Nintendo Wii: Video Game System Or Neat Toy?

I’ve been a gamer since I can remember. In the late 80′s I received a NES, and haven’t looked back since. We’ve seen interesting evolution in the industry that we love so much. We’ve gone from plumbers gathering mushrooms, to overly endowed women shooting at bears, to epic stories in space. What has not evolved is the need for “fun” to be prevalent in the games we play. You remember “fun”, right? The ideal that we take a little time from the day to relax, and get ourselves caught up in a world beyond our own.

Ok, before I go off too much into a tangent, I’ll focus on the topic of debate today. The execs over at Bioware, the minds behind some of the greatest story driven games ever, weighed in on the Wii console. While I hold Bioware in the highest respect, I must disagree with comments they made about the Wii.

Here are a couple of comments to sum up their opinion of the Wii; Greg Zeschuk, “(The Wii is) much more like an experience. They’re playing, together or not, but you’re not ‘gaming’ anymore. If gaming is defined by story, then generally Wii may not be”

And Ray Muzyka, “”When you look at a moment to moment experience what a player does on a Wii game, it’s different, lighter, and more toy-like,” he said. “But there’s also a narrative between the players outside the game and kind of fulfills the same things games do. Games are ‘toys’ in the sense that they’re fun.”

Zeschuk’s comment to me suggests that stories are needed in gaming. While a great story can be fun and engaging, it definitely isn’t needed. I still switch on my SNES from time to time and play Super Punch Out! A story is non-existent, but after all these years I still come back to it. Would you classify that as “not-gaming” because I’m not wrapping myself up in an epic? The Wii has some great titles, and there are some story driven ones out there as well. No More Heroes, Super Paper Mario, Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess, are examples of Wii games that have a solid story backing them. While the execution of controls might differ from other consoles, the same capacity for gaming and story are still there.

Ray Muzyka was a little more general with his views on the Wii. He suggests, that video games themselves should be classified as toys. I can easily get behind this view, because to me classifying video games as toys isn’t a bad thing. Toys are fun, I remember racing my Ghostbusters Ecto-Mobile around the house having a grand time. Is the experience I got from that, all that much different from the same thing I get from video games today? Yes and no. Games might be more complex than the output toys bring, but the effect is what matters; and that effect should be “fun”.

I can understand the views and opinions behind the Bioware execs. When you create some of the most epic stories in video game history, you want to make sure the video game market is shifting to more of an art form. If developers are creative enough, I don’t see the Wii hindering this idea. To me the controls and accessibility of the Wii, if anything can add to the immersiveness of a story. What can draw you in more, than taking a character through his quest? Having all the actions of the character performed by you personally. Developers need to wake up and realize that these ideas can co-exist together, and could make for some really great gaming in the future.