Practicalmadness

Some useful (no pun intended) lessons from a feature story in the new issue of Time about Nintendo’s upcoming Wii video game console:

“The one topic we’ve considered and debated at Nintendo for a very long time is, Why do people who don’t play video games not play them?” Iwata has been asking himself, and his employees, that question for the past five years. And what Iwata has noticed is something that most gamers have long ago forgotten: to nongamers, video games are really hard. … The standard video-game controller is a kind of Siamese-twin affair, two joysticks fused together and studded with buttons, two triggers and a four-way toggle switch called a d-pad. In a game like Halo, players have to manipulate both joysticks simultaneously while working both triggers and pounding half a dozen buttons at the same time. The learning curve is steep.

That presents a problem of what engineers call interface design: How do you make it easier for players to tell the machine what they want it to do? “During the past five years, we were always telling them we have to do something new, something very different,” Miyamoto says (like Iwata, he speaks through an interpreter). “And the game interface has to be the key. Without changing the interface we could not attract nongamers.”

Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don’t listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal…but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. “[Wii] was unimaginable for them,” Iwata says. “And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds.”

And here’s the second notion: Cutting-edge design has become more important than cutting-edge technology. There is a persistent belief among engineers that consumers want more power and more features. That is incorrect. Look at Apple’s iPod, a device that didn’t and doesn’t do much more than the competition. It won because it’s easier, and sexier, to use. In many ways, Nintendo is the Apple of the gaming world, and it’s betting its future on the same wisdom.

About a week ago I bought myself a Nintendo DS. I like to play simple (as in, Tetris-simple) video games on the train, and I finally got bored enough with the solitaire game on my iPod to look at some alternatives. I was drawn to the DS the instant I saw three words on its package: Mario Kart included. I love Super Mario Kart. As well as Super Mario All-Stars, Mega Man X, Donkey Kong Country, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past — all the great old games for the now-ancient Super NES we had when I was in middle school.

I’m loving my DS precisely because it is everything the Xbox 360, PS2 and even the PSP are not: simple, tactile and easy as pie to use. I even love the fact that though the DS has Wi-Fi, it doesn’t have built-in functions for checking e-mail or surfing the web. It does one thing really well — it plays fun video games — and is designed around the user, not a marketing campaign or a feature set.

And I love the comment in the article about surprising customers. I think the greatest success and the most fun in the technology business comes when you offer people something they would never have expected or asked for. Like the “Virtual Console” feature planned for the Wii system coming out this fall: I could have expected a video game company to come out with some crazy high-def kill-em-all game I wouldn’t want to play, or to make the controllers rumble so as to make the experience of getting killed by some horrible 3D creature more “extreme.” But I could never have imagined that a game system coming out in 2006 would let me indulge my crazy desire to play Super Mario Bros. 3 at three in the morning. Of course, it seems obvious in retrospect, but so does any truly great idea.