I’ve never been much of a gamer, in the standard sense. 1st to 6th grade I figured out games such as Day of the tentacle and Sim * (SimTower!) and finally graduating to Madden (‘00, at which I seriously kicked ass on my 233mhz iMac). I spent 6th and 7th grade playing Medievia, a MUD, borderline obsessively.
But I’ve never owned a console, and have only managed to ever play them at friends houses. I never really could get beyond finger mashing. I was fine with a keyboard. But something about the controller just never worked for me. That’s why I’m so excited for the Nintendo Wii, with a totally sweet looking controller.
It’s a remarkable experience. Instead of passively playing the games, with the new controller you physically perform them. You act them out. It’s almost like theater: the fourth wall between game and player dissolves. The sense of immersion—the illusion that you, personally, are projected into the game world—is powerful. And there’s an instant party atmosphere in the room. One advantage of the new controller is that it not only is fun, it looks fun. When you play with an old-style controller, you look like a loser, a blank-eyed joystick fondler. But when you’re jumping around and shaking your hulamaker, everybody’s having a good time.
I played with a friends eyeToy once, which is a camera that translates your movement in front of a TV into actions within the video game, and it was limited (not to mention whatever game we were playing sucked), but pretty fun. I don’t know if I’ll be able to shell out the bucks for both it and a TV to use with it, but just reading through descriptions of how the games work makes gives me excited bouts of laughter – it just sounds so unbelievably cool.