One of Nintendo's core strategies with the Wii and DS has been to appeal to a wide audience through accessible gameplay, intuitive hardware and family-friendly intellectual properties.
But company president and CEO Satoru Iwata said if the company wants to further expand, it needs to help address a fundamental problem with the video game industry: a lack of social acceptance.
"Of course, we should try our best to produce appealing products which keep users excited, but on the other hand, it is a big problem if such excitement causes family troubles or affects a user's life balance," he said in a Q&A session during a shareholders meeting last week.
"I believe that the social acceptance of video games will never improve if we just aim for user absorption without being aware of the potential problems," he added.
Nintendo conducted a survey last year in Tokyo about the social acceptance of video games. Eighteen percent of respondents said they "like [games] very much" -- TV and movies had 46 percent and 33 percent of respondents reacting positively. It's one of Nintendo's long-term goals to improve social acceptance, Iwata said.
Iwata added that Nintendo once "seriously considered" implementing a hardware function that would "force games to stop mandatorily." The function would allow parents to set hard-line restrictions on their kids' gaming time.
"However, we also considered how the players would feel if the game suddenly stopped during an exciting part," Iwata said. Instead, the Nintendo Wii has a time log that parents can review that shows how long games were played.
Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 have various parental controls -- the Xbox 360 has a "Family Timer" feature that lets parents set the amount of time kids can use the console.
Iwata said that Nintendo is exploring an option for the 3DS that gives parents control over playing time. "Whether it will be similar to the one for Wii or we may add something more has not been decided," he said.
"Nintendo is seriously considering such measures -- probably the most earnestly in this industry," said Iwata. "Our arguments are so serious that people might be surprised if they were aware that a video game company like Nintendo is having such arguments internally. We believe that we will never be able to improve the social acceptance of video games without careful consideration of this challenge."
This reminds me of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. When I first played it, I got stuck at one of the dungeons. At the beginning of the dungeon, there was a heart, that could be collected, whenever I died. After several attempts to solve this dungeon, I saw, that the heart, was not there anymore. I was very frustrated at this moment and stopped playing for that evening.
When I started the game the next time, I found the heart, where I it always was and mastered the dungeon in the next try. It was as if the game counted the failures and decided to make it impossible for me to play further. This helped me to overcome my frustration and to master the game. I still don't know, if that was a bug or intentionally, but it was the right thing to happen at this moment.
That is very interesting, Christian...I wonder if they have really thought of it this way...it could be psychologically implemented. Wiifit has something like that too, that reminds you to take breaks...
Ah, so this is the reason for the daily game logs on the Wii message board! That's very fascinating, and I never considered its usefullness for parents before. I personally enjoy it to track how much time I spend playing games - 20 minutes on Castlevania, 40 minutes on Metroid, an hour on Strong Bad.
Nintendo was very keen to recognize the permanent decline of the videogame market, especially in Japan, whose population is also declining. This was their modus operandi for embracing Innovative Disruption and the Blue Ocean Strategey, and it is encouraging to see that they're still struggling to discover new ways to expand the market.
You can also see the ideal of not allowing video games to consume one's life in titles like Brain Training and Nintendogs and Clubhouse Games and Wii Sports and Wii Play. It's refreshing to just play around for a few minutes at a time.
Its great the Nintendo is taking issues like this very seriously. Although I really think that "Social Acceptance" is more than just give parents tools to control their childrens. Its like saying that the prohibition of the minimun dose would end the addiction problem. I really think psychological studies are needed here. To put games in a strong social & educational direction. One example, for me, is Assasins Creed 2 where as you travel along the Italy of the renaissance, in Florence, Venezia etc you are able to unlock databases about important people, events and architecture of real renaissance history (some parts are fictional of course, but the "history lesson" is there).
