Gaming with a drawing tablet
Last updated
Last updated
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! 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.
They have about 1.7M monthly active users who play osu!
You can get the live stats from here: https://stats.circleclickers.com/
While creatives tend to use their drawing tablets in standard ways, osu! players do a number of quite surprising things:
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.
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 players play with the pen touching the surface of the tablet.
Hover players don't let the pen touch the tablet surface.
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
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.
Players do advanced customization of osu! through OpenTabletDriver plug-ins. Some examples:
Circular/Elliptical tablet areas
Rotated tablet areas
Live active area randomization
More here: Buying a drawing tablet for osu!
Players using drawing tablets for FPS games is less common than for Rhythm games, but this is the preferred input device for some people.
example: (video)
