nintendo wii

Nintendo Reveals Wii Pay-For-Online Play, WiiWare Compression

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

In a curiously confidential session, Nintendo Network Administration Group Group Manager Takashi Aoyama spoke at length on the thought process behind the Wii’s online offerings.

Amongst his anecdotes were a story of how WiiConnect24 came out of early dial-up concerns, during planning stages around 2000 for a GameCube network. (Maybe if users could download content overnight, that would alleviate some of the cost and delay — except, wait! This is dialup!)

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

The New Generation – Part Three: Infrastructure

  • Reading time:20 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Videogames are finally finding their way. They’re moving in small steps, yet whether by need or inspiration change is in the air – a whole generational shift, an inevitable one. It’s the kind of shift that happened to film when the studio system broke down, or painting broke out of academia and… well, the studio again. In short, people are starting to get over videogames for their own sake and starting to look at them constructively – which first means breaking them down, apart from and within their cultural, historical, and personal context. When you strip out all the clutter and find a conceptual focus, you can put the pieces back together around that focus, to magnify it and take advantage of its expressive potential.

Over the previous two installments we discussed some of the voices heralding the change, and some of the works that exemplify it. In this third and final chapter, we will cast our net wider, and examine some of the cultural or circumstantial elements that either led to this shift, reflect it, help to sustain and promulgate it, or promise to, should all go well. This is, in short, the state of the world in which a generational shift can occur.

The New Generation – Part Two: Masterminds

  • Reading time:23 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Something is happening to game design. It’s been creeping up for a decade, yet only now is it striding into the mainstream, riding on the coattails of new infrastructure, emboldened by the rhetoric of the trendy. A new generation of design has begun to emerge – a generation raised on the language of videogames, eager to use that fluency to describe what previously could not be described.

First, though, it must build up its vocabulary. To build it, this generation looks to the past – to the fundamental ideas that make up the current architecture of videogames – and deconstructs it for its raw theoretical materials, such that it may be recontextualized: rebuilt better, stronger, more elegantly, more deliberately.

In the earlier part of this series, we discussed several games that exemplify this approach; we then tossed around a few more that give it a healthy nod. Some boil down and refocus a well-known design (Pac-Man CE, New Super Mario Bros.); some put a new perspective on genre (Ikaruga, Braid); some just want to break down game design itself (Rez, Dead Rising). In this chapter, we will highlight a few of the key voices guiding the change. Some are more persuasive than others. Some have been been making their point for longer. All are on the cusp of redefining what a videogame can be.

The Wii that Wasn’t

  • Reading time:6 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Market analysts call the Wii a return to form after the relative flop of the GameCube. Design analysts call it a potential return to form after the relative rut of the previous fifteen years. Whatever the spin, when people look at Nintendo’s recent misadventures, generally the Gamecube sits right on top, doe-eyed and chirping. Its failure to do more than turn a profit has made its dissection an industry-wide pastime. Everything comes under the microscope, from its dainty size and handle to its purpleness to the storage capacity of its mini-DVDs. The controller, though, has perplexed all from the start.

Touch Generations

  • Reading time:13 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, under the title “FEATURE: A Short History of Touch”.

A few years ago, Nintendo launched the DS with a vaguely unsettling catch phrase: “Touching is Good”. Their PR team sent disembodied plastic hands to everyone on their mailing list, in the process creeping out Penny Arcade. As creepy and forward as the campaign was, it had a point. Touching historically has been good, for the game industry.

On a whole, videogames are an awfully lonely set of affairs. They paint an alluring well, then give the player rocks to throw, to see what ripples. From Spacewar! to Pong, you’re always shooting or batting or throwing some kind of projectile, to prod the environment. Even in some of the most exploration-heavy games, like Metroid, the only way to progress is to shoot every surface in sight, with multiple weapons. Little wonder art games like Rez are based on the shooter template: it’s about as basic a videogame as you can get. See things, shoot things, you win. If things touch you, you lose. Except for food or possessions, generally you can only touch by proxy; toss coins into the well; ping things, to see how they respond. To see if they break.

The Pathology of Game Design

  • Reading time:18 mins read

Originally published by Next Generation.

