But Zakkiel, these are all points where you are assuming negative reactions will take place, and that they will remain long after they have investigated the experience further. That is why I write:
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So we shouldn't be surprised when people are stunned or challenged by the name. They're just being asked a question they've never been asked before: What am I? They're being put in the position to define, not be dictated to. They're being put in the position to experience, not merely view. And whether that results in Wii-jokes, or exclamation, or curiousity, or resoluteness, or even puzzled introspection, these things are all just different ways that people undertake discovery.
I mean to show that these things aren't negative at all. These reactions are occuring because the viewer is given a chance to discover an entirely new experience.
"Wii? What is that? Doesn't that sound like...? Doesn't that mean...? Let me try it out... I gotta tell my buddies at the watercooler!"
To criticize it as otherwise is to paint people as beings without curiousity, as creatures always on the prowl to destroy, and as destructive individuals who won't even take a moment to look at what this strange new thing is which causes people to laugh and wave their arms about. These are one-dimensional entities lacking merit and imagination, faith and excitement.
You talk of infantilism, but that's a word deliberately chosen when cuteness is more accessible. You mention a lack of input where uniqueness and unconventionality are instead the necessary risks when you dare to do more than reformulate. And you talk of awkwardness...
How can it be labelled awkward when the english language is the most bastardized, rule-breaking, irksome, rebellious, mutable, exciting language on the planet? How can it be awkward when feng shui isn't pronounced how it's spelled at all, yet it's a trend? When middle-america celebrity-watchers put Cruz after Penelope and instantly know how to pronounce it? When "Inagatadavita" is the song my friend always selects when we're doing karaoke? When "supercalifrajilistic expialidocious" was given to adults and children alike without any hint as to how its spelled, and then won an Oscar award? When no one needed to know that edelweiss was a flower when they heard it in "The Sound of Music"? And where no one in my high school social studies class was offput for long upon discovering Djibouti?
This is an awkwardness which, like the infantilism and the perception of recklessness, like the one dimensional beings that lack any inner light of curiousity or whimsy... This is an awkwardness which only exists because the future, and our potential, our whimsy and lightness and creativity and ability to laugh, is being discarded so readily and immediately.
I will address the sales issue now, since you wish me to. I urge you not to believe in a world of dark one-dimensional creatures. I urge you not to trap our experiences and emotions and desires in boxes and compartments. I urge you, I entreat you, to believe in a world where we can be curious, where we can laugh, where we can adapt to new things and grow to love them, and where this inclusiveness, this openness is celebrated, not buried underneath pessimism and distrust.
I urge you to do this because with regards to sales... it will not matter an ounce how many sales at all the Wii makes if such a world does not exist. And if we do not believe that such a world CAN ever exist, if we do not believe that people can be curious and level-headed instead of snide and malicious, that humans have a capacity for experience such that new things will not send us running in fear only to return with torches and pitchforks and blindness and anger...
If we end up believing that that a world with more in it is not even at all possible, then the issue of the Wii's success is moot, for play would soon cease to have meaning, gaming would lose its appeal, and fun - that inexact property that Nintendo tries to capture and share - fun would be a cruel joke on a pitiful existence.
Yet you ask me again about sales.
Screw the world, screw the people, screw every notion of right or wrong or good or bad or just or wise. Will the Wii sell? Will it succeed? Will it give me the userbase that I want for my own satisfaction, without regard for anyone else's?
I think the only way to answer your question is to ask you one of my own. Will you buy the Wii? Because every customer will be asked that same exact question. And if you buy the system, and you think that the world isn't such a terrible place, that there's some real value in your purchase, and that others in the same exact situation would do the exact same thing, odds are that you will find satisfaction more often than not.
~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com
P.S. That was fun!
Topic: The Name Wii: Why I Don't Like It (Read 29787 times)
