Persuasive Games: Wii’s Revolution is in the Past - Ian Bogost
I want to suggest that the major innovation of the Wii for serious, political, art, and independent games is not the unprecedented controller. Nor is it the potential to create new games with a dev kit still unavailable to most developers. Instead, the major innovation is a system that takes us back in time, to earlier platforms. One of the main draws of the Virtual Console is its ability to emulate older systems, including the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Super NES, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, and NEC TurboGrafx 16. Unconfirmed reports claim that an MSX and Commodore 64 emulator will also be available, also suggesting that the Wii will be able to download new emulators as a part of its built-in online update system. Without exception, the Virtual Console has been touted as a digital distribution channel for new games and “classic” games from vintage consoles. But the Virtual Console suggests an application for serious and independent games that no one has yet discussed: independent publishing of new games on classic platforms. Nostalgia has so strangled game developers and game consumers alike that we fail to recognize platforms like the NES and C64 as viable targets for new video games. So mired are we in technological progress that we quickly condemn earlier platforms to the status of cult relic. But just as the daguerreotype, the sonnet, the Super-8 film camera, and so many other constrained forms from other media remain valid modes of expression, so do games for the NES, the C64, the TurboGrafx. These computers enthralled millions of people, people who were not merely biding their time waiting for better technology.
Developing games for older platforms is cheap (as few as 1-2 people), well-documented (dozens of books and websites are devoted to programming the 6502 microprocessor used in the C64 and NES), and thoroughly satisfying (take it from someone with a slight obsession with Atari VCS homebrew). Independent developers should see the Virtual Console for what it could be at its best: a place where older platforms are renewed not for nostalgia’s sake but as viable targets for new forms of video game expression. Like all platforms, these classic consoles endured premature sunsets as they made way for their predecessors. The very idea that a platform like the SNES has been fully explored should make you bristle as much as the idea that the novel has been fully explored. Today, hindsight and historical distance can help us create experiences that went unexplored on these systems. Serious games offer a convincing way to simultaneously renew old platforms and avoid competing with the production values of contemporary systems. Those who would deride the very idea of releasing new games for old systems ought to note that most of the features of 2D game engines used for downloadable games—tiles, layers, sprites—came for free on the hardware on platforms like the NES. Why bother rolling your own code or making sense of a downloadable publisher’s proprietary engine when such a platform exists already, and with a proven track record no less? Furthermore, the visual styles and interaction models of these “vintage” consoles are likewise proven, with two generations of players already familiar with the feel of a C64 or NES title. And furthermore still, the joystick and button of the arcade and Atari VCS, or the D-pad and A+B button of the late 1980s console may offer an even greater intuitiveness and simplicity than the wiimote, with its per-game changes in orientations and interaction models. These interfaces also privilege the powerful abstraction of button presses. Maybe, just maybe, the key to making gaming “as accessible as possible” can be found in the past, not in the future. In spite of its much-celebrated downsized graphics and gestural interface, perhaps this unsung, sleeper feature of the Wii is where the console really holds promise of revolution: as a viable distribution channel for old and new video games for classic consoles and computers. Time to brush up on your 6502 Assembly and get ready to “change the way we play.” Other Serious Games Source features by this author: Persuasive Games: The Right to Bore Arms Persuasive Games: Games Phone Home Persuasive Games: Taking Bully Seriously
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