It would seem that since its North American release in 2006, the talk of the console arena has been consistently dominated by Nintendo's tiny-white-box-that-could, the Wii. With games such as Donkey Konga, Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution having ostensibly sparked the control revolution that we now see taking place in the living rooms of North American homes, the Nintendo Wii (following in the footsteps of its diminutive handheld sister, the DS) has managed to further ignite the imaginations of gamers, designers and academics. Has the shift away from the traditional controller paradigm of years past changed the way we play? The way we think about play? Technology? Design? This entry takes a look back at the state of the blogosphere of the past year and revisits, with a particular emphasis on the Wii, those stories raised by gamers, tinkerers and thinkers.

In early 2007, a video began sprouting up across a number of newsblogs featuring a young electro-acoustic composer, Yann Seznic, doing what he does best: mixing, looping and sequencing sounds in a electro-acoustic tour de force. Of course, what set this video apart from your average You Tube American Idol tryout video was the fact that Yann was performing without touching any of his computer equipment, without adjusting any knobs and without moving any sliders--Yann was conducting his performance solely through the use of the Wii remote.

Twisting and contorting his arm to change frequency, pitch, add loops etc., Yann had turned the Wiimote into a device that allowed him to not only compose his music remotely, (having been freed of his desk-anchored technology), but also to add an element of physical performativity to his musical compositions. Yann's movements now became relevant to his music in ways which shaped the music itself and he had programmed the Wiimote such that it responded to actions which he felt intuitively related to particular adjustable facets of his piece. Shortly after the 'hackability' of the Wiimote became apparent, a slew of different appropriations of the Wiimote began to flood blogs. Images of what users had managed to turn their Wiimote into from music composition devices such as Yann's Wii Loop Machine to control devices which cater to disabled/handicapped users to 'wii-weaponry' such as this Colt .45 inspired Wiimote reconfiguration at the Hack-a-Wii blog. But unlike the typical gun-hacks, Yann's modification of the Wiimote offers up possibilities, not only for creators and performers of electro-acoustic music, but for educators as well. Music education blogger Evan Tobias writes, "Students could hypothetically record their own music and load it into the program and then manipulate it with a wii controller. For students who aren’t necessarily interested in using notation based music software this could be an interesting way to have them make use of other types of music technology. What types of skills might they develop? What musical concepts could they make use of? What problems might they run into? What might develop from students working with this type of technology?" Evan's questions certainly resonate with those thinkers who are currently exploring the legitimacy and potency of new digital literacies in educative contexts (de Castell and Jenson). Using the Wiimote to discover, formulate and play with new permutations of music and movement may make for an unprecedented interaction with music curriculum not yet explored in a classroom environment. For de Castell and Jenson, this sort of technologically enabled play has the potential to "effectively mobilize, direct, and sustain the engaged attention of youth" and appeal to a common literacy already shared among those who interact with the now-ubiquitous Wii (2004, p. 381). Of course there are other Wii hacks which have made their way onto blogs over the last year, not all of which are dedicated to the furthering of musical endeavors...

At the time of its release, the Power Glove was ultimately considered a market failure. Clunky and awkward, the Power Glove portended a future of control that was perhaps technologically impossible at the time given the limitations in hardware and the few games made to take advantage of the control style. The small irony may be that the Wiimote operates on essentially the same control principles as the Power Glove--something which has inspired such fan-driven innovations as the 'power glove wii' hack as one can see below.

When this 'mod' showed up on blogs such as Joystiq and Slashgear the reception was mixed, but more often than not, bloggers deeply resented the hack. A number of users felt it was a slap in the face of what today's Wii technology with one particularly irate blog commenter claiming that "the fact that someone apparently thought it was a good idea to incorporate the horrible controller with a new system...well that's more !@#$ than anything else !@#$ has ever been !@#$" But is anything different today? Is the Wii controller still crude by today's standards? What are the Wii's shortcomings if any...and if there are, why are we willing to overlook them today? One user on the forum of the Official Nintendo Magazine notes: "I think a lot of people seem to forget that there are so many games in which the controls just don’t work properly. Where movements don't register and you are left waving the Wiimote in the hope that something, anything will happen on screen. I think that the technology for the most part is crude, unresponsive and imprecise. In a generation or two it will really come into its own. Although Nintendo should be congratulated for the sheer level of innovation they have shown, and continue to show. However hailing the Wiimote as the finished article is just wishful thinking as the majority of games on Wii would be just as good or better played with a control pad." Musings like the above certainly speak to a prevailing paradigm of control: it's easier to fall back onto 'old faithful' than try something new which way be rough around the edges. But technical awkwardness aside, the Wii's control scheme undeniably widens the playing field for demographics less familiar with the dominant regime of the 8-10 button, two handed controller. However, when it comes to new technologies, the precision of control isn't the primary concern for all bloggers who have chimed in on the issue of new gaming control schemes. A few blog posters such as those at Water Cooler Games note that in-game functions which we've become used to performing using button presses may not translate well to new controls. One blogger muses, "How would you be able to use the special moves such as the ice move by Sub-Zero or the flying kick by Liu Kang? Many of the fighting moves in these games are physically impossible to reenact like flips or flying kicks [...] Some of the main reasons why people play these fighting games is for the cool and intense special moves." Authors such as Chris Crawford have frequently bemoaned that games which imply particular affordances that cannot be taken advantage of by a player should not be included in a game's design (1984). Does the inverse hold true? Once the Wiimote moves past the phase of 'swinging' and 'shooting' and 'shaking', will we begin to see controls that privilege our body's lower half in ways which reflect in context-relative actions in-game? Although Dance Dance Revolution's dance pad, Rock Band's snare pedal and the imminent Wii-Fit both speak to lower-body involvement, there may very well ultimately be an impass at the intersection of genre and technology which remains insurmountable. The fighting games of yesteryear may never translate well to new control paradigms, and 'old-schoolers' may gripe, but this only means that the soil for innovation is ever more the fertile.

