So, fellow members of the master race, I’d like to discuss what the mouse and keyboard offer. What are the main advantages to either of them?
Are there ways in which they could be used but which have been left as largely untapped potential?
Great username/ post combo.
My cat has no opinion either way.
Primary advantage is that, if you own a PC, you already own them 
In shooters, the mouse offers much more precise and faster means of aiming. This has been borne out time and again and, recently, Blizzard said that they want Microsoft and Sony to block use of a M+KB setup on their consoles because of the unfair advantage.
In less twitchy games, keyboards offer the benefit in strategic and simulation style games that you have potentially 103+ keyboard functions to choose from for control purposes. This held true for MMORPGs as well (hence the 22-button MMORPG mice) although those have become more console-oriented with more action and less complexity.
Because, in the end, there aren’t many better ways to interface with a screen-oriented device.
Since the invention of the typewriter, no one seems to have come up with a better way to enter language strings, quickly and with high precision, than a keyboard of some form or another.
Voice recognition, even the best and well-trained, is very slow for anything but short commands and text entry. I can’t imagine, say, a graphics program that would be efficient with voice commands. (See: Blade Runner.) Or even a word processor, for formatting, editing, document setup, etc.
And we’ve run through an incredible gamut of pointing devices, yet the mouse (and its close twin, the trackball) persist. Most other HIDs are for compact, self-contained applications like laptop touch pads, or attempts to be really, really different like “force balls” and “space balls” where small forces and torque on a gripped object translate to pointer motion. Tried many; hated them all. (The original Spaceball can be seen on the desks, painted black, in Men In Black 1.)
I can’t conceive of a truly different pointing device that accommodates easy, larger motions with innate feedback than something a lot like a mouse. Motion sensing, force feedback, touch panels all require endless hours of very precise movement, which is tiring and error-prone.
So, what I’m perceiving at this point is that there are 3 main priorities: range (of options, including spatial locations), precision (in choosing among those options) and quickness. Usually, you have to choose 2 out of 3 at most. With the mouse, you can have all 3. Is that accurate?
What are are the main differences between the mouse and the keyboard?
I don’t think there’s anything compellingly superior about either one but they both work and oodles of people know how to use them.
• The keyboard — the QWERTY keyboard with F keys and numerical pad and 4 arrow keys and whatnot —are descendants of the standard typewriter. Never mind all the objections you can come up with for why the design isn’t ideal, I can type words on it faster than I can speak them (or at least faster than I would want to speak them for very long, my mouth would dry out and I’d have to stop for breath). So even 100% perfect dicatation-from-speech technology would not replace the keyboard on my computer. I can see how that might not be true for someone of a later generation, for whom speech recognition software has always been a presence and who sees no reason to learn how to type as a consequence.
• The mouse — I remember learning the damn mouse and it initially felt like “learning how to paint with a brick”. All other things being equal, I probably would have preferred a pen-shaped object that would let me use the muscle-memory techniques I already had from pens and pencils, something akin to a Wacom tablet and stylus perhaps. But I got the hang of the mouse and now I take one in my laptop backpack because I detest the trackpad which feels like, well, umm, trying to paint with a brick. Or that horrible pencil-eraser thingamabob that IBM laptops had (ugh!). Or trackballs. After all these years, I can hit a specific pixel with the tip of the mouse arrow using my mouse. It feels like an extension of myself. I would not want to be without one, although I could cope with a pen-and-tablet metaphor, whether akin to a Wacom or a softpoint penstylus + touchscreen interface. I hate trying to use my friends’ iPhones or Android phones and use my fat fingertips. But once again it’s my own personal familiarity and competence with the device that makes the mouse so nice.
By a pretty large margin, the mouse is the best interface we have for getting a pointer to a specific location quickly and with a minimal amount of physical movement. It also does a great job of accommodating different levels of precision. I think the key is that there’s an intuitiveness to how physical movement closely translates to pointer movement. The big downside of mouses is that they’re hard to recenter.
Analog sticks, on the other hard, are great for giving you a constant feel for how far off center you are. When it comes to movement, we have a pretty intuitive notion that zero is stop and that translates very well to an analog stick.
Basically, mouses work very well at simulating how our vision works and analog sticks work very well at simulating our sense of motion. They can approximate the other decently enough, but will always be more suited to their own niche.
What’s unfortunate is that no one’s made a really serious effort to combine the two. WASD has always been a really hacky setup to make keyboards work for movement. I’d like to see some kind of desk based controller for the non-mouse hand with pressure sensitive keys laid out in a comfortable way. That could be the best of both worlds.
Would make a lot of sense if they instead just made different leagues for people playing with M+KB vs controller setups. They could even match you against PC players with M+KB if you are using M+KB on console instead of matching you against console players.
I want the option to play other non competitive games with M+KB if I want, I’m not sure why Blizzard can’t put M+KB detection into Overwatch themselves and implement their own ban, it doesn’t need to be done at the OS level. Even with conversion devices that pretend to be a controller I’d imagine that from the pattern of inputs you could still tell the difference in your software. (This is similar to the way that “I’m not a robot” check box works, they look at the mouse movement and timings of movement and time to click the button.)
Let me just say that the computer keyboard is fucking wonderful, and I couldn’t have become a decent writer without it. I can type much faster than I can write, and like AHunter3, I’d hate to have to dictate my thoughts to the computer for very long. It would be two or three paragraphs, then take a break from talking, then another 2-3 paragraphs, rinse, repeat.
Especially because the keyboard-and-mouse combo is way better than voice would be for the inevitable editing that I do as I go along. Voice commands for taking one string of text, moving it somewhere else, and changing a few surrounding words to fit? No, I just want to grab the mouse, highlight the string, drag it to its new place, mouse here, correct words, mouse there, correct words, done.
Seriously, text editing with a keyboard and mouse in a WYSIWYG environment is one of the miracles of our time. (Says this guy who remembers the old ways - an initial draft, handwritten or dictated, turned into text by a secretary with a typewriter, then laboriously going through the typed copy, inserting and scratching out words by hand, circling text and drawing arrows to have it moved somewhere else, secretary types revisions into a second draft, you look at it and see things wrong with it that you missed the first time, etc. It would be a fucking nightmare to go back.) It works so well, so smoothly, that it’s hard to see how one would improve on it, so it’s doubtful that many people are putting any time or effort into doing so.
What? That’s like comparing apples and oranges, or mice and cats, or something. The mouse and keyboard is an input combination that is compared to a console controller in regards to first person shooter games. The mouse/keyboard combo is more precise and has more buttons for binding commands than a console controller has. That’s about it. The console controller may have certain aesthetic advantages to do with “feel” and ability to slouch back on a lounge but a mouse and keyboard is objectively better in terms of raw performance.
For movement I would say a keypad is better (think the old school Nintendo Cross pad) but for aiming a mouse is light years ahead of a controller (at least for me). it’s a completely different arm/hand motion and must easier to move the cross hairs where you want them. Maybe because a controller is just your fingers and a mouse is your whole arm? Don’t know.