Viewing videos at GameSpot comes with an interesting twist – a novel approach to scrolling.

The pain of vertical scrolling has been somewhat alleviated by the ubiquity of the mouse wheel; no more precision drags or clicks in the right margin. GameSpot has opted to implement horizontal scrolling, and while capturing wheel events is entirely possible (e.g. Google Maps) they have chosen not to.

Furthermore, they’ve broken the typically scrolling component by not bordering the content with scroll controls (Windows) or making the scroll controls adjacent one another in the scrolling direction (Mac).

Yahoo! features a media player with almost precisely the same layout but in place of the horizontal control they have… wait for it… a scrollbar. We’re getting there! However no mouse wheel support and positively microscopic scroll controls don’t make this much more usable. The white dot (representing your place in the content) can be pulled neither up nor down as we’ve come to expect from scrollbars.

Why violate convention for an already cumbersome interaction?