Click Nothing

Sports Injuries - Elbows and Egos

A couple little news items that made me laugh and cry this week.

First is the Wall Street Journal covering so-called 'Wii-elbow'. No other way to decribe it than a kind of culture shock arising from the collision between a bunch of fat, lazy pre-diabetics suddenly finding their sedentary life-styles in conflict with their insatiable thirst for entertainment with the arrival of the Wii.

A twelve year old girl says "it's harder than playing basketball"... which is such an absurdly false statement than I was almost blinded when I read it. Have you ever even played basketball? I've played a lot of Wii now, and one thing I can say for sure is that - while better than nothing - it's a far cry from playing a 'real' competitive sport. The only way I could reconcile that statement with reality was to assume she meant "it's harder than playing basketball". Gimme a break.

Next is the guy who complains of aching shoulders and arms and profuse sweating after playing Wii boxing for and hour and a half. An hour and a half. Of shadow boxing!! That's like 20 rounds of shadow boxing including all the breaks. Twenty, three-minute high intensity anaerobic sprints. The guy is threshold training with his Wii and fucking himself up. Does anyone in the world think it would be a good idea spend 90 minutes doing threshold training at the gym the very first time they go?

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for using Wii Sports daily to get some exercise, especially if you currently get none, but ease yourself into it. Soon enough you will find that the exercise itself is as fun as the gameplay, and the gameplay will start to get tired once you've exhausted the depth of the system-space. Then - god forbid - when your brain is bored of the systems, but your body is craving the movement - maybe you'll actually want to do some real exercise for its own sake.

I wonder if we'll make it through the holiday without someone's Uncle Jack from Winnipeg having a coronary from playing 45 minutes of Wii Tennis with little Billy after gorging himself on Christmas Ham and Turkey? I wonder if Nintendo will face class-action lawsuits from a North American population so addicted to laziness and broadcast media pablum that a few corpses will actually be more shocking than an entire population of pale-skinned, carpal-crippled, diabetics with soaring blood-pressure and cheetos-orange stained fingers?

Part two of this sports-in-games weekend-write-up is an article from UrbanGrounds that went around the office last week. Now, I don't know much about football, but this is fuckin' hilarious. Ethan Albright is what I gues you call a 'special teams lineman' playing with the Washington Redskins in the NFL. He's had a 12 year career (which I take it is exceptional for a lineman) because he's good at doing a long snap to a punter, thereby buying the kicker enough space to get the ball away before being pummeled into the earth.

Unfortunately for Ethan Albright, someone has to be the lowest rated overall player in Madden Football, and this year, it's him. He writes a foul-mouthed rant to Madden and EA that's a good read provided you're not trying to drink a can of Coke while you read it.

Anyway, to bring a point to it rather than just point to it, question: does there even need to be an overall player ranking in such a game? Does someone have to be the 'worst' player in the NFL? It certainly seems like a problem to provide overall rankings - especially in a game like football - which has so many orthogonal units in play. You can do it more easily in boxing or tennis where everyone is being compared in the same way, but in more complex team sports with a variety fo player (unit) roles - of which football may be the most complex - is such a ranking even meaningful?

Regardless, Albright probably didn't complain when he got the royalty check from EA or via the player's association, and probably he wouldn't opt out of receiving such a cheque next season either, so maybe he should just deal with it. It's still a funny letter.

Here Wii Go

So I don't actually have my Wii in my dirty little mitts yet, but I should tomorrow or at the lastest by mid-week. Ubi arranged to have a bunch of them ordered for employees, so I managed to get one through them. No bargain price or anything, but at least I don't have to stand in line.

I did manage to pick up some games though. I got Rayman, Trauma Center, and Monkey Ball, and am eager to get my hands on Elebits (which I loved at E3) and Zelda. Can you believe I have never played a Zelda game?! Well, I guess I'm lucky, because by most accounts, this one is the best one yet.

Sadly, I tried to pick up an extra Wiimote and Nunchuk today. While there are extra Wiimotes, finding an extra Nunchuk was not in the cards. Hopefully I'll be able to snag one in the next couple of days.

I also picked up a copy of Gears of War and a copy of Tony Hawk's Project 8. My recent almost-criticism of Gears basically means I am obligated to play it and provide honest critical insight to counter-balance. I only played for about 45 minutes last night so I'll wait before I say anything. As for Project 8 - I played it for a couple of hours and really loved it. I haven't played a Tony Hawk game since THPS2, and I kinda lost interest when they started with the whole open world thing and the story stuff. But this one seems to find a middle ground that has some appeal, and so far I'm enjoying it a lot. I was also this close to buying Viva Pinata, but I figured five new games, a console, plus an extra controller, a classic controller and two more games all waiting to be bought was enough for one weekend.

In the end though, I think all of that stuff combined still comes out to less than a PS3....

Wiinning Strategies?

