June 4, 2006
The Video Game Goes Minimalist: Nintendo Comes Full Circle
By SETH SCHIESEL
SOME new media, like the Internet and cellphones, begin life in a niche, as curiosities even, before becoming everyday elements of mainstream culture. Others evolve in the opposite direction.
Think about video games. Once upon a time, call it the 1980's, video games were simple. Facing one joystick and at most a couple of buttons, most anyone could simply drop a quarter into a Galaga or Ms. Pac-Man machine and have some cheap thrills. And because the games were simple, they were practically ubiquitous in bars, waiting rooms and other public places. Remember arcades?
Inevitably progress got in the way. As game machines have become cheaper over the years, they have mostly disappeared from public spaces and burrowed into bedrooms and dens. And as the machines have gotten more powerful, the games have gotten more complicated. Both avid gamers and the industry have come to fixate on the ever more impressive graphics and ever more complex scenarios that faster chips can create.
The results can be downright intimidating. People now in their 40's who might have just walked up to a Centipede machine and started playing when they were in college now might look at a Sony PlayStation 2 (which has 17 buttons and joysticks) and think, "I'll never figure that thing out."
Nintendo, the Japanese company synonymous with video games, wants to put an end to all that.
Trying to attract new fans and win back a growing population of lapsed players, the company is on an almost evangelical mission to rescue video games from the clutches of the sunlight-deprived, testosterone-addled, slightly gamy demographic group that has come to rule the gaming world. And the instrument of Nintendo's mission is called the Wii (pronounced we, not why). Every five years or so, the big game console makers release new flagship machines. Microsoft, maker of the Xbox, released its latest console, the Xbox 360, last November. This fall, when Nintendo plans to introduce the Wii, Sony is expected to weigh in with its PlayStation 3. But while Microsoft and Sony duke it out at the high end of the market with expensive machines (the PS3 will cost at least $500, not including games) that feature the flashiest high-definition graphics, Nintendo is taking a radically different, inexpensive path, one that focuses on how games feel rather than on how they look. The company says the system will sell for no more than $250.
Playing a video game may require looking at a screen, but the primary interface between a human and a game is the player's hands. So to play tennis with the Wii, you watch the screen, and when the ball comes, you simply swing your arm to make your on-screen avatar swing. (If you're good, you can get spin on the ball). To throw a football, you mimic throwing a football. To swing a sword — well, you get the idea.
The Wii controller has been consciously designed to resemble a television remote control, and the kinetic, tactile entertainment experience it produces is unlike anything on a current game machine. "My mother is never going to play a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 game because she simply cannot comprehend the controller," Dan Hsu, editor in chief of Electronic Gaming Monthly, a top game magazine, said in an interview. "But Nintendo wants to appeal to those people. Wii does feel very friendly and easy to use, and it's very intuitive because all you have to do is point the controller at the screen and just move it around. And most games only need one or two buttons."
Most North American game insiders got their first chance to use the Wii at the E3 game convention in Los Angeles last month, and it quickly became clear that the Wii was more than just a novelty. (A test version of the machine was demonstrated at the Tokyo Game Show last fall.)
With its sleek vertical design and unobtrusive white controller, the Wii is made to fit into a middle-class living room without looking like an alien invader from Planet Video Game. (By contrast the original Xbox's hulking black exterior turned off a lot of traditional nongamers. In response Microsoft made the Xbox 360 curved and off-white.)
More important than the unit's look, however, have been the almost entirely positive reviews from people who have played it. Tennis feels remarkably like tennis, employing a nearly full range of upper-body motion. With Excite Truck, the user holds the controller between two hands like a steering wheel and merely tilts it left and right to steer. You can also wield the Wii as a pen, a fishing rod and, of course, a weapon.
"We wanted to change the image that people have when you think of someone playing a video game," Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's creative director (and the creator of the famed Donkey Kong, Mario and Zelda franchises) said during an interview at E3. "There is always this image where you think of a young person holding a controller in two hands kind of in a darkened room with the light of the TV shining on his face, and it's not a very positive image. We really wanted to break that by creating this interface that would allow people to be much more active."
But even as the company reaches for the mainstream, it knows it cannot afford to lose the millions of seasoned Nintendo fans. For them there are more complex games like new Wii installments of Zelda and Metroid Prime on the way. But the overall focus is on using the controller to make the gaming experience as simple and intuitive as possible.
It's the sort of approach that appeals to Nintendo fans like Floyd Hayes, 34, an advertising creative director who lives in Brooklyn.
"Nintendo has really the best track record in terms of innovation," he said, "and what they're trying, in dropping the barriers to game play by lowering the barriers presented by the controller, is fantastic. I'd love to be able to stop memorizing different button combinations for every game. It's like having to learn to walk all over again in every game, isn't it?"
Nintendo's innovation seemed to captivate attendees at E3. "Wii was extremely popular," said Mr. Hsu, who was there. "As usual Nintendo has the longest lines because they really draw in the hard core, but I noticed a lot of people who weren't the typical Nintendo fanboys were waiting in long lines to play Wii. That's because you have all these other games for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on the show floor, but they're pretty much what we've seen before, just with prettier graphics. But Wii is a totally new experience."
The company started its mission to expand the gaming audience with more user-friendly products in 2004 with the Nintendo DS handheld. While Sony has garnered more headlines with its sleek black PlayStation Portable, Nintendo has had at least as much success with the less expensive DS, which employs an entirely different approach. While many PSP games are for hardcore players, the top DS games were made to appeal to a wider audience. Nintendogs, for instance, which allows users to take care of a virtual dog, is a nonconventional game that has proved highly successful among women and girls who are not generally gamers. Another example is Brain Age, a series of mind-training games that have been hugely popular among middle-aged and older people in Japan and have recently been released in the United States.
"People often call this another next-generation game competition or war," said Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata, who was also at the E3 convention, but "Nintendo is not trying to compete with merely the next generation. Instead we want to provide completely different experiences. What we want to provide you is not something that is simply a linear extension of current high-end gaming. But rather we will provide you with something brand new, something unprecedented."
It's no easy feat to make extremely complex technology feel as basic and straightforward as picking up a tennis racket or golf club. And it may be just as hard to excite a die-hard audience accustomed to the loudest bells and whistles. But it may be hardest of all to convince nongamers that they won't feel like geeks if they pick up a game controller. For Nintendo, however, the dream is that there is a huge untapped audience sitting out there that is ready to stop watching and start playing.
"You still play video games? LOSER!"