A Wii the Nintendo way

A Wii the Nintendo way

September 5th, 2006, 20:26 Posted By: wraggster

Via Telegraph Blog:

Back in the early 1990s, when Ben Elton was best known for mocking the establishment rather than propping it up (The Thin Blue Line anyone?), he wrote an occasionally funny book about the car industry called Gridlock.

Playing tennis the Wii way

One of the more memorable moments featured the launch of a new pan-European car, which after some spectacularly ill-informed market research, was named the Crappee. Apparently it sounded quite good in Spanish.

The Crappee sprung to mind recently during a press event for Nintendo’s new games machine, the rival to the new XBox 360 and PlayStation 3, which is due out in time for Christmas. In an attempt to find something that sounded good in French, Japanese and Italian, Nintendo’s marketing people came up with the Wii (pronounced “wee”).

The word Wii is supposed to be inclusive and positive. However, given that the machine will be popular with seven to 11 year old boys, a group not best known for restraint when it comes to finding scatological puns, it’s certainly a courageous choice.

Putting the silly name aside, the Wii is rather good fun even for people like me who don’t particularly find computer games appealing.

Its big selling point is its controller - a small white box called a wand that looks like a TV remote control. The wand is wireless, has just a couple of buttons and is motion sensitive controller. Rather than play games hunched in front of the television with a fiddly and irritating joypad, you can stand proud in your sitting room and wave the Wii wand around in the air.

If you’re playing tennis, the wand is your racket and you swipe it from side to side to hit the ball. If you’re playing golf, you swing it like a club. It can be used as a light sabre, a sword, a conductor’s baton or a handlebar.

What is liberating about the Wii is that it assumes no prior knowledge of computer games culture.

To outsiders like myself, a Playstation or Xbox games console joypad is a fairly intimidating beast, packed with mysterious and intimidating buttons, marked with Xs, circles or squares. Games are now so mind-blowingly three-dimensional and interactive that unless you’ve been brought up on them since the age of seven, newcomers to the games culture have little chance of understanding what’s going on.

In contrast, the Wii offers simplistic, intuitive and social play. Its button-free design, and choice of simple, mostly non violent software, is wiping clean the slate of the last 15 years in an attempt to appeal to people who don’t like the computer games culture of guns, sports, cars and monsters.

Proof came from the female photographer who came with me for the trial. Beforehand she didn’t “get” computer games and had to be forcibly handled by two burly Nintendo employees to have a go at the Wii tennis.

In the end, she was having so much fun, the same two men had to pull her off.

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