I started writing a response to my chime in post yesterday, which has now gotten entirely too long and resulted in this second post - so, here’s my additional thoughts and the view gathered from the roundtable that got me started.

We had a university professor there with us, who has actually been researching the Wii and its audience - what makes it such an attractive system for the masses. And he’s come up with some interesting points that I want to add, specifically about how motion is used on the Wii.

With the Wii, the game isn’t just played inside the TV, but in your living room too. Take Wii sports for instance -

You can play Tennis by just waggling the remote while laying on your couch, and that’s probably why we never play Wii Tennis alone. But if you have friends and family over and you decide to play Tennis, people will be standing up, getting into the game, doing big swings and such, even though the only action required is a small waggle.

Same for bowling, I’ve seen people, including myself, take the steps you would normally take before throwing the ball. So the game isn’t just inside your TV anymore, it’s also a game of “showing off” to your friends.

But let’s look at other Nintendo titles and their use of motion.

Mario Galaxy, what motion did it use? Waggling. You could use your pointer to move that star to gather stardust, but that didn’t require much movement at all. And there was also Zelda TP, where players used waggling for attacks, and the pointer for aiming the bow. The point is that both these titles make really simple use of the motion controller. But why?

We had some guys from EA around the table, some of whom had worked on SSX Blur for the Wii. SSX Blur was basically a launch title (February 27, 2007), and Nintendo told them they had to use the Wii controller to its fullest. So they did, here’s a description of the controls from Wikipedia:

The game control uses both the Wii Remote and the Nunchuk controller. Movement, speed, and jumping is controlled through the Nunchuk, while, when in the air, the Wii Remote is used to perform tricks. The Wii Remote is also used for throwing snowballs at targets or foes during a race.

But then, that same year, Nintendo launched Mario Galaxy (November 12, 2007) with the controls mentioned previously. So why tell developers to use the controls to its fullest, while barely using them for their own titles?

Some games have some overly complicated controls, the idea being to get the most from the motions, but the result often having a negative effect on the gameplay. So the question that developers need to ask themselves is - “Will the enhance the experience of the user? Will it immerse the user in the game?”.

We probably all had this problem with one game or another on the Wii. We’ve tried to do a motion to perform an action on-screen, but the result was a completely different action or none at all. I was a big fan of Cooking Mama on the DS for instance, so when it came out on the Wii I bought it, for me and the wife - but returned it the week after because we couldn’t get half the actions to respond correctly.

Okay, I’ve talked enough, now it’s your turn.