The Gaming Intelligentsia: Nintentdo’s New Console, A Scholarly Look at The Wii
This column is going out to a new group that I see emerging, one that I like to call the “gaming intelligensia” – the gamer that sees video games as growing into a media form on par with literature and movies in its scholarly and artistic value. Both of the other mediums started primarily as forms of entertainment, or at the very least, as simple surface texts only valuable in one regard. Both are now widely studied and analyzed for what they can teach us about ourselves and about what truth may be out there in the world. I believe that videogames are just now rising to this realm of complexity and respectability.
For instance, we have recently seen Killer 7 on the GameCube, a game widely praised for its artistic value and widely derided for its poor gameplay. The scholarly study of games as media, and therefore outside of its technical aspects, is a new if not non-existent field and it is one that I hope to explore and expand. There are so many questions that bear answering, such as the place of aesthetics in gaming, whether or not there can be a solely aesthetic game, and how gameplay and game-world interaction is an art form in and of itself. Perhaps we can find answers out there, away from the universities and within the wilds of the internet.
So if you are in this group, I hope that you find my column intellectually stimulating and refreshing. And if you are not in this group, I hope to provide to you a fresh viewpoint in a world that, I believe, is undervaluing what the gaming medium has to offer.
Now that the obligatory introduction is out of the way, let us talk about the biggest bit of recent news: Nintendo’s unveiling of the Wii. By now, gamers across the web have been making the regular ‘creative crap’ or ‘inspired genius’ arguments; we saw much of the same reaction before the release of the Nintendo DS. While there are many who will still say that the DS is little more than a gimmick, I think the vast majority of gamers must see by now that innovation does have a place in gaming, and that good innovation, if utilized well, could prove to be more popular than a technologically stronger product which-shall-remain-nameless (though I own one of those as well, for all of you who would wish to comment on my possible biases). Of course, this does not guarantee that the Wii will be similarly well-received, or even well-conceived, but it does give one hope that we have not seen the full extent of innovation in gaming.
Or perhaps innovation isn’t the right word for what Nintendo is doing here. Rather, it feels an awful lot like Nintendo is creating an entirely new form of interaction between the player and the game world. In all games, what you could do was, and still is, severely limited by the controlling mechanism. The old NES with its two buttons, for instance, did not have many complex games due to the action limitations. However, with increased buttons (the predominant mode of control) comes the other limitation on interaction: complexity. Multiple buttons increase complexity and may turn off your more casual gamers who would not want to suffer and struggle through something that is supposed to be a form of recreation.
Nintendo’s new controller could possibly deal with both of these problems in one stroke. With this new controller, game companies are no longer restricted by how many buttons are on the controller. Instead, their only restrictions are how many movements one can do across a screen, and how creative they can be in programming these controls into their games. At the same time, the simplicity of the system will keep the more casual gamers happy and it may even attract more of them. This is not just simple innovation -it is creating a more direct way to communicate. This move from the abstract (pushing a button to swing a sword) to the concrete (actually swinging your controller the way you want your sword to swing) is an astounding one when you think about it. We all search for immersion in our games, and Nintendo, a company famous for creating amazingly immersive first party games, has found a way for immersion to be strengthened by something as far removed as the controller. Amazing.
Some may say that Nintendo’s bold direction is behind the times – that full motion games never really caught on in arcades and that one shouldn’t expect them to catch on here. Some may say that this is ahead of the times, something leagues away from what every other game company is thinking, and perhaps just as far away from the minds of gamers. But I think it is right on time. I’ve spent a fair amount of time as a literary student, and one school of thought that has gained significant strength over the years is the school of postmodernism. While a full description would take far more pages of space than it is worth in this context (if you’re interested, Kevin Hart has a wonderful introduction to the theory called Postmodernism: A Beginner’s Guide), it is sufficient to say that the primary tenet of postmodernism is the belief in the existence of multiple truths rather than one single, all-encompassing truth.
Regardless of whether or not this was intended, it feels a lot like Nintendo is embracing postmodernism in a technical way. We have a controller that does not attempt to exclude or to force others to program for it in its singular, somewhat radical way. Yes, I am sure that Nintendo would like for people to utilize their controller in the way shown in that promo video floating around, but the allowance of attachments proliferates the number of ways the controller can be used. Instead of simply embracing one form of control, Nintendo has created a controller that can embrace all.
The controller also allows for multiple views of gaming by jumbling up the genres and categories of gamers. Your mainstream or light gamer should be attracted to the controller due to its supposed simplicity, yet your hardcore gamer may be drawn to it due to its extreme range of capabilities. The controller itself is an oxymoron in its simplicity and versatility, in its appeal to people thirsty for change and its ability to satisfy those who wish for orthodoxy.
So hats off to Nintendo for providing cutting edge technologically, and perhaps, ideology. But like I keep on saying, Nintendo can only seed its Revolution. All revolutions require popular support to be successful. Let us all, whether we be Nintendo fanboys, Sony enthusiasts, Microsoft supporters, or simply gamers, hope that Nintendo can truly do all that it hopes. If so, there will be much to be excited about from all sides of the gaming industry.
