Grandpa met my controller and asked for a screwdriver

Grandpa took my controller the way you'd take a baby bird somebody handed you at a picnic. It buzzed in his hands. He nearly threw it across the room.

"It's alive," he said.

"That's rumble. It vibrates when stuff happens in the game."

"Nothing's happening."

Then my guy on the screen started walking left. Slowly. Nobody was touching anything. Grandpa watched him stroll calmly off a ledge and fall.

"Your fella quit," he said, and held out his hand. "Phillips. The small one."

What it says it does

A modern controller is a wireless remote for a console or a PC. You get two thumbsticks, a D-pad, four face buttons, two bumpers and two triggers. On a lot of controllers the triggers are pressure-sensitive, so a light squeeze and a hard squeeze do different things.

The thumbsticks are the clever part. They don't just say "left." They report how far left, all the time. Most of them do it with potentiometers, which are tiny strips with a contact that slides across them as you move the stick. Over time that strip wears and collects grime, and the controller starts reporting movement you aren't making. That's stick drift, and it's why my guy walked off a cliff on his own.

Some newer controllers use Hall effect sticks instead. Those read the stick's position with a magnet and a sensor, so nothing rubs. That's the big reason people look for them.

Most current controllers have a lithium-ion battery sealed inside and charge over USB. The standard Xbox controller is the famous holdout. It still runs on AAs unless you buy a rechargeable pack. Many controllers also pack rumble motors, a headset jack, a light bar, and on some models a built-in microphone.

What Grandpa thinks it does

Grandpa counted the buttons out loud. He got to sixteen before he stopped.

"The first one of these I ever saw had one button," he said. "And a stick. I played that game for a whole winter and never once needed a second button." I asked if he won. He said you couldn't win, you just kept going until you lost, "which is how most of life works, so it was very educational."

He thinks the triggers are drill triggers and kept squeezing them gently like he was trying not to strip a screw. He decided the sticks are "two tiny gearshifts" and wanted to know why a game needs two transmissions. The light bar, he's sure, is a check engine light. When it turned red he asked me what I'd done to it.

Then came his general theory of gadgets. Anything with no visible screws is hiding something.

He turned it over, peeled back a corner of the grip, and looked at the seam. "When'd you last clean this?" I said I didn't know you were supposed to. He ran a toothpick around the base of the left stick and pulled out a gray strip of what we agreed, after some discussion, was mostly chip dust.

He held it up to the light like it was evidence. Which it was.

Where he has a point

Drift is real, and it's the number one complaint. Before you buy, read the owner reviews from people who've had theirs for a year or more, and look for drift in particular. A brand-new controller tells you nothing. A year-old one tells you everything.

The battery is sealed in. When a sealed battery gets tired, you can't just swap in fresh ones like Grandpa's old flashlight. You can usually still play wired with the charging cable plugged in, so check whether yours supports that.

Some things it replaced never broke. A wired controller never ran out of charge in the middle of a game. AAs cost money, but you can buy them at any gas station at midnight.

Online play usually costs extra. Playing most games online on the major consoles requires a paid membership. That's on top of the controller and the game, so add it into what this hobby really costs you.

Check the mic. If your controller has a built-in microphone, find out whether it's on and who can hear you. Go through the console's privacy and voice chat settings, and set them with your parents. That isn't about trust. It's about strangers.

A note on opening it up, with no joke attached: lithium-ion batteries can catch fire if they're punctured, bent or crushed. Don't pry near the battery. If a controller ever swells, gets hot while charging or smells strange, stop using it, unplug it, and take it to a battery recycling drop-off. Never throw it in the trash. And opening the case can void the warranty, so read that first.

What Grandpa did instead, and what you can do this week:

• Turn the controller off.
• Use short bursts of canned air around the base of each stick, holding the can upright.
• Push the stick to its edges and rotate it slowly a few full circles.
• Update the controller's firmware through the console settings.
• If your console or game offers stick calibration or a dead zone setting, nudge the dead zone up a little. That tells the game to ignore tiny phantom movements.

His drift got better. Not perfect. Better.

Where he is wrong

Grandpa has mild arthritis in his right thumb. I showed him the button remapping in the console's accessibility settings, which lets you move any action to whichever button you like. He moved jump to a shoulder button, played for twenty minutes, and got quiet.

"Well, that's a good idea," he said. From Grandpa, that's a parade.

He also admitted that no cord means nobody trips over it on the way to the kitchen. A rechargeable battery means you're not buying a pack of AAs every few weeks. And when my cousin in Arizona joined our game and Grandpa heard him say hi through the headset, he leaned toward the TV and shouted "HELLO, BUDDY" like it was a long-distance call from 1974.

The rumble grew on him too. "It tells you when something hits you. Like a truck with a good suspension. You feel the road."

He's right that it's fragile. He's wrong that fragile means pointless. It does things the one-button joystick couldn't have dreamed of.

The verdict

Worth it, with conditions.

It's for the guy who plays regularly and will actually take care of it. That means clean hands, no snacks mid-game, and not spiking it when you lose. If gaming is starting to crowd out sleep or homework, this piece on fitting gaming, school and sleep into the same week will save you more than any controller will.

Three things to check before you buy:

1. What kind of sticks it uses. Look for Hall effect sticks, or for a controller whose maker sells replacement stick modules. Either one beats throwing the whole thing out over drift.
2. The battery setup. Sealed or swappable? Can you play wired while it charges? How long does the maker say a charge lasts?
3. The warranty. Read the actual document before you buy. Check how long it runs, whether drift is covered, what voids it, and who pays shipping if you send it back.

Then check the current price, because controllers go on sale more often than you'd think.

Grandpa gave mine back an hour later. The sticks were clean, the seams were clean, and the cable was coiled with a twist tie I didn't know we owned. It was in better shape than when I handed it to him. That's his rule with anything he borrows, and it turns out that kind of thing is built at home, one returned object at a time.

He kept the toothpick, though. Said he'd need it next time.