Expanding the Gaming Audience

While Nintendo likes to crown itself with the achievement of expanding the gaming entertainment to the mainstream world, the truth is Nintendo failed to deliver anything beyond selling a useless piece of plastic that's less entertaining than a porcelain mantelpiece. Instead of actually bringing casual audience into gaming by expanding what is considered hardcore games, Nintendo chose to create whole new genres to accommodate new pockets of these casual gamers.

Most people will argue that Nintendo has definitely brought the grandmothers and the girlfriends into games by projecting sales figures and citing successful weight loss by using Wii Fit. But, to be blunt, that's all a lie. Those casual games are not really games at all. Wii Fit is just an overpriced fitness video. Wii Sport is just a failed excuse for Nintendo to claim that the Wii immerses the player in reality using the magic of motion control. Soccer moms love the Wii because they can say that they're "in touch" with their kids and keeping up with the technology fashion because they play games like all the cool jockeys. But they're not. What Nintendo failed to do is to actually take what was the established entertainment of video games and make it accessible to the mass audience.

Instead, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 are the consoles that push the video game genre to mass audience appeal. Games like Grand Theft Auto 4 innovated its sandbox genre to appeal to the masses by taking the traditional core of its game mechanics and add easier controls and other things that are more readily acceptable and recognizable by the casual audience. GTA4 didn't topple sales charts because of its gratuitous violence. GTA4 presented a game space that people recognize as playing a mobster/gangster role in an almost theatrical plot.

And that's really where it starts. Everyone understands and accepts the movies as a form of mainstream entertainment. Therefore, it makes sense to attract these mass audience to games by promising an interactive movie experience. Take Uncharted 2 for example. Many people want to play the adventurous hero in Indiana Jones, so when people sees Uncharted 2, which promises exactly that, it makes sense for the clumsy dads or the curious girlfriends to try that game out. And that's how games expand to the masses.

Every kid loves Wall-E or Toy Stories, so the PS3 promises an interactive experience for something like a Pixar film with the Ratchet and Clank series. The point is that games don't expand to the masses by transforming the whole industry into petty toys and training exercise. Games can only be accepted by the casual gamers by still being games. The Wii does have some catching up to do to deliver a gaming experience for the mass audience, but New Super Mario Bros. Wii is a pretty good start, albeit still is a complete ripoff of some decade old games.