The Spacebar: A Tribute

I wanted to talk briefly about the significance of the spacebar in PC gaming. Ever since gaming transitioned from "arcade" style to interactive storylines, we have seen the use of many types of keys. Today, the usage of keys varies from game to game, but one can agree that it is substantially more than the way it used to be.

For me, I started off my PC gaming (not counting the educational games my mom got me like Zoombinis and Math Blaster) with games like Wolfenstein 3D and Dark Forces, which my dad and I played together. He designated me as the "doorman", because I was quite young, and I would remember pressing the spacebar over and over again, which was in essence, the historical beginning of the "use" key. One would see this quite a bit in games from the 90s - I'm thinking of Rise of the Triad, Doom, Quake, Hexen - the old classics.

However, as games became more advanced, we started to see the spacebar being used in different ways, because of the sheer amount of commands that were being added to games, as they increased in complexity (game genres branched out as well, which we will talk about later). Now we had the "jump" command, which was in response to the worlds being more spacious and multi-layered. Therefore, the "e" key or something of the like would be used as "use" instead. The definitive game that transitioned this rule was Duke Nukem, which still used the spacebar for "use", even with a jump feature; the alternative "jump" was usually the "x" key. Games that switched to the "spacebar jump" were: the Half-Life series, Unreal Tournament, etc.

However, as I stated in the aforementioned paragraph, the spacebar would come to mean something to different genres of games as well. I'm thinking of some late 90s RPG games in particular: The Baldur's Gate series. These games revolutionized what it meant to use the spacebar in a game. Instead of "use" or "jump", it was designated as "pause", which is important when one is strategizing attacks in an isometric view.

Today, the spacebar is still often used for "jump", rather than the "use" key, even for MMO games. It's interesting to think how something as mundane as game controls/key mapping could have such an interesting backstory and such an influence on a veteran gamer such as myself.