After having watched the ShadowGun demo, I was thinking about First Person Shooters on tablets, and I think it can be done almost as well as with a keyboard/mouse.

Hear me out for a moment.



I have a long history of playing FPSs with a keyboard and mouse. In fact it's my preferred method of input. What feels awkward at first becomes very natural for controlling your character on screen and offers ground for amazing levels of precision. The mouse allows you to look around accurately and extremely quickly for split-second actions. I have not found the same level of proficiency with a console controller. It thus perplexes me that tablets would try to emulate the console controller.

On a tablet, most games use the tablet screen as a controller that you hold it with your hands and use your thumbs to hit virtual buttons. While this scheme works, I think it could be far more effective with an alternate control scheme (if only as an option).

Picture this: Instead of holding the tablet in your hands, you lay the tablet flat on a table.

LEFT HAND
On the left, your middle finger is free to drag around which controls your characters movement (forward, back, strafe-left, strafe-right). Your index finger on your left hand can quickly tap to make the character jump whilst moving. This is important as it makes it possible to move around without losing 'balance' while trying to jump with an unnatural gesture -- it should feel very natural.

Alternatively, the left part of the screen can mimic the keyboard with up/down/left/right targets, and a quick double-tap gesture to jump. This would mean that you lose analog movement, but would still be quite easy to get around.

RIGHT HAND
On the right, you use your middle finger to look around, or change the direction of your character. The sensitivity should be increased quite a bit. It should be possible to look around very quickly with a single swipe, rather than requiring 5 or 6. You can fire your weapon with a single tap of the index finger on your right hand -- as you may have guessed, holding down your index finger would allow you to continually shoot.

Your ring finger that would always fall right of the middle finger could control a different action altogether. It could be purposed as a crouch, or a generalized action button.

CONCLUSION
In this scheme, there is no searching for buttons, and you can move, jump, position, and shoot simultaneously and without losing balance.

The current 'console' scheme largely forces you to do only two things at once, as you're using your two thumbs to control the character. You can look around but not shoot. You can move around, but not jump, etc.

It think that with a scheme like this, a tablet can be as effective as a keyboard/mouse, and because of the touch screen can provide new ways to play (eg. NOVA mini puzzles on-screen).