I want a Wii
Matthew Baxter - 1/22/2007
"I wanted a wee, but it’s gone away now".
When he was 2, if my son said this we would automatically reach for the Anti-bac and start looking for a wet patch on the sofa, the carpet, the cat, whatever. But when he said it to me last week I knew what he meant, and it wasn’t that.
He’s 6 now, and has had computers, games consoles and various recorded media devices around all his life. For him, interacting with a screen via a mouse or controller is as natural as interacting with a person via a sword, hockey-stick or boxing-glove; in fact more so, as he’s never wielded a sword or worn a boxing-glove in real life, only in games, and games are a world of their own. Even the most realistic game is not real, and even the most engrossed gamer is aware of that.
So the ads hooked him on the idea of a more ‘physical’ interaction, but in practise it was disappointing. If you want to get the full rush of banging someone on the head with a stick, you’ve just got to bang someone on the head with a stick. Tears, running away, guilt and fear of revenge are part of the thrill. For someone my age – even someone who uses a computer every day – a more physical interaction implies a more precise control that we cack-handedly fail to manage with mouse or controller. It keeps things familiar for us, because we do not have that instinctive relationship with the equipment. We operate it – we don’t really feel it.
What I find fascinating is the way in which children of my son’s age and younger do interact instinctively. On the PS2 or our bashed-up old Powerbook my son pilots his way using whatever means available as if he is directly linked to the device, and he is by no means unique in this. He can work other devices without the need for instructions; his understanding of them is completely natural.
So here I am back on convergence again in a way – this time between people and technology. For people in the communications business this is a real revolution, and one that we haven’t really thought about: As we rush to create an interactive experience which we believe to be more ‘real’ a whole new generation of people are growing up for whom the controller and mouse experience is as much or more of a ‘real’ interaction as any unsatisfactorarily approximated by ‘Wii’.
It’s old people who need to ‘Wii’ more often.