Steven: We agreed with a number of critics–Jasper Juul in particular, who wrote a book called The Casual Revolution–that this was a watershed system in 2006. Why did you guys choose to examine the Wii in particular? So I think the most important feature really is its overall design, but especially the way the Wii remote turns it outward to the physical space of gameplay.
#WII PLAY GAMES ON STARTUP SERIES#
It was designed to encourage you to move around in a kind of invisible grid, rather than just having a series of buttons on it to allow you to control the game. What it’s really doing is configuring your living room as a possibility space. Steven: So if you think of that accelerometer as measuring the motions of your hand. Which aspect of the Wii had the biggest impact on the Wii as a creative platform? But the system inspires you, it is designed to encourage players. You can sit on the couch and move around a lot less and play games. So really the system implies that space you are going to play. And it only works when you move it out of the way, to make room to play the Wii because you have to jump around and wave your arms in order to play properly. The missing component in the system, that doesn’t ship with it, is the coffee table. All of those peripherals that littered the living room: the controllers, the balance board you stand on, the things on the coffee table–in fact, the coffee table itself. Think of this as a creation of a Personal Area Network. We always tried to move up and down that stack, looking at any sort of technological feature of the platform, in relation to its effect on the way players use the system, and the way the culture viewed gaming. That means, for instance, when we looked at the importance of motion control in the Wii, we looked at how the accelerometer worked, the micro machines that actually measure player movement in relation to game design to exploit that technology, and in relation to user behavior and to the social space of the living room. You work your way up into user interface and controls, which connects that part of the platform to the user. You look at lower level kinds of phenomena, all the way from chips and machine language and the machine’s operating system. The editors of the series Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost produced a very simple diagram of a stack that helps explain it. Steven: That’s where we started with this.