Gaming with a drawing tablet

My hobby concerning drawing tablets is centered largely around creatives - people who are drawing, sketching, etc. Despite using tablets for well over a decade, only in 2022 did I discover people were using drawing tablets for games. And some of these games are quite popular.

osu!

osu! is a popular rhythm game and many of its players use drawing tablets instead of a mouse. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osu!)

Example of someone playing osu! with a tablet <- this video is relatively well known in the osu! community.

osu! is very popular

They have about 1.7M monthly active users who play osu!

You can get the live stats from here: https://stats.circleclickers.com/

How osu! players use drawing tablets

While creatives tend to use their drawing tablets in standard ways, osu! players do a number of quite surprising things:

Active area size

  • Players use tablets of various sizes: Small, Medium, and Large. Small is the most popular based on the videos I've seen.

  • Players often customize the active area to be surprisingly small - much smaller than even the default active area. In the video above, notice how the player moved the pen only in a tiny region of that tablet.

Drivers

  • Players often do not use manufacturer drivers, but instead they use OpenTabletDriver because:

    • OTD has less lag than manufacturer drivers

    • OTD is highly customizable through it's plug-in system

    • OTD works across many tablet models

    • OTD works on Windows, Mac, and Linux

Drag vs hover

  • Drag players play with the pen touching the surface of the tablet.

  • Hover players don't let the pen touch the tablet surface.

Clicking

There are various clicking styles used by osu! players.

  • click by tapping the pen on the tablet

  • click by using the keyboard

  • click by alternating between the pen tapping and keyboard presses

Tablet expertise

Some osu! players - at least the ones I communicate with regularly - are remarkably knowledgeable about drawing tablets.

They know a tremendous amount about the hardware, drivers, etc. Some conduct original research and testing of tablets. Some write code for OpenTabletDriver.

I would consider them absolute experts - far beyond any drawing tablet reviewer out there and myself.

They are also incredibly sensitive to microscopic behaviors, latencies, etc. in drawing tablets - far more than someone who has typically has used tablets only for creative tasks.

Advanced customization

Players do advanced customization of osu! through OpenTabletDriver plug-ins. Some examples:

  • Circular/Elliptical tablet areas

  • Rotated tablet areas

  • Live active area randomization

Picking a drawing tablet for osu!

More here: Buying a drawing tablet for osu!

FPS games

Players using drawing tablets for FPS games is less common than for Rhythm games, but this is the preferred input device for some people.

Last updated