|
Premium Member
|
|
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 11,681
Blogpoints: -1,212
|
|
05-11-2006, 01:28 AM
|
There's an article about Wii in the May 15 Time magazine. Here are just some random excerps:
Quote:
|
"Why do people who don't play video games not play them?" Iwata has been asking himself,and his employees, that question for the past five years. And what Iwata has noticed is something that most gamers have long ago forgotten: to nongamers, video games are really hard. Like hard as in homework. The standard video-game controller is a kind of Siamese-twin affair, two joysticks fused together and studded with buttons, two triggers and a four-way toggle switch called a d-pad.
|
Quote:
|
That presents a problem of what engineers call interface design: How do you make it easier for players to tell the machine what they want it to do?
|
Quote:
|
Nintendo threw away the controller-as-we-know-it and replaced it with something that nobody in his right mind would recognize as video-game hardward at all: a short, stubby, wireless wand that resembles nothing so much as a TV remote control. Humble as it looks on the outside, it's packed full of gadgetry: it's part laser pointer and part motion sensor, so it knows where you're aiming it, when and how fast you move it and how far it is from the TV screen. There's a strong whiff of voodoo about it. If you want your character on the screen to swing a sword, you just swing the controller. If you want to aim your gun, you just aim the wand and pull the trigger.
|
Quote:
|
Instead of passively playing the games, with the new controller you physically perform them. You act them out. It's almost like theater: the fourth wall between game and player dissolves. The sense of immersion--the illusion that you, personally, are projected into the game world--is powerful.
|
Quote:
|
When you play with an old-style contrller, you lok like a loser, a blank-eyed joystick fondler. But when you're jumping around and skahing your hulamaker, everybody's having a good time.
|
Quote:
|
Last year they set out to design a game for the elderly. Amazingly, they succeeded. Brain Age is a set of electronic puzzles (including Sudoku) that purports to keep aging minds nimble. It was released for one of Nintendo's portable playforms, the Nintendo DS, last year. So far, it has sold 2 million copies, many of them to people who had never bought a game before.
|
Quote:
|
The real demographic grail for any game publisher is, of course, girls. And although females have historically been largely impervious to the charms of video gaming, Nintendo has made inroads even there, with products so offbeat that they barely qualify as games at all.
|
(It goes on talking about Nintendogs, Electroplankton, and Animal Crossing.)
Quote:
|
Cutting-edge design has become more important than cutting-edge technology. There is a persistent belief among engineers that consumers want more power and more features. That is incorrect. Look at Apple's iPod, a device that didn't and doesn't do much more than the competition. It won because it's easier, and sexier, to use. In many ways, Nintendo is the Apple of the gaming world, and it's betting it's future on the same wisdom. The race is not to him who hulas fastest, it's to him who looks hottest doing it.
|
What a way to end an article haha |
Linear Mode
