The Escapist Bulletin: Why the Wii is the best thing to happen to gaming

No one that can deny that Nintendo has been very successful with the Wii: sales of the system outstrip those of its rivals significantly, in some cases by tens of millions, and the console has become a common sight around the world, from your buddy’s apartment to the homes of queens and presidents.

The Wii has made a lot of people who would normally never have picked up a controller engage with games in a way that would have been impossible with a traditional console, and it has made great strides into bringing gaming into the mainstream.

At the same time, it’s easy to make the case that Nintendo has take its core audience for granted in favour of chasing the casual gaming market.

The simpler controls, relatively underpowered electronics and family-centric marketing of the console clearly show a shift away from the traditional console arms race, and a lateral move on Nintendo’s part, a move that has drawn scorn from so-called ‘hardcore’ gamers.

The question that's never adequately answered, however, is: why is going after a more casual demographic is a bad thing?

If we want people to stop treating us gamers as if we’re children, we need to stop acting like children, and learn to share our toys. Video games at the moment suffer from a glut of action and horror titles - well, action-horror anyway - which is great if you like thrills and scares, but if you want anything else your options are incredibly limited.

There’s no reason why the industry couldn’t make a really compelling game out of non-action properties - imagine Mass Effect’s dialogue tree in an America’s Next Top Model game, or the Crysis engine being used to make a Survivor game - but the current hardcore systems, not to mention hardcore gamers, present a very real barrier to getting new blood into the medium.

The Wii is fairly unappealing for an audience that craves AAA titles like Assassin’s Creed 2 or Dragon Age: Origins, but there's plenty of provision for that audience from Microsoft and Sony. For someone just getting switched on gaming, the Wii's relative simplicity is a boon.

The fact that the Wii doesn’t appeal to the regular gamer market is probably its biggest strength. In the forty or so years of gaming history, the rate of change has been amazing, but despite all the progress gaming still comes under attack from sensationalist media.

It’s great that someone as high-profile as Zac Efron has an Xbox, but if we want gaming to be accepted it’s not celebrities that we have to get playing, it’s regular people like parents and teachers, and that’s what the Wii does.

If your mother plays video games and enjoys them, it’s a lot harder for a newspaper or TV show to convince her that they are bad. This will get easier as the gamers of today get older and have families of their own, but in the meantime, the Wii is a powerful tool for getting people on our side.