We should find ways to parents to understand that videogame are not a waste of time. The influence of this industry in the every day life of a kid is probably bigger than movies, tv shows or maybe, even, some sports. An introduction to this is "What Kids Learn That's POSITIVE from Playing Computer Games" by Marc Prensky
Hope I made myself clear, my english isnt perfect lol :]
More insight can be gathered from the book "Nintendo Magic" on how Nintendo sees their place in the lives of people. I think what Nintendo means is that games should co-exist with the other interests and responsibilities a player has outside of games.
@Jose: Your English is perfectly fine, and you made some wonderful points. As I (jokingly) tell my girlfriend, who's Colombian, "Your English is better than most Americans."
The best way to bring parents into the fold, of course, is to get them interested in videogames, too. This shouldn't be a strange notion in the year 2010. Today's parents grew up around Pong, Space Invaders, Atari...and the NES. Expanding the market means appealing to these older age groups, and they will have their own wants and desires.
I'm reminded of something I see at the Mall of America every holiday season. From Thanksgiving to New Years Day, Nintendo has a large booth oustide the park-formerly-known-as-Camp-Snoopy. They have many Wii and DS games available to play, including the big blockbuster hits like Wii Fit and Mario Kart and Wii Sports Resort, and some of other key titles from third parties (I remember Guitar Hero last year).
What's remarkable is that Nintendo is specifically targeting families - parents, grandparents, and children alike. Everybody is encouraged to play. And none of Nintendo's rivals are doing this.
Look, sooner or later, we Generation X'rs are going to be too old and too busy raising families to devote much money or time on videogames. The traditional core market is fading, and you're going to have to expand the appeal of electronic gaming (there's the old Katz-Kunkel-Wurley phrase) to the rest of the population. You're going to have to break down those social barriers. The only alternative is to follow the path of pinball machines....
TV has PBS, Discovery, History Channel etc. TV also has the Sopranos, Lost and Playboy Channel.
We need to stop thinking in terms of "games" and thinking in terms of the digital education and entertainment software medium.
There is an opportunity to make the console more than a gaming platform. I always thought this was Microsoft's vision for the xbox... to make it a central computing appliance for the family.
You don't have to make gaming more appealing, you just have to expand your product offerings to things other than games.
EDIT:
Imagine an xbox that is always on, with wifi connections to your smart phone, your tablet/e-reader/pda pad thingie/music pod/ etc.
You sit down and instead of a game, you load up a virtual tour that uses some clever mix of streatviews and 3d rendering to simulate an actual tour of anywhere in the world. Do you think the people in Nigeria all live in huts? Take a virtual walking tour or bus tour of the capitol. See the people and see the streets and the shops and get a near first hand idea of what it's actually like there. Some users may upload their own custom tours with narration and similar to youtube, some will be favorited by many many others.
You load up your language lesson for the day and spend a few minutes a day learning to speak Japanese.
Your pda / pad thing also serves as your remote to your tv, dvr, stereo, etc. One minute you're reading a graphic novel, the next you're reading & showing an animated story book to your little ones before bed. Later you're inputting the gps address info in advance to a new destination you're driving to tomorrow. You open the homework share of your oldest and review the essay homework assignment waiting there. You go to bed. You wake up and go to the kitchen and with the help of RFID you know that you're out of milk, bread, and toothpaste and you're notified and given the option to add them to the grocery list and even submitted to the local grocery story where they can be pre-bagged for you for a small convenience fee and delivered for an additional fee.
You pour a glass of orange juice, toast a bagel and the caloric intake is added to your dietary log. Perhaps you use simple always on voice commands "I ate 6 spoons of ice cream and a bowl of spaghettii." The computer asks you if the spaghetti had meatballs. You lie because you feel guitly. Your heart rate and pedometer stats are also logged. Based on the lights, stove, a/c, heater, and appliances that are running, your energy consumption can be seen in real time. The weather report is always instantly available with a single click on most types of devices.
You get into an argument with your spouse over something and somebody has written some clever (or not so clever) marital consulting software that decides you were wrong and should appologize. Over time it determines the overall health of your marriage. (maybe this is too creepy an example).
