No Wii Puns Here

As the five out of seven of you who read this blog probably know, Nintendo recently shed the Revolution alias of its next gaming console meanwhile unveiling the true moniker of the machine: Wii. Pronounced "Wee", the name has unleashed a veritable Katrina upon the internet, drowning most logical people in a flood of childish puns and cries of anguish from many people who call video games their hobby. But, while I can't say that I haven't laughed at some of the puns, I have read in full every text that has opined upon both the name and the system that I have encountered and I have come to only one conclusion about what it all means. The Wii is not for me.

Basically, I am the kind of consumer that Nintendo is trying to avoid because I and my ilk play games already. We are comfortable with dual analog sticks controlling avatar motion and viewing angle simultaneously. We are comfortable memorizing and practicing long strings of button combinations in order to pull off that one uber, game-winning move. But, there are less of us in the world than there are people who really don't give a rip about any of that. Those people just want to have fun. The Wii is for those people and the name of the machine is Nintendo's ultimate declaration of its shift in market focus.

Nintendo is setting itself apart from its two primary competitors by neither making a direct reference to games a la the Playstation 3 nor a half-hearted attempt, as is the Xbox brand, at creating an "extreme" image by putting as many 'X's or 'Z's as possible into the name. While I don't see Wii as being a label that is going against current marketing trends in names for technological devices, it does what I believe it is intended to do which is to set itself apart from the direct competition. Wii is after all, a simple, rather friendly name despite the fact that it takes a whole paragraph of text to explain itself.

In the end, I am still interested in the machine and what it will be able to do. Despite the fact that it is "not for me", I still want to belong to what it stands for, that is, a different way of thinking about games. Viva la Wii.