Just a quick link to Annalee Newitz’s piece on Alternet about the politics of the iPhone launch frenzy. I think it gets a bit too paranoid towards the end – only in America does fear of government surveillance make you a true leftist – but it’s a refreshing voice of skepticism that doesn’t bash the iPhone because, oh, the Linux-based one you cobbled together in your basement is sooo much better.

Link

Upon their thirtieth birthday, I imagine that most people went out with their friends and got toasted while bemoaning the inevitability of aging, only to wake up the next morning to realise that, yes, they were actually adults and it was time to get on with life. Not me though. What did I do that was so different on that fateful February night, you ask? I stayed home with my family and played with birthday gift: a Nintendo Wii.

But beyond being a commentary on the rather sorry state of my life, the idea of my family sitting round the TV and ‘gaming’ was a rather novel state of affairs, as gaming has never been looked upon too fondly in my clan. But after a couple of glasses of good Australian shiraz had loosened us up nicely, two remarkable things happened: my father, someone who has detested, abhored and reviled video games for years picked up the Wiimote and had a blast playing Wii tennis; and secondly, in perhaps the closest thing to an epiphany he’s ever had, my brother sat back on the couch and said “Oh. I get it now”.

The ‘it’ he was referring to is what I might call the ‘Wii aesthetic’: the glossy white finish, the soft music, cartoonish graphics and ultimately, the plain and simple approachability. As has been said a million times now, it is this sort of capacity to simultaneously appeal to a seasoned gamer like my brother and a complete ‘n00b’ like my father that has been Nintendo’s great coup, leading them to not only dominate coverage in the mainstream press, but the sales charts also. Watching the Nintendo E3 presentation this year, that focus on the mainstream and approachability continued to be front and centre. While there were a couple of announcements for the ‘hardcore set’, the key bit of news was about the exercise ‘game’ Wii Fit.

Using my family as a gauge again, as I watched the address live with my father, he seemed quite excited by the Wii Balance Board and the possibilities it offered for low-impact exercise. A cursory survey of friends and other family members revealed a similar response. So it seemed the Nintendo mantra of expanding the audience for gaming is, anecdotally anyways, working quite well.

But spurred somewhat by the Ebert-Barker debate over the art of gaming, I wonder to what extent Nintendo are undercutting the potential for gaming as a more sophisticated, engaging and challenging medium. That might seem a remarkably odd thing to say about the company that brought us Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64, both arguably works of genius regardless of what you think about their status as ‘art’. But there is rather stark difference between Nintendo’s commitment to the mainstream and, say, Sony, who have insisted that one of their goals is to make gamers cry (and, no, they don’t mean from sticker shock…). Nintendo is attempting to make gaming accessible; other developers are trying to make gaming socially and aesthetically relevant beyond the simple question of entertainment.

To some extent, this is the difference between directors like Spielberg and Kubrick. While both are committed to the potential of film to tell stories and move people, Spielberg is interested in reasserting what we already know – that the truth is out there, that family and friends are good and that the individual will eventually overcome. Kubrick, while not exactly a marginal or underground director, was far more concerned with pushing film as a medium to challenge accepted values and ideas, from the noble war hero to love and desire in a marriage. Nintendo’s Wii is obviously Spielberg in this analogy: innovative, interesting and yet populist to the detriment of the form, placating its audience with the simple as it delights. Wii Sports is a lot of fun – but that’s all it will ever be. If titles like it and Wii Fit are the new direction for Nintendo, then the sort of promise for emotional and intellectual resonance shown in titles like Haze, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, Mass Effect or Heavy Rain will never grace Nintendo’s little white console, denying the potential power of these new forms to millions of new gamers.

If the two approaches – gaming as moving towards art and narrative and gaming as entertainment – can co-exist, then fine: my father can use Wii Fit while I enjoy interactive stories and moral dilemmas. The only problem I see is the utter dominance of Nintendo – and the subsequent rush by other companies to hop on board the casual games bandwagon. If Nintendo are allowed to dominate the gaming zeitgeist, moving the industry away from pushing the limits of the form to getting your mother to play Wii Bowling, the industry and gaming will be set back by years – a remarkable shame for an experience that is just beginning to hit its prime.