Someone creates a collar that can read the mood of your dog or cat and communicate it to you through your device. Your phone rings and your dogs tells you he's hungry, happy, needs to pee or poo, etc.
A new market emerges for personal data analytics software that takes various accumulated personal data and helps the user/family improve themselves, their lives, each other. You run some analytics against your daily diary (and part of this diary is compiled for you) and you can tell what things make you happy, what makes you sad. Maybe the weather combined with a certain diet that day and certain chores were a very bad combination.
Seriously though when did we stop trying to make software that empowers people and makes our lives easier and enables us to make better choices? I thought Bill Gates' ultimate dream was to make this type of computing ubiquitous. Instead the xbox is just about games. Apple seems to be doing a better job of realizing Gates' dream. But i digress....
Imagine if Nintendo decided to just re-invent home computing by giving us what we always wanted anyway... networked appliances throughout our homes from stereo and tv to coffee makers and alarm clocks and water proof e-readersmp3 players for the bathroom. They could be the new Sony of the 80's. Instead of software hacking of the 90's and 00's, hardware hacking becomes the new "dot com" phenomenon as everyone is trying to invent new devices that plug into the home network and provide new capabilities and do new things. But i digress some more...
Games today should be considered somewhat dangerous... like smoking and alcohol use. They are by and large a way of spending time that doesn't really improve us or allow us to improve ourselves and some may in fact hurt our personal and psychological development. In that sense there is an opportunity cost and potentially social & psychological costs to playing them. Certainly they are fun but they should be enjoyed in moderation. But some people will simply never be gamers and frankly they wont be missing a damned thing.
It's great to know that Nintendo is thinking about this. But doing so, I wonder if they somehow make games more accessible and not as time-consuming as they are right now.
IMO, today's games are just way too long to provide enough fun to set the controller down and be on with our lives. It grabs your attention, and will not let it go... for hours and hours and hours. And all those for nothing truly constructive. :(
And this is why I think games are not as socially accepted when compared to other entertainment venues like music, movie, or TV.
Oh, and also, I think the characteristic of games where they're not as socially involved as other experiences is also affecting this trend. (e.g. when going to movies, it's a social experience, of being in one room, sharing the same movie, or watching TV together, or listening to music or even producing and sharing the music together. But when playing games, most of the time, you are sitting alone, not paying attention to anything other than what's going on in the screen. :( Sad.)
By social experiences he only meant that you could get a room full of people and watch together whereas gaming is typically more isolated (eg. a kid off playing by himself whilst his family is in the living room watching a movie together).
As for waste of time, certainly the majority of programming is but there's still some educational programming on channels like PBS, Discovery, Animal Planet, History, TLC, Travel, Food, etc.
I would agree that if Nintendo's debate is about "How can we make that which should not be respectable, respectable..." then they're heading into evil territory.
When I started the game the next time, I found the heart, where I it always was and mastered the dungeon in the next try. It was as if the game counted the failures and decided to make it impossible for me to play further. This helped me to overcome my frustration and to master the game. I still don't know, if that was a bug or intentionally, but it was the right thing to happen at this moment.
Nintendo was very keen to recognize the permanent decline of the videogame market, especially in Japan, whose population is also declining. This was their modus operandi for embracing Innovative Disruption and the Blue Ocean Strategey, and it is encouraging to see that they're still struggling to discover new ways to expand the market.
You can also see the ideal of not allowing video games to consume one's life in titles like Brain Training and Nintendogs and Clubhouse Games and Wii Sports and Wii Play. It's refreshing to just play around for a few minutes at a time.
We should find ways to parents to understand that videogame are not a waste of time. The influence of this industry in the every day life of a kid is probably bigger than movies, tv shows or maybe, even, some sports. An introduction to this is "What Kids Learn That's POSITIVE from Playing Computer Games" by Marc Prensky
Hope I made myself clear, my english isnt perfect lol :]
The best way to bring parents into the fold, of course, is to get them interested in videogames, too. This shouldn't be a strange notion in the year 2010. Today's parents grew up around Pong, Space Invaders, Atari...and the NES. Expanding the market means appealing to these older age groups, and they will have their own wants and desires.
