Thursday, July 12, 2007

Revolutionary Wiimote

I am currently on a day thing that anybody under the age of 25 that has been unemployed for so long gets automatically sent on so that is why I haven't updated much. It is a wast of time, but having the British tax-payer picking up the bill for me doing rock climbing isn't all bad. And that is also why I am just now watching the Nintendo E3 Press Conference. They keep using the word revolutionary in reference to the Wii which is bothering me and so I make this post.

To me the Wii is a gateway product that is ultra accessible and for the right game interface has a near to zero learning curve, which is what makes it a gateway product. You can read into that statement that the Wii has a natural interface, but that is only true if games allows for it. There is stuff that could be better with the Wii like online, but Wii is to Lego as Mindstorms is to XBox360/PS3.

To me revolutionary technologies have been things like, colour television, canned drinks and quarts watches. These are technologies that are developed into an existing market that completely change their respective industries. To a gaming example I think 3D graphics was revolutionary, but interface improvements are mostly only innovative. You could argue to me that the computer mouse was revolutionary as it made computers very accessible (accessible like the Wiimote), but I would simply say that the mouse is just an extension of the real revolution which was the GUI (graphical user interface) that allowed for the mouse to exist, without the GUI the mouse would make a very poor text input device and would not have revolutionised the computing industry. So I think the mouse itself was simply an innovative exstension of the GUI. As too I believe the Wiimote to be innovative, but not revolutionary.

P.S. I am probably only being so academically critical of the press event because I don't like Reggie's formal presentation style. And where as Nintendo says that they are doing great in online and there is no reason to criticise, when the Wii's successor comes out it will have had a radical online overhaul.