As I entered adolescence, my mother decided in her wisdom that I was destined to be an actor. That I showed no particular enthusiasm or indeed talent did not dampen this enterprise for years to follow. One summer, between calls for music videos and hypothetical summer blockbusters, I chanced into a tryout for a hypothetical Blockbuster ad. To the best I can recollect, the company was adding Genesis and Super Nintendo games to its rental library, and to demonstrate the premise was sending out a net for the archetypal game-playing teenager.

Thus I found myself lost across a desk from a pockmarked man with a mustache. When the man asked me to show him my “videogame” acting, I hunched over and concentrated at a spot a few yards ahead of me, miming my button presses with an imagined precision. I knotted my brow, maybe gritted my teeth or moved my lips as if to mutter. You can imagine where the scene goes from here. The director keeps asking for “more”, growing frustrated in proportion to my unease. He wants me to thrash in my chair, slam the buttons like a jackhammer, contort my face, and show him my best Beverly Hills orgasm. I am amazed; he patronizes me; I get to go home. Later I met the man they cast as the teenager; he was in his late twenties and had a habit of performing rude gestures to passers-by.

Fifteen years later, despite what seem obvious advances in technology and design, people don’t really see videogames any differently.

Aonuma’s Reflections On Zelda

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Check out the comments section on the original article. Seriously.

On Thursday Aonuma candidly, and with self-effacing humor, spoke of his period of aimlessness and mistakes that began with the release of The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker, the way in which they reflected the Japanese industry as a whole, and how they led to Nintendo’s shift of focus over the last few years.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Gathering evidence that the Wii is what the GameCube should have been

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The system: small, inobtrusive.

The controller. The GameCube pad was a strange half-measure.
* Its premise: standard controllers are confusing, overly abstract, and have too many buttons, mapped too arbitrarily.
* Its solution: make the buttons more intuitive to find, and more intuitively map actions to them.
* Result: everyone was confused and annoyed.

Original games, conceived for said controller.
* Super Monkey Ball
* Pikmin
* killer7
* Luigi’s Mansion

What else?

Gestures and Measures

  • Reading time:8 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part eleven of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

About a year ago NextGen published an article in which I groused about the early speculation about the Wii. The point, I said, wasn’t that we could now have real-time lightsaber duels; it was the extra layer of nuance that the Wiimote added on top of our familiar grammar – kind of the way analog control made 3D movement a hair less awkward. The point of motion control, I said, wasn’t to replace current control systems; it was to augment them, thereby to make them more flexible. A little more powerful, a little more intuitive.

Well, I was half right.

While we’re jumping the gun…

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I hope for Dragon Quest X, for the Wii, to filter players’ Mii data though a library of stock Akira Toriyama face and body features, such as to produce customized Dragon Quest styled approximations of the players.

That would seem like something Yuji Horii would have on his “to do” list.

Hey, Tim. Any way you can suggest it to him next time you’re in the same room?

Gestures and Measures

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Yes, I think that’s a decent way of looking at it. All these new, supposedly more “friendly” control schemes aren’t really acting as such. They are still forcing new players to remove their preconcieved attachment to, say, swinging a tennis racket, and replacing it with a more standard video game approach in order to get anywhere. They’re essentially just pushing buttons, in the end.

That’s not an issue with the Wii as such, I don’t think, as much as it is with the dumb, overly abstract way things are being designed. What I’ve noticed is that few Wii games either detect the Wiimote in realspace and realtime (as Boxing and Baseball do) or simply use the Wiimote for what it’s worth in added nuance (like an analog stick or trigger, only way more so). Instead, they’re just replacing buttons with gestures and canned animations. It’s frustrating to see — and not even so much as an end product as in what that product shows about how unable game designers currently are, en masse, to wrap their heads around the bleedin’ obvious.

Red Steel is a pretty good example. Instead of giving the player a sword and a gun, and letting him gradually learn how to use them properly — teaching new techniques and whatnot as the game progresses, staggering out “assignments” of sorts (not literal ones) over the game’s story, to allow players to get accustomed to some key concepts of swordfighting or shooting or mixing the two — you tell him to move the controller like this to make this animation happen, and maybe earn new gestures as the game progresses. What the hell? How could you possibly screw this up?

Though this is one of the more obvious examples, you’ll see this problem in pretty much all Wii games currently available — and indeed, in Gamer and press discussion about the system. You can see people straining their imaginations to figure out something to do with the system, and it doesn’t work. Either you get gimmicks or you get phantom buttons. Digital do-or-don’t.

