Oh shit I didn't know! Amazing! Is there a COMBINING ENCLOSING BUTTON too? We'd also need SHOULDER, SHOULDER BIG and THUMBSTICK, then we'd have something.

By "game tutorials", I think they mean modern successors to the role GameFAQs used to play.

There is a combining character that, by its description, sounds like it should be implemented to do the desired thing (U+20DD Combining Enclosing Circle), but my fonts don't render it very well when I stuff geometric characters matching the PlayStation buttons into it.

Without spaces: △⃝□⃝×⃝○⃝

With two spaces between each one so you can see how "enclosing" is getting interpreted: △⃝ □⃝ ×⃝ ○⃝

For the Markdown renderer I'm working on to replace WordPress for my blog, I resorted to shortcodes which resolve to CSS styling the `<kbd>` tag with `title` attributes to clarify and the occasional bit of inline SVG for things where I didn't want to specify a fixed font to get sufficient consistency, like PlayStation button glyphs.

https://imgur.com/a/1EPm7QV

(In all fairness, it's a nerd-snipe made based on the idea that I'll be more willing to blog about things I have nice tools for. I don't currently typeset button presses in any form.)

With more and more players expecting emoji support in text entry boxes, more games are starting to ship with full unicode support. Also I've noticed optional ligatures that OpenType supports have become a big style thing in certain game genres/by certain studios. Harfbuzz's "Old MIT" license shows up more often in the credits of games and game engines.

I don't know if that's a good reason to push to standardize controller glyphs to Unicode, though.

(ETA: Plus the other obvious reason more games and game engines are bringing in full Unicode support is localization, especially for Arabic and CJK. We're a bit past the point where AAA games only feel a need to support EFIGS. The Middle East and Asia are huge markets, especially for mobile games.)