Clive, I feel I should mention in case you have not discovered them Super Monkey Ball, which uses no buttons, and Kirby Air Ride, which uses one. Kirby Air Ride is an exceptionally unusual racing game for any number of reasons, but it is also the only one I know of that uses just a stick and a single buttonb for its control mechanism.

Number of controls is a factor we term 'dimensionality of control' and I am intent on designing with as low a dimensionality of control as is viable for the intended audience of a game. The budget market PS2 games we're currently working on use no more than two buttons for their key functions (although we've added some extra controls for Hardcore players which are merely conveniences). In fact, I think the first two are single button for their core controls.

Thanks for the link!

Great, and here I was planning to get to sleep early.

On your search, have you already run into Orisinal? The Amazing Dare Dozen is probably my favorite one-button game of all time (besides that infamous worm game, of course). The aesthetics of all the Orisinal games are fantastic, too.

Chris, good points all around. I should also point out that single-button games are ideal for mobile situations where you might be in the process of being jostled and thus do not have fine motor control (i.e. on the bus, in a car, on the subway); I would imagine that single-button-control games would truly rock on mobile phones.

Metaly, yes, I blogged about Orsinal a few years ago. His design is superb! That Dare Dozen game is hilarious!

Nice!

This reminded me of a couple of things:

This excellent review of DK Jungle Beat...

"This degree of precise expressiveness coming out of a controller with essentially 3 buttons (read: fewer input channels than an Atari joystick) truly illustrates how most of us are walking fiascos who should be fired immediately for filling the Xbox controller up to the last analog interpretation while our character still can't reliably climb walls."

and also this article about one button game design which catalogues the modes of interactions possible through a single button/

Orbituary is terrific.

Best one button game is Shuffle the Penguin. Addictive and gorgeous graphics.

On http://klack.sf.net there is a one-button game I wrote years ago. It uses thrust and a rotating pointer for the direction.

As annoying as they are, the advertisements for "free ipods if you crush the spider" or "free ipod nano if you hit the mailbox" are all practically one-button games (mouse movement makes it not techincally one-button). It's weird because they had Punch-Out rip-offs in those ads. I originally thought that if you clicked anywhere in the ad, it would immediately bring you to the site. But, these ipod ads actually require you to crush the spider or punch Osama in order to click through. Weird. I wonder how difficult these ad-games will get.

These are all amazing comments.

I love how the consideration of one-button game design is a cool way to think about game design in toto -- since it brings to the fore all these questions about the rulesets of the game, the interfaces, etc., that are normally a little too buried in any complex 3D.