Sean,
I have to say I appreciate what you’re doing. Not that I agree with everything you say (I prefer Puzzle Zelda to Arcade Zelda, but then Ocarina of Time was my first Zelda game), but it’s nice to see a real explanation for Nintendo’s dominance other than “people are stupid.”
Not that you need another anecdote about a previously-exiled gamer, but I thought I’d throw out a mention of my mother. We got an NES late in the game, around the end of ’91 (I was six). We only ever had about 7 games for the thing, but I remember that my mother played most of them as much as we kids did. These were games like the SMB trilogy, Lolo 3, and Mickey Mousecapade. She was actually the first one of us to beat SMB 2 (the only one we had for a while.)
Obviously because of our late entry into videogaming, we ended up skipping the SNES, and when we eventually got an N64, my parents were no longer interested, until the Wii came along. The only console game my mother even touched before then was Mario Kart Double Dash (she plays Bejeweled-type games on the internet fairly often.). But Wii Sports she enjoyed, I suspect mostly because she could play it with her family. SMB 5, on the other hand, she loves. She hasn’t gone so far as to play it by herself yet, but she has actually initiated the “Let’s get everyone together to play,” which is a big change. This is in spite of the fact that her kids are clearly impatiently waiting or even leaving her behind while she gets killed frequently.
My dad has a similar story, although he was always more into PC gaming and wasn’t really much of an exile, just played fewer games as he got more busy. He loves Tiger Woods 10 so much that we’re getting him his own Wii for Christmas, as he complained about me taking my console back to school with me.
I should note that my parents played Traveler for a while back in their early-mid 20’s, so they may not be your typical example.
There has been this myth that the NES and that time period was the time for ‘hardcore gaming’ and nothing could be further from the truth. Your own family history had your parents play games with you at that time. However, as gaming veered away from what gaming is, your parents didn’t want to join you. Now that gaming is returning back to what gaming is supposed to be (not movies), it is no surprise your parents want to join you again.
Of course, your own family history and childhood memories are irrelevant to the dictates of books like “Casual Revolution” who declare that we have never seen such new ‘demographics’ before! I can excuse people for this ignorance if they were born after the 80s. But many of these analysts and other people were born well before.
There are templates everyone in the “Game Industry” gets in line behind. One of the obvious ones is “Nintendo is doomed!” because Nintendo is always doomed no matter what happens. Even when the Wii was sold out, stories were still being written how Nintendo was doomed.
But the other template is this: “The Game Industry is growing like never before! OMG!!!” Like the “Nintendo is doomed!” template, the “Game Industry growing like never before! OMG!!!!” is always followed even if the “Game Industry” is suffering decline. You will never, ever hear anyone talk about how the “new demographics” and “women” used to be part of gaming fifteen years ago and earlier. Writing that story would imply that the “Game Industry” did something wrong as it veered away from whatever it was doing before. If you notice, the “Game Industry” is always ‘growing’ even when it has declining numbers.