Battleship, not Axis and Allies: Nintendo and the expanding market

News came down today that Sega's latest attempt to make a mature, hardcore-aimed game for the Wii, MadWorld, sold 66k copies in the US it's opening month. This is lackluster even when compared to relative flops for the 360; in it's first month Too Human, just such a game, sold over twice that number of copies. A similar piece of news dropped regarding GTA: Chinatown Wars, a mature title for the DS, which sold only 89,000 units in March.

Many have discussed the Wii and DS audiences' apparent resistance to hardcore games. Discussing the sales of Nintendo games in February, TWG News' said, "t will be very interesting to see how well MadWorld and GTA: ChinaTown Wars do on the Wii and DS in March. If these hardcore games can’t sell well on each of these systems, then people should just give up trying." I wouldn't go that far, but it's clear that, despite the fact that there are more Wiis out there than any single other console and the DS crushes everything else, the people that own these Nintendo platforms are not using their consoles in the same way that 360 and Playstation owners use theirs. To get a better sense of that difference, I find it helpful to think about board games:

You've probably played Battleship. It's a simple game where two players, unable to see each others' boards, fire shots at coordinates, discovering and trying to sink his opponent's ships based only on knowing whether each shot hit or missed. It's a classic for a reason; the game mechanics themselves are time-tested, having been invented in the early 1900s, and so simple you could play the game with a pencil and paper if you wanted to.

It's easy to learn, takes a minute or two to start up and to take down, and games last maybe ten or twenty minutes apiece. It has this in common with most of the other board games that you might find in the board game aisle at your local Target.

Contrast this with another game of naval warface:

Where Battleship's rules take a minute or Two to explain, the first time you play Axis & Allies you will likely spend ten to twenty minutes -- the time of a full game of battleship -- listening to someone explain the rules or reading the directions of Axis and Allies. After this, you will still need to refer to the rulebook or a knowledgable other player frequently to clarify details. Axis & Allies comes with charts, graphs, and cards that can change how a piece works in the middle of a game. It also takes 4-5 hours to play, which are often spread across several days as the board is left on a table somewhere.

Axis & Allies is by no means the most complex board game out there. There are a lot of great complex board games: pretty much any board game put out by Fantasy Flight Games, Avalon Hill, or any game company from mainland Europe is going to fit that description. All of these games require a lot of time buy in just to learn how to play the game, and usually take a lot of time to play through each game. Backbreaking amounts of time.

People love these games. Some people love to play them all the time. Other people, like myself, enjoy playing them every once in a while. Most people, however, look at an Axis and Allies board, or see the hour it takes just to break all the cardboard markers out of their cutouts when first playing Arkham Horror, and they run for the hills.

Many of these people who run away would happily play a game of Battleship, or Connect Four, or Pictionary, or Sorry, or, well, you get the idea. It is these people that form most of the audience for the Wii games out there.

When I use Wii games, I also use them more like board games. When I have a friend from out of town come to visit, and we're looking for something to do, I'll break out Steven Spielberg Presents Boom Blox. When my fiancée's parents come down for the weekend, I might put in Wii Sports. I played MadWorld, but I rented it. When I buy games for the Wii, it is to play those games with other people and, these days, the other people I play games with aren't usually "hardcore." I am not alone in this.

When you look at the top selling Wii games, you don't see a lot of single player or traditional game titles. What you do see are, for the most part, games that you can pick up and play with other people who happen to be around. Even Wii Fit, which I use mostly for personal exercise, has a serious set of minigames that can be enjoyed by a group of people.

In short, as consoles become more accessible and penetrate the market deeper, the difference between video games and regular games is shrinking in peoples eyes. The Wii is being used the same way that cards and board games have been used for millenia. Looked at in this way, the Wii isn't the odd man out, it's a "market correction," showing the hardcore gaming market to be the niche that it really is.

All of this is not to say that hardcore and mature games do not have a place on the Wii. Sega was, reportedly, happy with the apparently meager sales of MadWorld. Considering what they must have saved on asset generation in that game, between the lower res and polygon requirements of the Wii and a pallete made up of four colors (one of which is reserved for UI), I'm sure they are happy. The trick is to manage your expectations.

Wii Fit - Motivational Mechanics

Recently my fiancee and I got a new Wii Fit. We'd been looking for one for a few weeks and we finally saw them on sale. For the past three days I have been on an exciting fitness journey with my Wii Fit, and I have come to share my experiences with you, the reader.

The genius of the Wii Fit is that it does essentially everything in its power to make you want to get fit. I would be lying if I said that I am in tip-top shape. The fact of the matter is that I have only ever been thin while I was a heavy smoker, and I have never really gotten into regular excercise when it wasn't a part of a medically mandated physical therapy plan.

The reason that physical therapy worked for me was because I had 1) serious back issues that prevented me from being productive 2) a damn good physical therapist 3)enough free time to set aside half an hour a day to exercising.

Twice a week I would go to the therapists office, he would walk me through my exercises to make sure I was doing them right, and he would check in on the progress I made. When I had been working he would approve, when I slacked he would know about it. After a while I noticed the progress I was making myself. After that not only did I do my exersices, I actually pushed myself. About a month after I stopped therapy, I stopped doing my exercises.

The Wii fit provides the same kind of structure that my therapist did. For one, it gives me a small scale pat-on-the-back reward message every day that I do it, and reinforces more if I practice every day. This is just enough to make me think about how to fit the Wii fit into my daily schedule, or at least has been enough to do so for the past few days.

Next, it provides a look at progress over time. I can see where I started weight wise (I'm not telling), and "Wii Fit Age"-wise (40) . While my weight has not dramatically decreased over the past three days, I have noticed a significant drop in my Wii Fit Age (to 27) and, you know what? This is enough to make me want to keep playing.

Thirdly, it actually monitors my progress in each of the exercises I'm doing. Now, I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that a balance board is going to tell me whether I'm doing an exercise exactly right or not, but between the balance feedback and the model of the person doing the exercises on screen I no longer have the crippling "I can't be doing this right" feeling that I get when trying to do exercises on my own.

The last thing I want to talk about is the co-motivation it uses. Every time you see your score on a particular exercise, you see it in a full leaderboard of everyone who uses the wii fit. If my fiancee does better than me in an activity this gives me a powerful motivation to do a little better. It also periodically asks us to notice how the other one is doing, encouraging co-motivation outside of the game as well.

As my studies have shown me, motivation is the biggest component to education and behavior change. You want someone to do something, you have to make sure they want to do it. So far, Wii fit is doing a great job of really making me want to spend a little time every day exercising.

At the moment I don't have any real criticisms of Wii Fit. Yes, it requires exercise but I signed on for that. Yes, it's more of a tool than a game but, you know what, it's a really neat tool for motivating exercise at a fraction of the cost of a personal trainer. What I would love to see is an in-gym version of this kind of program with the same constant support, schedule flexibility, and convenience factor.

We'll see how I feel about it in a couple weeks.