The console war is a war of the past, one for the previous generation. In the bloody drawn out confrontations of old, Sega's Genesis battled Nintendo's NES and Super NES, Sony's PlayStation usurped Nintendo's N64, and the subsequent PlayStation 2 slaughtered the combined forces of Nintendo's GameCube and Microsoft's Xbox. While there are still some remnants from that old war, Nintendo has regrouped and has declared a new war. No longer are we partisans in the console war, we are soldiers fighting the war on indifference.
"Our enemy is consumer indifference to games," Nintendo Co. Ltd. President Satoru Iwata valiantly declared. "We want to appeal to mothers who don't want consoles in their living rooms, and to the elderly and to young women." Nintendo has a strategy to fight and overwhelm this new and unusual enemy. They aren't fighting this on a traditional battlefield, flaunting impressive polygon counts and clock speeds to the media, nor are they bombarding households with a monolithic all-in-one system and shiny advertisements. Instead, they've opted to fight with a highly unusual weapon: Wii.
Nintendo admits to specifically designing the Wii to please parents. The controller isn't a hodgepodge of triggers, buttons and joysticks, but rather a simple pointer that resembles a TV remote, something that people wouldn't mind having out on their coffee table. Wii has the capacity to play games from every previous Nintendo home console because "moms would hate it if they had to have several consoles lying around." Nintendo's done away with wired controllers and ethernet cords because having wires all over the place "might anger moms because of the mess." The company even sacrificed graphical and processing muscle because "moms would rise up against" noisy, expensive electricity-hungry machines that take forever to start up.
And yes, those are actual quotes from Nintendo bigwigs.
Pushing a game system onto a group who doesn't want one isn't an easy task. Splashing shiny commercials on G4 isn't going to do the trick. Nintendo knows this, and as a result, they've devised an aggressive advertising campaign that involves ads across all mainstream and specialty television, product placement, event sponsorship, private Wii parties, store kiosks and even mall tours... anything to get Wii into the minds and hands of the general public -- short of giving them away, of course.
The DS has spread like wildfire around the world thanks in part to word of mouth. Portables lend themselves to easy promotion in this way because they're easy to carry around in public, relatively cheap, and many of their games don't require huge time investment in order to get the gist of what they're offering. Console games are more complicated. It isn't possible to whip a console out when you have few minutes to spare. You can tell people all about the Wii until the sun sets, but it won't really click until they actually sit down (or stand up, in some cases) and play.
Iwata hopes that gamers can help to act as ambassadors by giving their friends and family their first tastes of Wii. Nintendo is inviting gamers to take up arms and fight in their name, to spread the word and defeat indifference to gaming.
This series, creatively titled Wii Ambassador, chronicles the path taken by one gamer as he takes the word of Wii to those pesky parents, all with varying levels of knowledge and experience with videogames. Can their indifference about videogames be vanquished? Can Wii offer them anything beyond being just another electronic component beside the television? Our test subjects' feelings about gaming will be recorded before getting their very first taste of Wii. Their play experience will also be documented, along with their post-Wii thoughts about the system and videogames in general.
