Nintendo teaches the digital media industry what it means to lead

With NPD’s latest game console sales figures the stunning reality of next-gen gaming finally sets in: Nintendo spanked the market with its own peculiar genius. We scoffed at its low-res hardware specs. We questioned the wisdom of forsaking a DVD player while other consoles aimed to be media servers. We speculated that after the weak GameCube showing this was the last generation of hardware Nintendo had in it. Maybe it should just be a software company from here out, many argued.

 

But in August, 403,600 Wii units sold through retail, NPD found, far ahead of the 276,700 a Halo 3-hyped Xbox 360 nabbed and the 103,600 a game-deprived Sony Playstation 3 sold. This has been the game console sales story all year. The behemoths of modern media, Microsoft and Sony, are playing catch-up month after month.

 

The Nintendo strategy of aiming toward the family and at the non-gamer has worked when everyone thought HD and prohibitively expensive new game design would rule the day. Kids and parents, and just about anyone else who ventures into my living room-cum-test lab can’t keep their hands off the Wii-mote.

 

The Wii is not the only place Nintendo dominates. It also sold 383,300 handheld DS units to the Sony PSP’s 130,600, even though both machines are fairly close in price now. Likewise, any argument that the Wii’s success is price driven become less convincing now that Xbox 360 price cuts bring it close to the Nintendo price point.

 

Point being? While Microsoft and Sony merely extended farther into the same old familiar territory with their next-gen strategy, Nintendo took us in a different direction that many observers resisted. We are in an age of focus groups, of supposedly empowered consumers, of a user-led market. It is significant that one Japanese company bucked all of these trends. It led us into a way of gaming, of interacting with technology, that was novel and unfamiliar. The key word here is that it led the market rather than followed it.

 

This is something to think about the next time your company brags about “following the user.”

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A new game reminds us how interactive entertainment could reach beyond the fan base

Game reviews are not in the purview of these posts but every once in a while a video game comes along that reminds us what is possible in this digital content medium. No doubt Microsoft’s release of Hale 3 this fall will initiate another predictable wave of press coverage about gaming’s growing importance, how Hollywood-like it has become, how much of the young male demo it grabs away from other media. Yadda, yadda yadda. In fact, the current best candidate for game of the year emerges from 2K Games today in the form of Bioshock. The Xbox 260/PC release has been duly touted by the game press as a stunner of an experience, and if the first few hours of the pre-release version I played is any indication they are right.

 

The game is set mostly in an underwater world created by a megalomaniacal tycoon of the 1930s. No pun intended, it is immersive in the way that only gaming can be. It defines an environment, literally submerges you in a foreign technology and sensibility that is as compelling as any filmed drama. The visual textures are as rich, the set designs as thoughtful as any Spielberg historical epic. The pace is carefully constructed, even as it lets the player feel free to go anywhere and interact with environments at will.

 

As a piece of interactive digital content, Bioshock is a lush and involving as it gets. Why mention it here? Because it underscores where gaming has gone so wrong. Even executives at major gaming firms like EA now say publicly that gaming has gotten boring and predictable. In large part, this is a function of the business and technology themselves, which have become so bloated and costly that the entire infrastructure is risk-averse. “Game play,” is the core elelent of gaming that retains that central gaming audience, but there are other more creative elements that lure in the rest of us.

 

To some degree even Bioshock is a safer bet than most. It is a classic first-person RPG designed by some of the same crew that gave us the brilliant System Shock 2. But this game is leveraging the elements that make interactive gaming artistic – environment, mood, texture, immersion. This is why a gamer can spend scores of hours in a game and feel restless after two hours in a movie theater. These are the unique aesthetic values of gaming. Yes, there is a good mystery in the game, and that helps move things along and keep the stakes high, but the essential quality of this digital medium is a convincing world we inhabit and move within.  

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