference we’re discussing here needs to be considered.

Granted, the controller wasn’t perfect. In the modern generation, it’d need to be wireless and rechargeable, and it’d need a “Home” button to quickly navigate to a menu screen. There was no Z-button on the top-left of the controller to match the one on the top-right. You couldn’t press the Joystick or C-stick in to use as additional buttons. And the thing is still purple.

An aside totally worth mentioning: The GameCube similarly suffered from a second size-related issue that should have been an asset: Game discs themselves were tiny. The natural assumption is that smaller discs = less powerful, worse graphics, smaller. The actual reason? Games load faster. Shorter and less frequent loading screens, greater sense of immersion.

A second aside: Many avid gamers cite the PlayStation Dualshock (again) as their controller of choice. Strange, because it’s by far the blockiest, least comfortable, and worst-designed (the left joystick—the input used most frequently—is placed awkwardly low to be held comfortably) controller of the current generation. And yet, it may be justifiably considered the most immersive controller of the lot, for the simple and intuitive reason that Sony has been using the same style controller for nearly fourteen years (November 1997), and avid gamers have long since grown accustomed to and fluid in its (albeit flawed) layout.

The conclusion: The GameCube was a flop. The GameCube controller, a flop merely by association. Negative buzz spread about the console (the word “kiddy” made rounds frequently), developers opted to make games on the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox instead of for Nintendo, which lead to more negative buzz hitting the airwaves, ad infinitum. It sold the worst of the three video game consoles of its generation. Its flaws will go down in history in much larger print than its successes, which, in light of the motion-gaming revolution currently underway, will probably be ultimately lost to obscurity entirely. What a shame.

But from a production and immersion standpoint that will never be heard from again in the history of the universe, what a shining (and surprising) success.