It’s… really not that hard! The Wii really suggests two things: added nuance to traditional games (instead of just doing X, you can do X in any number of ways; the way the game plays changes dynamicly to match your body language) and giving the player true first-person control, for all the subtlety that implies, with a minimum of abstraction, over a certain range of motions. The advantage here is the ability to explore concepts with an organicity impossible with just a digital player involvement — again, making people really learn how to use a sword (more or less) rather than simply pressing buttons or making gestures to cause an on-screen character to do something.

Instead of the player’s avatar developing and learning new things as an abstraction of progress, and instead of learning complex arbitrary and abstract gestures (like moves in a fighting game), the player himself or herself physically learns how to produce difficult, subtle actions that have a tangible result in the gameworld to whatever degree of skill the player posesses.

Imagine a fighting trainer. The wiimote is exchanged for four sensor bands, strapped to each of the player’s wrists and shins, as well as perhaps a belt to provide a center reference point (and perhaps force feedback for when the player receives a blow). The game gradually metes out concepts to the player — not just to improve mechanical technique and to teach new maneuvers; also to improve the way the player mentally contextualizes all of this. It could to some extent teach the art of fighting as well as the science — or at least a reasonable enough facimile for verisimilitude. Likewise, completely new skill sets with no real-world parallel could be devised for the player — so long as they were produced and could be reproduced in a believable and nuanced way.

Games that involve physical concepts would use the Wiimote physically, as above; games that involve more abstract or intellectual ones would use it more abstractly — closer to how we normally think about playing videogames, except with an added layer of capability. Press forward to walk; tilt the controller subtly forward to jog or run forward; tilt it subtly back to creep; tilt it left or right (while still holding forward) to sway or dodge in those directions. The way this should be balanced, the player shouldn’t be expected to physically, consciously tilt the controller so much as the game should respond to slight changes in the player’s posture — those little subvoluntary movements that we make when we want the avatar to behave in a certain way — go faster, hold back, watch out! Excite Truck sort of tries to do this, though it doesn’t seem to be executed as well as it could be.

Likewise, a whole range of related motions could easily be mapped to a single button — much like the state-shifting afforded by shoulder buttons, except intrinsicly analog. Press the button to execute a punch; when pressing the button, move or position the Wiimote this or the other way way to punch in different ways for a subtly different effect. Flick the tip up for an uppercut, say. Imagine the way a Silent Hill 2 or a Metal Gear Solid could take advantage of this subtlety and flexibility — the way it could read into the player’s body language and movement patterns and extrapolate a certain level of psychology from them, to make unseen behind-the-scenes decisions.

This is a pretty damned important breach we’re crossing, here — and we’ve been given a decent, if somewhat rickety, bridge. Yet so far people are just laying the bridge on the ground and using it as a replacement for a sidewalk or a new kind of a bed, or trying to figure out really clever pieces of playground equipment they could turn it into. I kind of hope people get more smart, before the novelty wears off.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Stupid

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I don’t consider myself a gamer. Then again, I suppose I don’t “game” so much as I… play videogames, sometimes.

If my distance sounds disingenuous… well, sometimes it is, a little. There is, however, a difference between having something in your life and building your life around that thing. Videogames fascinate me, and I spend a good deal of time thinking about them on an abstract level. I’ve thought enough about them to make some money based on those thoughts. Sometimes I play them, a little, when I’ve nothing better to do. I don’t feel it’s got much, if anything, to do with my personal identity, though. It’s just something that’s there, in my life.

And I think that’s an important distinction. Most videogames currently cater to “gamers” — a label that suggests that they use videogames to give themselves identity on some level. And, well, that just explains everything, doesn’t it. Aversion to change, in particular.

A person doesn’t need to have that ego attachment to enjoy a videogame any more than I need to tattoo Trent Reznor’s name on my thigh to enjoy Nine Inch Nails. Or even to analyze his music on a deeper level, sometimes. Likewise, I don’t need to spend my life in the cinema to enjoy Orson Welles and appreciate the significance of his work.

That is, to an extent, what Nintendo’s going after now: trying to make videogames accessible to people who don’t necessarily want to base their lives around them — which, at present, videogames really aren’t much. The “casual game” sector, and the success of cell phone games, proves that there’s some headway to be made here. I think that whole subsection of the industry is a little misdirected (and frankly a little patronizing), though.

