This sort of preconditioning — button-mashing our way through hard opponents before rage quitting — is unregulated, undisciplined, unmatched to the gravity of real conflict. But it conditions us on a haptic level, teaching us to respond to the feel of an object in certain ways. Heidegger makes the case that we cannot come to grasp a hammer’s essence through detached observation, but through its use — only when we’re hammering do we come to an understanding of what a hammer is. Gaming is the means by which the controller is known, revealing the essence of this tool as one of play: we grow to see it as weightless, inconsequential, and the conscious substitution of “fake” tools for “real” ones can’t easily displace the knowledge inscribed into our bodies and hands. The artist Rachel Berger acknowledged this tactile risk when she created an Xbox controller cast in lead and copper to respond to its weaponization. Discussing her piece, she said that the “Xbox controller’s seeming innocence is the key to its danger.” The way it feels in our hands, so light and familiar, makes it unthinkable as a heavy, alien instrument of death.