Afterthoughts on the Wii

A recent article by the Escapist summed up the latest video game console war between Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. All systems have finally launched globally and as the smoke clears gamers watch in awe as the industry has shifted in ways nobody thought possible. A year ago Sony was the undisputed video game king of the hill and Nintendo, the king of years long past, was seen as a struggling company. The Big N still dominated the portable market but their future in the console arena was bleak as they had lost out in the past two generations.

To everybody's surprise, Nintendo appears to be winning the war so far although only the initial battle has been fought. Their Wii was a huge hit internationally and to this day they are relatively hard to find. Microsoft is selling healthily and Sony has suffered a disappointing launch due to weak title offerings and an expensive price.

The article gives a cursory summary that should not be new to anybody who follows the industry. The reason why this article stood out, however, was that it articulated a point that had been on my mind since I had first heard about the Wii--that the control scheme would eventually be dismissed as a gimmick with no lasting value. Nintendo is no stranger to gimmicks. The Virtual Boy is one of the best examples of a gimmick that seemed cool in the concept phase but ultimatley failed in the open market. (If you are asking yourself, "What the hell is the Virtual Boy?" then my point is well proven.)

I felt Nintendo was taking a huge gamble with the Wii. If it worked it would be a huge success, and it was. If it didn't, I have a feeling it would have buried the company and they would have totally lost out on this generation.

The idea sounded kind of cool but the more I thought of it the more I thought it wouldn't work. I was fortunate enough to try the Wii at the E3 back in May and even after fishing with Henna and getting weird with Wario I still had my doubts. Nintendo figured it all out and delivered a product that, so far, has impressed the world. Sure, some of the games are gimmicky and many are mediocre ports that feel like a forced application of the Wii's technology, but other games such as Wii Sports and Twilite Princess make the proverbial light-bulb go off and clear any doubt I may have regarding the new control scheme.

It is beyond the fun factor of swinging a sword in Hyrule or getting my butt kicked at Wii Tennis, rather, it's something I wasn't able to define until recently. I feel Nintendo didn't just create a gyroscopic remote; I feel they deconstructed the idea of what a game was and what a user experience was and used their technology to recreate it. They did this long ago with the classic NES controller... in fact, the company recently won an award for inventing the D-pad. The NES controller leveraged the highly evolved control humans have with their thumbs (which is why we are the dominant species) and reconstructed a control scheme around that opposed to the "whole hand" experience of the joystick. It seems like a small step, and technologically it was, but it changed the way we play games and to this day the other "more advanced" parties in the console war use variants of the D-pads.

Games exist as an escape (The Escapist, ahem) from the real-world to a fantasy-world where we have relatively more control. The trick is to use the technology available to create this experience. Following the technology bandwagon and putting in faster chips, more memory, more storage, higher graphical output, etc. would have only been moving in the same direction that the industry has been moving in since the NES. Games on the Xbox and Playstation do look much more realistic than they did 20 years ago but the interface and overall experience is still very similar. You are essentially playing the same car race or shoot-out, just with butt-ton more polygons.

Nintendo decided to reinvent that experience by rethinking the control scheme. It is worlds simpler than what control pads have evolved to yet in the case of Twilight Princess you get something more engaging and more "real" feeling than any 1080p output could ever provide. Gaming is accessible to non-gamers who saw an oddly shaped plastic brick with twenty buttons and no intuitive link to real-world movement. Anybody with Wii Sports and parents knows what I'm talking about. My words could never describe the feeling of jumping at a fallen enemy and plunging my sword deep into his body, feeling the force feedback from the impact, and hearing the blade cut the air as I do that from the tiny built-in mic.

Before you dismiss me as a fanboy let me say that I hope that all three consoles win in the end. I'm a huge fan of competition and all three emerging as victorious would only mean a victory for the consumer. Each offer interesting angles and if Nintendo succeeds in broadening the video game market there will be more pie to share. I personally don't own a 360 or a PS3, nor do I have any near-term plans to purchase any. I've already got my high-def wonder... a GeForce 8800 GTS. Yup, I'm more of aPC gamer anyway.