Following up on my recent blathering-on about the Wii and about LiveMove, Patrick over at King Lud IC scratches his head about the business case for casual games on the Wii. I'm about as far as one can be from a casual games developer. I think the kinds of numbers he's talking about are close to what the teams I'm used to spend on dinners at the office over the course of production, and if that's the case, then hell yeah, there's a huge pile of money to be made there.

Everybody Wiins

Following up on my last post about the dev tools for Wii, here is a cool link I found on Robin's blog. I'm not one to cruise the sites of the hardware manufacturers, but I'm glad I did.

This reminds me of me my first Wii experience which, sentimental as it is, I will share with you.

At E3, me and LP managed to con our way past the insane Wii line by going to the developer support desk and flashing our sexy Ubisoft business cards. I guess Producer + Creative Director + Ubisoft (is it 7 Wii launch titles?) was enough to get an escort past the line (unless it was LP's sexy haircut?).

Inside the zoo of all that was Wii, I spied all sorts of wonders; from guys playing tennis with an invisible ball, to chicks 50-50ing rails with a flick of the wrist, to a full fledged Tam-Tam Jam that was mercifully free of stinky unshowered hippies. It was like a scene from Harry Potter, with thousands of apprentices fumbling about with their wands for the very first time, and accidentally summoning, zapping, animating, or mesmerizing themselves in all directions all at once.

They had these little booths set up in a ring. Each booth would hold maybe a dozen people crammed in, with a Wii set-up in each booth. There was a Zelda booth and a Mario booth and a Metroid booth and a Red Steel booth - everything you'd expect, and each one overflowing with giddy gamers waiting their turn.

But one booth in particular caught my attention. It was running - well, honestly, I don't know what the game was... it was the one where you conduct an orchestra as (not) seen at the 37 second mark of this video. I don't even know if it's a game - maybe it's just a tech demo (but I hope its a game). There was a huge crowd, bigger than at the other booths, and everyone was clustered around staring in amazement, cheering, laughing, and I had to elbow my way in there to get a look at whichever hotshot young hip japanese kid was rocking out like a post-modernist Kent Nagano.

But it wasn't some hip young gamer getting his groove on to the adoration of thirty-plus twenty-somethings, it was a mid-forties overweight balding buyer from some middle-american mega-mart. He was a dishevelled businessman in a second-rate suit with his tie out of place, sweat marks under his armpits and a name tag that said 'Hi My Name is' something pleasantly forgettable. He was a totally average, bland, uninteresting, boring, generic human. The kind of guy who you'd see standing behind you in line at the bank.

And there he was, conducting an orchestra in front of a booth full of exhilerated onlookers who were cheering for him, and he had the biggest fucking smile on his face that I think I've ever seen on anyone, ever. They say the average person is more scared of public speaking than of dying, and this guy was certainly average. Yet here he was, not speaking, per se, but performing, with a huge crowd of people worshipping him. I bet this guy felt like shit when he couldn't even gather the courage to ask Tina-Marie to the prom in 1978, but was thankful he didn't two weeks later when he saw her in the arms of runningback Tom Slade after the big homecoming game. I bet he shuffled through life being an ordinary guy and dealing with all of the nightmares that that entails. I bet he never imagined when he took his job at Mega-Mart that it would bring him anything more than a paycheck for his wife and kids - who he loves. I bet that even though he orders hundreds of thousands - even millions of games a year - that he probably hasn't actually played one since Space Invaders (when he sullenly stuffed his hands in his pockets and followed his friends to the pizza parlour after the homecoming game). I bet that no one ever cheered for him even once in his life. Ever.

He'll buy a Wii. And probably his wife will raise an eyebrow when he brings it home and make him feel a little bit stupid for wasting their money on a toy. And he'll probably have a hard time convincing her to just try it, just once. But she will. And she will probably feel something she has never felt before either. And maybe - and I won't even assert this one, I'll just say maybe - maybe it will become a new part of the life that they share together.

I still wonder why they changed the name to Wii.

Kinetic Design

Ai Live, LiveMove is apparently the application in the Wii SDK that allows designers to simply record their movements as input data for the Wii. Here's a video that demonstrates it.

Here is a video of the demonstration, and hot damn is that some cool shit. Of course, thinking about it after seeing it, I can't imagine another way to do it that seems even remotely practical. Why wold you do it any other way? Nonetheless, looks like the entire process of making games just got a lot more fun.

What I think is especially neat is that by designing the input parameters this way, the designer is forced to know from the get-go if the move feels the way he wants it to feel. It's pretty easy, even trivial, to shut your eyes, imagine frying and egg, fishing, or roping a calf with a lasso, and then perform the action in a way that just feels right.

Perhaps forcing designers to come at the experience design from this perspective - literally aping the players interactions to develop the games control scheme - is the genius element behind the Wii design.