I’m reminded of a recent post by Matt McIrvin about the Wikipedia science community, in particular advanced physics — about how the people editing don’t know how to write at all and keep skewing articles toward the most inclusive, precise, elaborate definitions possible. McIrvin keeps trying to smooth out the language, to make more accessible analogies, and to winnow out the superfluous material so as to make the pages readable and the information comprehensible to someone with, at best, only a slight existing understanding of the material. And even then he often gets complaints from casual readers that the articles are impenetrable.

Addressing this doesn’t necessarily mean dumbing down the material; it just means stepping back and detaching yourself from it enough to understand the context and what’s actually useful. There is a place for insider science writing, and that’s in academic science journals. There is a place for “gamer games”, and the Wii completely supports them. Just as important, though, is making the information available on a certain practical level to anyone who might express an interest.

How often have you handed a controller to, say, a parent who expressed some interest in what you were doing, only for him to hand it back in frustration when he couldn’t make sense of what he was doing; couldn’t coordinate his hands, was overwhelmed with all of the buttons and their seemingly random effects? The interest is there; anyone can be interested in anything. The problem is addressing that interest and drawing it into full-fledged involvement, for the time spent with a videogame — rather than simply assuming an existing level of exposure and a certain set of preconceptions.

Though I have that exposure, I don’t really feel I go into videogames from the perspective of someone looking for a videogame to play; I’m looking for something on a more human level, to maybe contribute something to my life for the time I spend playing. That might be an abstract intellectual observation, as in the game systems of a Treasure game, or it might be emotionally-based, as in Silent Hill. I don’t play videogames simply because they’re videogames, though. I don’t at all care about videogames for their own sake; I’m only interested in what they can do for me. I mostly stick around because I see the potential bubbling away, for them to tell me something really interesting that I didn’t know before.

I think that’s pretty close to the definition of a non-gamer. And I think it’s pretty close to the stance of your housemom or random schmoe. Which is why I think, should videogames come closer to achieving that goal, they will find a much wider audience than they currently do.

A Cosmetic Conundrum

  • Reading time:13 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part seven of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under a different title; something like “The Problem With Game Consoles”. People seemed to take this article more seriously than I intended.

In May I finally saw a PlayStation 3 up-close – and dear lord. Whereas the Xbox 360 at least puts on a pretense of tenability, sucking in its gut like a real man, Sony’s system sets a new standard for girth. Maybe it was the rotating display, walled behind likely-bulletproof Plexiglass – yet I swear it must be the most outrageously massive game console that’s ever been designed. And that’s on top of looking like a space ship based on the template of a waffle iron. Whereas the Sega Genesis looked like you could top-load a CD into it, the PS3 looks like you could top-load a side of bacon.

Home of the Underdogs

  • Reading time:13 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part five of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, then reprinted by BusinessWeek, under the title “The Lasting Impact of “Failed” Consoles”.

The videogame industry is usually portrayed as a battle of titans: Xbox versus PlayStation versus the Nintendo Whatever, butting heads over the biggest market share. The winner, by virtue of winning, will lay the law for future generations. This is a tough industry, where the ruthless survive and the weak or incomprehensible are savaged and devoured.

A curious thing about videogames is that, underneath the bluster, you’ll nearly always find that the “losing” platforms – from the Sega Saturn to the Turbografx-16 – are in many ways either objectively superior to or subjectively more intriguing than what “won”; what they typically lack is balance. Like root beers or politicians, typically the top candidates rise to the top not out of pure excellence; they rise because they serve the basic desires of the greatest audience while offending the fewest.

The Nintendo Syndrome

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part two of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

So Nintendo’s at the top of its game again – or near enough to clap, anyway. The DS is one of the bigger success stories in recent hardware history. People are starting to buy into the Wii hype; even Sony and Microsoft’s chiefs have gone on record with how the system impresses them. Japan is mincing no words; 73% of Famitsu readers polled expect the Wii to “win” the next “console war”, whatever that means. And these people aren’t even Nintendo’s target audience.

Satoru Iwata has done a swell job, the last couple of years, taking a company that was coasting on past success, whose reputation had devolved to schoolyard snickers – that even posted a loss for the first time in its century-plus history – and making it both vital and trendy again.

So what happened to Nintendo, anyway? How is it that gaming’s superstar was such a dud, for so many years? What’s the white elephant in the room, that everyone has taken such pains to rationalize? It is, of course, the same man credited for most of Nintendo’s success: Shigeru Miyamoto.