TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Woo

I was shamefully unable to leverage my super-VIP insider access to get access to a Wii before last week, when Nintendo sent a free one to more or less every magazine in the office except us. I played the one they sent to our kids’ mags with one of their staffers, a non-gamer, and was beaten resoundingly. That alone seemed to vindicate the Nintendo agenda here: she won her first point against the AI in Wii Sports tennis, and it’s hard to think of a game on any other platform that a non-gamer could succeed at so immediately.

But that intuitiveness doesn’t quite last. When the novelty of waving something around rather than mashing buttons wore off, neither of us were clear on how our avatar’s movements related to our own. Frequently they’d do the exact opposite of the real-world motion. Having played on Tim’s a lot more now that it’s officially out in the UK, I still don’t think it entirely works.

Last night was just six people messing around, which is about as casual as gaming gets. But even in that environment at least half of us kept getting stuck in situations where the game thought we were doing the opposite of what we really were, and screwed up the shot. Personally my problem with these situations was that I didn’t know how to avoid them: it usually lost track of me when I was moving very quickly, but if I tried slowing down so it could keep up, it didn’t register what I was doing as movement at all. In the end I found myself creeping the controller slowly back to where my avatar was holding it, slowly enough that the game didn’t know I was doing it, then pulling it back to where I wanted it at a Wii-friendly speed. In other words, I spent more time thinking about the control mechanism than I would have with a mouse-driven golf sim.

We did have a fantastic doubles match of tennis, and for a while I really enjoyed golf, but in both cases it was when I treated it as an abstract game rather than the real sport that it started to make sense. I started doing really well in tennis when I finally accepted that the game couldn’t care less which way I swing the racket, only when I swing it. I have a feeling each mini-game has an abstraction like this that I need to learn before it starts behaving the way I expect it to – in fact perhaps they’re all about timing and speed rather than the actual nature of your movement.

It gets said a lot that you do better when you just play it like the sport and don’t think about the controls, but it never worked out that way for me. I’ve played a lot of golf, I still play a lot of tennis, and I know how balls behave. Most of the time Wii Sports is close enough to attribute the difference to lag or ineptness on my part, but for one in five shots it ignores your movement completely or does the exact opposite of you. And the only way I can avoid that happening is by forgetting about the real action and doing what I know the game will register.

That can be great fun, but it’s not what I thought the point was. And when we’re getting our parents or spouses into gaming, we shouldn’t ever have to start an explaination with “It’s really just about…” That’s what they already think games are, fancy graphics hiding simple timing challenges. I wish their introduction to our world could be with something artful, sophisticated or profound, something that shows games as worlds more than toys.

I think there are going to be some incredible games on the Wii, but now I think they’re not going to be very skill-based. Now I want to play games that relish in how satisfying the motions are – because they are – rather than demanding a level of performance from you that forces you to strip away the illusion and work out what the game’s really measuring: timing or speed alone rather than the direction and arc of your movements. Ironically I think I’m going to enjoy the single-player games more than the multiplayer ones, because multiplayer is always going to be about who can best grok the system. In fact the thing I keep thinking about is a Half-Life 2 port – sucking up and firing things out with the gravity gun would be five times more satisfying if it was done with a grabbing and a punching gesture than it is with two mouse-clicks.