Persuasive Games: Wii’s Revolution is in the Past - Ian Bogost

We can extend this sentiment further: there is a great danger in believing that innovation at the level of the interface produces innovation at the level of meaning—an implicit aspect of most serious game development. While I’m not ready to call the Wii controller a gimmick, I’m also not prepared to take it for granted that a new interface leads to new opportunities for expression. One need only look at the Wii launch window titles to see how developers are cashing out the console’s interface innovation.

Like most commercial releases these days, the majority are sequels or new editions in long-running franchises (Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz, Call of Duty 3, Rayman Raving Rabbids, Madden NFL 2007, Need for Speed: Carbon, Tony Hawk ’s Downhill Jam). A few are original releases (Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Red Steel, Excite Truck, Elebits). Only a select few really seem designed to take full advantage of the interface (Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz, Trauma Center: Second Opinion, Wario Ware: Smooth Moves), and all of those are extensions of existing franchises. Almost without exception, the Wii’s “innovative” interface is deployed only as an incremental innovation for existing game franchises. Drive by turning the wiimote like a wheel. Target by pointing the wiimote. Swordfight by slashing with it. Evade a tackle by flicking your wrist. Perhaps the motto for the Nintendo Wii should be “changing the way we play the same games.” Some slogan for a revolution.

My intention is not to disparage Nintendo’s effort to reinvent video game interfaces. And it is admittedly unfair to judge the console’s potential based solely on the titles produced for its launch. The point I want to make is this: interface innovation does not lead automatically to expressive innovation.

The wiimote just may not be very useful to serious games developers. In fact, the wiimote may even limit the console’s ability to create some kinds of experiences. The device privileges analogous physical gestures as a foundation for gameplay, suggesting that games that represent non-physical actions may remain even further out of reach on the Wii. Serious games that look beyond exercise could indeed benefit from gestural interfaces—Trauma Center offers a convincing model for more detailed games about medical practice. But a focus on physical interactions may also further widen the gap between simulations of, say, medical or military procedure, and the emotional, social, or cultural implications of the gestures that produce them.

The Wii risks offering automatic apology for video games that represent physical gestures in greater detail instead of greater abstraction. The abstraction of a digital button press is a powerful tool for representing complex situations, and many games draw a considerable expressive leverage from encapsulating gestures into atomic units. Stephen N. Griffin has argued for a strong “fictive potency” in the digital button, claiming that it is “a catalyst for the transformative power of the video game medium.”² Consider Grand Theft Auto’s carjack verb, which compresses a physical and criminal act into a single button-press. Would carjacking have the same impact if it required several physical gestures to open the door, eject the driver, climb in? Griffin suggests that the button reduces the conceptual gap between intent and action: “the player is permitted to forget about the physical device in order to concentrate on interacting with the events of the game.”³ This sort of abstraction is particularly useful when a game’s verbs do not easily translate to measurable physical gestures—a large, unexplored space in the medium that runs counter to the Wii’s main innovation.

If we decouple the human interface from video game innovation, what opportunities for “revolution” are left in the Wii? One of them is related, but not identical, to the Wii’s de-emphasis of graphical fidelity. The more down-to-earth production values Nintendo has aligned with the console do more than just apologize for its lack of 720/1080p high definition output. They also invite lower development budgets. While “typical” next-gen game budgets are regularly reaching tens of millions of dollars, a respectable Wii game can be developed for well under $5 million, and probably as little as $1-2 million.⁴ In the case of serious games, the possibility that sponsors might subsidize at least a portion of such projects makes them even more appealing to publishers, at least in theory. More so, Nintendo will have to agree to license them, a question that’s more up in the air.⁵

Most will point to the Virtual Console, Wii’s digital distribution system, as the most likely target for serious games, political games, art games, and related genres. It’s too early to tell how open this channel will really become, but if Xbox Live Arcade is any indication, it won’t be very receptive. Since Xbox Live was relaunched for the 360 in 2005, the closest thing to a serious game released or announced is a forthcoming remake of the classic 1993 physics/puzzle game The Incredible Machine.⁶ No matter the potential of digital distribution, first-party channels thus far have offered little more than a new type of stone for the same old walled garden.

Both physical and digital distribution rely on independent developers’ ability to make games for the new platform in the first place. While Nintendo has been quite vocal about its intention to support independent developers, including offering Wii dev kits for under US$2,000, Nintendo of America has also said that it won’t start reviewing independent developer applications until January 2007—which means that only those developers with publishing contracts or special invitations actually have them.⁷

Continue to page 3

Return to page 1

₂ Stephen N. Griffin, “Push. Play: An Examination of the Gameplay Button,” Paper presented at the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Conference, Vancouver BC, June 26 – 20, 2005, 2. Available here.

₃ Ibid.

₄ See Reuters

₅ Despite the company’s claims to broaden the game-playing public, and even despite its own success with Brain Training on the DS, the fact remains that the company’s new tolerance for first-party stamps of approval remains untested.

₆ The game is scheduled to be released in 2007 (see here). Incidentally, The Incredible Machine was originally slated for release in 1984 on the Commodore 64, but didn’t make it to market until almost a decade later.

₇ The under $2,000 figure comes from a Nintendo Corporate Management Policy Briefing that took place on 20 June 2006. The text of the Q&A can be found here. The price quoted there ¥200,000, or roughly US$1,730. The date for Nintendo’s review of independent developer applications for Wii comes from a personal communication with Nintendo of America.