Computer Was A Mistake

I finally got around to starting 007 First Light last week–so far it’s been pretty fun, and even though my PC sits in a nebulous area regarding the game’s recommended specs, it runs fine with most settings on high. I began playing on keyboard and mouse, my default way to play games, but the keyboard layout is a bit clunky: The hand-to-hand combat involves a lot of keys, and having to activate Bond’s watch by holding down the Alt key is uncomfortable. So I decided to switch to controller, and now the game barely runs at all.

On Sunday morning I started First Light over so that I could go through the tutorials again with the controller prompts, because I have a very humiliating disease where I need controls shown to me instead of just looking at a layout. The Iceland mission ran the way it had when I played it previously, and things certainly felt a bit more intuitive on my Xbox One controller. But while following Moneypenny around the MI6 office, I noticed that this time around Bond was subtly rubberbanding, lagging behind her and then rushing forward. By the time I got to Malta, the whole game was dragging.

Literally nothing had changed since I’d last played the game with keyboard and mouse, so I found this very weird. I checked to see if there’d been an update that might’ve broken things, but there wasn’t. I spent a good half hour tweaking all my graphics settings–reducing things back to medium, cranking down lighting and shadow effects, fiddling with DLSS–but nothing made the game run the way it had barely a week ago.

Worried something was going wrong with my hardware, I grabbed my mouse to start poking around my system. When I moved my mouse, the game stopped lagging. Shocked, I tried steering Bond with my keyboard. He moved smoothly, and the game played smoothly around him.

I picked up my controller and moved Bond up and down the Malta street. He jerked along, and the game flailed and stuttered. I switched to keyboard and mouse; I was playing a normal video game again.

I am known, when faced with PC problems, for not quite thinking through the way a computer actually works, inventing narratives to explain a situation that run counter to the cold, logical bounds of the machine. My first thought was “my controller is breaking this specific video game,” but even I knew this was an absurd assumption. I closed First Light, updated my graphics driver, and tried again with my controller, only to find the problem persisting. But when I played with my mouse and keyboard, everything worked.

This all gave credence to the “my controller is breaking the game” theory, but it still made no sense. For months I’ve had no problems with this controller, a wireless Multiversus-themed Xbox One controller that got tossed my way when we were cleaning out our desks at The Washington Post. It connects to my PC via Bluetooth because Xbox doesn’t seem to sell a wireless adapter anymore, and while I sometimes have to pull out and reseat the Bluetooth dongle to get it to pair if I’ve left a game sitting on pause too long, it generally does what controllers do, and has never once fully broken a video game just by existing.

Incredulous at my own thought process, I googled “xbox controller causing lag pc.” And I could not believe it when results actually came up: a thread on the Microsoft forums from 2025, some Reddit posts, complaints on the EA and Steam sites going back years. Some people pinned it to dual instances of Microsoft’s GameInput program–I only had one installed but did find multiple instances of it running in my Task Manager, though closing them did nothing. Others pinned it to the controller batteries dying, but swapping them out for fresh ones did nothing either. Others suggested it was a Bluetooth problem solvable by wiring the controller up, my preferred method of attaching everything to everything but which would require a trip to the Microcenter for a USB data cable, and I couldn’t let the mystery sit half-solved while I left the house.

I took to Bluesky with my discovery, where multiple people said they’d had the same problem. The Video Game History Foundation’s Frank Cifaldi even helped me narrow the mystery further, sharing that he’d had this problem when using a controller with games through the Epic store, and this was in fact my first time using my controller with an Epic store game.

Here’s how I’m currently dealing: I play for about 20 minutes until the game stops working. Then I disconnect and reconnect my Bluetooth dongle, resetting the whole situation. I play until the game breaks again, then repeat.

Besides being a deeply unpleasant way to experience First Light, this entire situation is also ridiculous. Is this how computers work? I’ve made my peace with all the tweaks and fiddling required to be a PC gamer, but I’m not willing to accept that performing my gaming computer’s essential function–playing games–could require deleting processes and messing with my registry, or just playing a game in 20 minute increments. I’d be willing to accept a problem with the controller or with Bluetooth that caused input to lag, but the whole game? I imagine it doesn’t help matters that I’m still on Windows 10, which I can no longer update, but shit like this is one more reason why I’ve been dragging my heels on getting Windows 11. Why would I go deeper into an ecosystem that appears to have a known bug with using a controller to play video games?

I’m even more baffled that this isn’t just a me problem, which I could chalk up to my shoddy, aging PC build and my own stupid luck. So many of you have experienced this, living in this absurd status quo, that I am extra furious on your behalf. It’s not even due to all the new enshittification being shoved down our throats–this is just how the fucking PC works. This problem goes back nearly a decade at least, and it seems like if we want to use the computer, we just have to accept it as a thing.

This is some first rate bullshit, and I refuse to go quietly. Of course none of my raging is actually fixing the problem, which will most likely be sorted when it stops raining here so I can go up to the store and buy a cable to wire my expressly wireless controller to my PC. In the meantime, playing First Light like I’m binge-watching episodes of a sitcom is annoying as hell, though the game is pretty good. I just wish I didn’t have to deal with the computer to play it.