The Curator on how the Wii filled a void left by board games.
“Wii are the World”
– September 12, 2008
The Curator on how the Wii filled a void left by board games.
About the Author
Richard Clark (Co-Founder/Editor-in-Chief) has spent his entire life writing, reading, listening, and playing. He has a Bachelors in Theology from the Baptist College of Florida and has a Master of Arts in Theology and the Arts from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He lives in Louisville, KY where he is the classroom technology manager at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In addition to writing at Christ and Pop Culture, he is also a staff writer for Kill Screen Magazine's website and has written for various other outlets such as Paste, Gamasutra, and Collide.
Email: deadyetliving [at] gmail [dot] com. Twitter: @deadyetliving. Xbox Live: deadyetliving 
What hole? What death? We play board games all the time. Our only dilemma is choosing which friends to exclude, since they all like to play. I can get people to come over anytime to play board games, but I doubt if I called people up and said, “Hey, you wanna come over and play the Wii?” that I would get near as positive a response.
As far as the Wii and community goes. I haven’t really seen this whole communal revolution thing happen. Every last person I know who got a Wii was positively enchanted by the novelty of it (I was too and desperately wanted one*) and lauded it as something that would change the way things were. There didn’t end up happening. The whole community thing never happened. Maybe Americans (or at least those in OC) are so built into their individualism or maybe it was that the Wii never ended up delivering much more beyond the novelty experience, but now they either sit unplayed and gathering dust as if grinding rep or they’re being used to play Rockband and Guitar Hero.
*note: time heals a multitude of wants.
The Danes last blog post..20080911
“We play board games all the time. Our only dilemma is choosing which friends to exclude, since they all like to play. I can get people to come over anytime to play board games, but I doubt if I called people up and said, “Hey, you wanna come over and play the Wii?” that I would get near as positive a response.”
I’ve had the same experience, though I have a bit more hope for the future of the Wii, assuming Nintendo doesn’t screw it up. From what I can tell a lot of my friends aren’t crazy about the Wii because the games, as you say, do seem to come across as shallow novelty items. Nintendo needs to embrace the intuitive control thing and move on to something more substantial and worthwhile. I address this more in depth here.
Richard Clarks last blog post..I Remembered, but I Had Forgotten