That said, many players were never looking for innovation, but merely shinier graphics and the notorious 'same old' with every generation of gaming machine. As the Wii stepped onto the scene in 2006, a great many gamers relegated the Wii to '3rd place status' in the market, heralding it as a machine not intended for the 'hardcore'. Despite the control innovations, there was unrest among those who feared the worst for the visuals on the console. Two years ago, one IGN writer quipped "would I recommend buying a Wii to the fellow graphics whores out there? To be honest - probably no". Of course such reviews were typically suffixed with the acknowledgment that the Wii presented something new and potentially fun, but which neglected to satiate the hardcore gamer. Instead the Wii was being pegged as the console for family friendliness...alienating the existing gaming market.

Though centering marketing on 'family' was once intended to make video games less threatening during Nintendo's original thrust into the North American home console market, the 'family-friendly' aspect of Nintendo's latest console has incited praise from bloggers who have lauded the new approach to game interaction that the Wii has offered to the uninitiated. As such, the apparent 'alienation' of the hardcore audience has done nothing to slow the Wii's step. One blogger writes:

"I loved Wii Sports. My wife loved it. My dad had fun playing it. So did my mother-in-law. We went and bought Wii Play (with the extra controller) as soon as we could, so we could both play at the same time..." (Crislander, blogs.ign.com) This of course raises the question of whether the Wii was outdone on arrival in any aspect other than graphics...and arguably, the likes of specialized controllers which pre-date the Wiimote such as the Guitar Hero guitar and the DDR dance pad are incapable of seeing their respective gameplay affordances reproduced with the Wiimote. But if it's one thing that special-case controllers such as the DDR dance pad demonstrated is that there is an open market for alternative forms of control. As such, although the Wiimote may never be an ample replacement for something like Rock Band's drum set, the controller's affordances at very least further perpetuate the acceptance of new game control paradigms and aid in fostering new approaches to design. If controllers continue to evolve with some frequency, we may see innovations in game design which entirely re-define what video-game play is, further sparking ire from console traditionalists with their gamer thumbs firmly planted in the 1990s.

With most bloggers (gamers, thinkers and tinkerers alike) being largely encouraging about the Wii's control scheme and the promise it brings for innovation, it remains compelling to see how much further these new control configurations will further influence our gaming, our thinking and our tinkering. Game studies author Ian Bogost has already noted his intent to port his work to Nintendo's latest system, new uses for the Wiimote such as the Rocking Horse Wii Mod continually emerge, and new products on the market which attempt to port the Wii's control scheme to other technologies such as the Darwin remote (Gizmodo blog) and the Zeemote nunchuk attachment for cellphones (Kotaku blog) suggest that these recent shifts in game control courtesy the Wii are not to be considered aberrations. Author Seth Godin writes in his blog, that Nintendo "is consistently building a process that will lead to long-term success. Just as the Gameboy was disrespected for its technical shortcomings (but sold and sold and sold for a decade) the Wii is following a similar path. Just because it's not a product for the loudest, most devout fans of gaming doesn't mean it's not a brilliant product." And although the pulse of the blogosphere would also suggest that there are some 'devout fans' who are suspicious of technologies such as the Wii which perhaps threatens to displace their sphere of expertise, it should be remembered that even the paddle, the trackball and the joystick had their rise and fall. The evolution of control rolls along and hopefully it witnesses the extinction of the domination of the white 18-34 year old male demographic which has obnoxiously squatted the domain of video games for so long. One can only hope that the survival of the 'Wii-fit'test will prove to be an ever-broadening and inclusive evolution moving forward.

Chris Crawford (1984). The Art of Computer Game Design. Berekely: McGraw HillSuzanne de Castell, Jennifer Jenson (2004) Paying attention to attention: New economies for learning Educational Theory 54 (4) , 381–397