The Dark Side Of The Wii

As a rule, video games are played in the bedrooms of teenagers. When they reach the age of ten or so, you buy them a games console (because all their friends have got one after all) and then they disappear into their room for lengthy periods, surfacing only for toilet breaks and to stock up on savoury snacks washed down with fizzy drinks.

The pattern was changed with the release of Nintendo’s Wii console. The Wii was not a console to be confined to a child’s bedroom – it was a console to be positioned in the living room, wired up to a huge flat screen TV for preference. There are a number of reasons for this.

Firstly, the special motion sensitive controllers used by the Wii means that games are played in a much more intuitive manner. So it is easier to learn games – you don’t need to remember that the X button is to punch, the Y button controls your laser and the Z button launches your rockets. As a matter of fact, Wii games are so simple to learn that even adults can pick them up in just a few minutes.

There is also a certain amount of exercise involved in playing Wii games due to the physical element of the game control. It’s not just games like Wii Fit, which are designed to give you exercise of course – almost all Wii games require you to get moving about to a greater or lesser extent. That means that you need space to play them in.

For some reason, which is difficult to quantify precisely, Wii games and the Wii console seem to have a more social element than has been seen up to now with other PC or console games. You can ”play the computer” if you want of course, but Wii games tend to be much more fun as part of a group of gamers.

Maybe it’s because you are jumping around, waving your hands about like a lunatic that gives the Wii group appeal. Whatever the reason, the Wii is most enjoyable as a group activity.

As cheesy as it sounds, the Wii is, very genuinely, great fun for children of all ages. Playing Wii games can become a social event. They can help you to exercise and lose weight – and most important of all, they are a lot of fun. The Wii has taken gaming out of the teenage bedroom and put it right in the middle of the family living room.

This might be one possible explanation as to why Nintendo enjoyed such success when it went over to the dark side with the release of a black Wii console in Europe prior to Christmas. It was extremely popular with customers, maybe because the colour matched the other electronic devices in the family living room. At the moment, the black Wii is not on sale in the U.S. – but it should arrive soon.