I will never go back.
Look, I tried to be normal about PC pointers, I really did. I bought ordinary mice whose most exciting feature was the gray scroll wheel, hoping that the blandness of their budget would help me forget the discomfort I was struggling with. I ordered the fancy ones with small customizable weights and adjustable parts, trying to convince myself that some personalized tweaks would help me see the light. When that didn’t work, I paid more than I wanted for a high-end gaming mouse that was overwhelmed with buttons and trained myself to get the most efficient clicks out of it while ruining my life with MMO. If all else has already failed then surely Definitely, Clicking efficiently while my avatar was up to his armpits in dragons and space bunnies had to be the thing that would finally make a difference, because there were no other types of mice to try.
I struggled this way for years, always settling for something that didn’t quite feel right, always telling myself that this decade would make my wrist suddenly start to like the increasingly expensive little plastic discs I had around. small work area.
What else would I use anyway? Touchpad? A pen? A…
a trackball.
Especially a BIG one. Yes, that’s the name. Yes it is…It’s really big. And comfortable. A few years ago I gave up trying to keep my wrist happy with mice and switched to a trackball, and frankly I haven’t laid a single glance at a traditional mouse since.
Microsoft released a series of these strange upside-down mice decades ago; each contained some type of bright red ball in shades of grey. They didn’t have the customizable RGB lighting or packaging that provided a competitive advantage in an intense online conflict. They didn’t seem like something that would affect the other person (or anyone else) playing the important game. They were designed for sharing desks with neat pencil cases, paper clip boxes, and bound dictionaries. They looked reasonable and reserved. They promised comfort. Practicality.
And they’ve all been long discontinued, probably because they’re the PC accessory equivalent of a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. But a few brave souls remained in the athletics camp. Elecom makes mine, but Kensington and Logitech are the other big names in this small pool, and there’s also the GameBall boutique. Old or new, they are all bulbous creatures. Trackballs may be weird and old-fashioned, but I can definitely make weird and old-fashioned things. Moreover, I was desperate.
Elecom Large Wireless Trackball | 1500DPI | Wireless
Elecom’s largest trackball has 8 programmable buttons on the side and a scroll wheel, so it can do everything a mouse can (except glide across your desk).
The internet couldn’t wait to tell me what a bad idea this was as a PC gamer. People insist that trackballs are great for CAD work but definitely not suitable for gaming. I couldn’t react fast enough, and even if I could, that slippery ball wouldn’t give me enough control.
Maybe if I were part of a crack e-sports team, these problems might arise. But that is not me. I’m playing RPGs and XCOM 2 (again) solo. I click on elves and aliens and check hit percentages, shuffle through armor and ammo stocks, and constantly find myself marveling at how well integrated Tactics Ogre Reborn’s cursor support is (seriously – it’s almost weird to think this ’90s console game has ever been around). was based on anything else).
My trackball is perfect for me and what I want to use it for. While my index and middle fingers rest on the ball, my thumb naturally falls over the left mouse button, within easy reach of the scroll wheel. My third finger rests on the right button of the mouse, and my little finger rests comfortably on an empty piece of plastic to the side, out of harm’s way. Oddly it’s more portable than any mouse I’ve ever used, as I don’t even need to find a flat surface to use it, I just need to find a stable surface: like a bed, my leg, and sometimes even a very accommodating cat.
It is effortless; Spinning a smooth ball is no less intuitive than sliding my fingers across the touchscreen, and in practice it’s not much different from using a regular mouse. Despite what people say, I’ve never missed a pixel-wide sniper shot when using my BIG machine… at least not because of the hardware I’m using. It’s quick, it’s sharp. It works. Once I learned how fast and how far to roll the ball, it became another way to move the cursor around the screen, change my field of view, or aim at something. I use my fingers instead of my wrist to do this.
But that’s why it’s so good. I didn’t want to throw away decades of muscle memory or spend my weekends creating custom config files for every damn game; I just wanted to find a device that allowed me to perform a mundane computer task that didn’t burden me and my limbs. with complete misery.
Trackballs still aren’t cool and they probably never will be, but mine represents everything I love about PC gaming. One of the great strengths of the hobby is that it can reshape itself to suit our own preferences, no matter how big, small or strange. This can manifest itself in things as simple as choosing to play some games sitting on the couch instead of at a desk, or installing cute custom keycaps on handmade keyboards.
For me, this is my trackball. It makes me happy to use it and if something were to happen to it I would cry a little and immediately buy another one like it without giving traditional mice a second thought. It turns out that the biggest problem I have with mice isn’t the type, brand, or features; It was forgetting that I didn’t have to use mice. My computer setup needs to change based on what suits me, not the other way around.