The self and the Wii

In our last class, Mr. Cartwright mentioned the trend that is happening in the American society with the example of the popular gaming system the Nintendo Wii.  He commented that the Wii gave the impression of community and family, but Nintendo recently shipped the new Wii that is the opposite of community. In the first Nintendo Wii commercial community, family and friendship is the apparent theme here.  No home that the group visits is alone.  There is the image that this game needs to be played in a group of your closest friends, or even strangers. However, the Wii U is opposite.  In the clip of the Wii U commercial the person playing moves from the TV to the smaller device to allow another person to watch the TV.  The apparent community nearly leaves the Nintendo Wii platform.  There is also another scene where two people are playing a game of go and there is a player obviously winning.  The losing player becomes a sore loser and throws the pieces off the game board in a very impressive way.  This display of poor sportsmanship shows me that Nintendo is platforming a little less for the community and a little more for the self.  I do not, however, blame Nintendo for their marketing.  They are merely following the direction in which the American society is going.


Within the gaming community there are all types of games to suit everyone's fancy.  There are games that are meant to be one-player games and then there are games that are meant to be for the whole participation for the whole family.  In order to combat the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft released the Kinect for the Xbox 360.  Now the Kinect was showing the same commercials that inspired families to join in on the fun.  There is something about these devices and these gaming systems that urged the costumers to not play unless they were with others.  In my own experience, I remember my mother and grandmother wanting to play the Kinect because they thought it was amazing not having a controller and overall they wanted to do what the commercials urged us to do; and that is the play together.  For the release day of the Kinect, Microsoft held a concert in Times Square and brought about one hundred dancers to dance for one of the new games.  This represented community in a flashy way.  Microsoft brought together people with talent and similar interest and made the product marketable to many different consumers across the country.  This is the thinking that went into the production off this device in 2010.  Xbox has an online network called, Xbox Live.  Xbox Live is really popular with the consumers and is marketed very well.  Being online means that you can connect with other people around the world.  This is an awesome feature that has been a great success til this day.  However, this access to a bigger world may actually be taking you smaller.  It allows you to get to know people from across the world but not the people sitting on the couch right beside you.

In 2006, when the Nintendo Wii was released, there was a need for community and friendship in the United States.  The Wii was able to provide that. In 2010, the Kinect was able to achieve that goal too.  Now, games are started to recede from that platform of community and friendship because that is the direction we, as Americans, are coming to.  In class we talk about how these technology is beginning to become infused with our personality, with our goals and and dreams.  We are starting to get into our "self" image more than ever.  That is why companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, Apple and SONY are having to market out of the standard community platform and more toward the personal consumer.