Many people today wonder how a book like “Game Over”, by David Sheff, could be written. In the book, the NES was depicted as a Nintendo trojan horse, utilized by manipulated children, for Nintendo to conquer the world. By selling lucid imaginary worlds to children, Nintendo was able to sneak NES systems into millions of households.

History repeats.

I can just imagine, years from now, someone writing a book on Nintendo calling it ‘CON MAN’. The game journalist’s argument is that Nintendo is conning people because it sells, and markets, software such as ‘Brain Age’ and ‘Wii Fit’ to improve one’s brain and to help get one fit. The author claims this is ‘conning’ people.

But in all of these examples there has been an implicit understanding that the player is entering into a fantasy. Call of Duty 4 or Gran Turismo might aim for acute realism but they are never painted as anything more than make believe. You won’t become a better soldier or a faster driver through playing them.

By contrast, Nintendo’s recent thrusts towards a new ‘casual’ audience have seen the abstraction between the real and the virtual deliberately blurred. When purchasing Wii Fit, did consumers believe they were buying a video game about fitness or a genuine solution to a real weight problem?

What he is saying is that gaming has been about IMMERSION. Now, with the expanded audience, the games don’t try to immerse. They try to help out the person in the real world such as getting fit or helping their brain.

The article then goes on and on on this same thought. Nintendo is a conman because its new games are selling as tools to people to solve real world issues.

The ‘game journalist’ doesn’t realize that games, like any other product, are tools. Look in your game collection. I bet you bought some games solely for multiplayer. Some games you bought solely for single player. Some games you bought because of the challenge. Some games you bought because you want to relax with. People buy games for all sorts of reasons.

The job of Zelda is to give me an adventure. The job of Wii Fit is to help me get fit. They are both tools to achieve a certain end.

One of the past barriers to expanding gaming is that ALL games were immersion based. Not everyone wants to immerse themselves in another world. Just as in the book store, not all books are intended for immersion. Some books, like cook books, how-to-books, and dictionaries are to be used without any immersion and to help people solve problems in the real world.

This is Iwata’s New Continent.

Amazingly, the game journalist realizes near the end that games are nothing more than tools to perform jobs.

The demands Flash Focus: Vision Training makes of its player are similar to those required by Counter-Strike: all that’s changed is the metaphor. New metaphors are fine. That’s how we discover new fields of creativity and interest. And sometimes the new metaphors bring with them new purposes.

Perhaps, in the future, games will no longer be principally tools for fun but instead a means to a different end: weight loss, better eyesight, attractiveness or drumming. But if that’s the case, critics and consumers need a whole new set of language and approaches to understand what’s being encountered, because the whole game just changed.

Once discovering that games are just tools, he realizes he has no argument. So, at the last line, he says critics and consumers need a whole new set of language to understand what is going on.

Why?

It is pretty clear what is going on. ‘Brain Training’ very clearly means ‘training the brain’. ‘Wii Fit’ very clearly means ‘using the Wii to get fit’. The very first video games were called simple names like ‘Adventure’, ‘Space Invaders’, and ‘Asteroids’.

There is a great comment on the page that sums up how the article is and greatly annoys the author:

I actually fail to see the point in this article at all. You acknowledge that Nintendo bringing gaming to new audiences is a good thing, yet moan about the language? I don’t get it.

Either way, the millions who bought Wii Fit and Brain Training don’t feel conned, so whoever it is you think you’re speaking for, it isn’t them.

Furthermore, arguing that people who bought Wii Fit thought they were getting a genuine exercise regime is a bit like trying to say that people who bought Guitar Hero or Rock Band genuinely believed it would make them rock stars!

I’ll file this under ‘Another Blog Nit Picking Every Single Little Thing Nintendo Does’.

Very well said!