If you are a gamer, surely you use the WASD keys on the keyboard in a natural way to move your character. Regardless of the type of game , whenever you control a character with the keyboard, by default these keys are assigned for it. In this article we are going to tell you why this is so, and why the assigned keys in most games are not different.
Originally, keyboards were designed to be able to interact with the computer, to write commands and texts, and if you wanted to play a game, the most common thing was to have a controller or gamepad connected (this has been the case since the old Amstrad CPC464 Plus). However, with the rise of PC games for several decades now, keyboards are also used for gaming, and almost from the beginning the WASD buttons were chosen for the movement of characters in games.
Why are the WASD keys used so much in games?
As we have mentioned before, if you are a gamer you will use these keys in a natural way in your games almost without wondering why. You start a new game and without anyone telling you, you place your hand on these keys to move your character. And it is precisely in a natural way because of how we position our hands on the keyboard that the game developers chose these keys and not others.
Although left-handed users will not agree with this, the natural position for users when using a PC with keyboard and mouse is to always have the left hand on the keyboard, while with the right hand we move the mouse. In fact, even when we are simply typing, the left hand is positioned on the left side of the keyboard as is evident (otherwise we would have our hands crossed, right?).
Now the developers could have chosen, instead of the WASD keys, for example 2QWE instead. However, “more or less” all users have the same size of hands, and if they placed the controls on those keys, we would not get well to the rest of the key keys that help us to be able to perform the rest of the actions – in addition to the movement – in games such as space to jump, SHIFT to run, CTRL to crouch or number buttons to change weapons or throw skills.
Thus, the reason why the WASD keys are used by default for movement in all games in which a character has to be moved (in fact, even in strategy games played with the mouse, with WASD we can move the map without having to move the cursor to the edges of the screen) is twofold: on the one hand due to the natural position of the hands on the keyboard and mouse, and on the other hand due to the convenience of having key keys such as space, SHIFT , TAB or CTRL very close, so that the user can press them without having to move the hand position .
And what about left-handed users?
The use of these keys has been like this for many years and it is difficult for it to change, even by “inheritance”. However, left-handed users are in trouble since if they move the mouse with the left and even being able to place their right hand on the WASD buttons, they have an unnatural position to be able to press the rest of the special keys that are around.
Many of these users have learned to move the mouse with the right, but most of what they do is have to reassign the keys to others, located to the right (many do it in IJKL and many others in OKLÑ), since this way they can keep pressing the space bar with their thumb, and have the right SHIFT and CTRL “at hand”, forgive the redundancy.
Fortunately, the vast majority of PC games allow you to reassign the keys so that left-handed users can use the keyboard to their liking, but even those that do not allow it (which are few), allow playing with a controller, which is another possible solution.