I'm reminded of something I see at the Mall of America every holiday season. From Thanksgiving to New Years Day, Nintendo has a large booth oustide the park-formerly-known-as-Camp-Snoopy. They have many Wii and DS games available to play, including the big blockbuster hits like Wii Fit and Mario Kart and Wii Sports Resort, and some of other key titles from third parties (I remember Guitar Hero last year).
What's remarkable is that Nintendo is specifically targeting families - parents, grandparents, and children alike. Everybody is encouraged to play. And none of Nintendo's rivals are doing this.
Look, sooner or later, we Generation X'rs are going to be too old and too busy raising families to devote much money or time on videogames. The traditional core market is fading, and you're going to have to expand the appeal of electronic gaming (there's the old Katz-Kunkel-Wurley phrase) to the rest of the population. You're going to have to break down those social barriers. The only alternative is to follow the path of pinball machines....
TV has PBS, Discovery, History Channel etc. TV also has the Sopranos, Lost and Playboy Channel.
We need to stop thinking in terms of "games" and thinking in terms of the digital education and entertainment software medium.
There is an opportunity to make the console more than a gaming platform. I always thought this was Microsoft's vision for the xbox... to make it a central computing appliance for the family.
You don't have to make gaming more appealing, you just have to expand your product offerings to things other than games.
EDIT:
Imagine an xbox that is always on, with wifi connections to your smart phone, your tablet/e-reader/pda pad thingie/music pod/ etc.
You sit down and instead of a game, you load up a virtual tour that uses some clever mix of streatviews and 3d rendering to simulate an actual tour of anywhere in the world. Do you think the people in Nigeria all live in huts? Take a virtual walking tour or bus tour of the capitol. See the people and see the streets and the shops and get a near first hand idea of what it's actually like there. Some users may upload their own custom tours with narration and similar to youtube, some will be favorited by many many others.
You load up your language lesson for the day and spend a few minutes a day learning to speak Japanese.
Your pda / pad thing also serves as your remote to your tv, dvr, stereo, etc. One minute you're reading a graphic novel, the next you're reading & showing an animated story book to your little ones before bed. Later you're inputting the gps address info in advance to a new destination you're driving to tomorrow. You open the homework share of your oldest and review the essay homework assignment waiting there. You go to bed. You wake up and go to the kitchen and with the help of RFID you know that you're out of milk, bread, and toothpaste and you're notified and given the option to add them to the grocery list and even submitted to the local grocery story where they can be pre-bagged for you for a small convenience fee and delivered for an additional fee.
You pour a glass of orange juice, toast a bagel and the caloric intake is added to your dietary log. Perhaps you use simple always on voice commands "I ate 6 spoons of ice cream and a bowl of spaghettii." The computer asks you if the spaghetti had meatballs. You lie because you feel guitly. Your heart rate and pedometer stats are also logged. Based on the lights, stove, a/c, heater, and appliances that are running, your energy consumption can be seen in real time. The weather report is always instantly available with a single click on most types of devices.
You get into an argument with your spouse over something and somebody has written some clever (or not so clever) marital consulting software that decides you were wrong and should appologize. Over time it determines the overall health of your marriage. (maybe this is too creepy an example).
Someone creates a collar that can read the mood of your dog or cat and communicate it to you through your device. Your phone rings and your dogs tells you he's hungry, happy, needs to pee or poo, etc.
A new market emerges for personal data analytics software that takes various accumulated personal data and helps the user/family improve themselves, their lives, each other. You run some analytics against your daily diary (and part of this diary is compiled for you) and you can tell what things make you happy, what makes you sad. Maybe the weather combined with a certain diet that day and certain chores were a very bad combination.
Seriously though when did we stop trying to make software that empowers people and makes our lives easier and enables us to make better choices? I thought Bill Gates' ultimate dream was to make this type of computing ubiquitous. Instead the xbox is just about games. Apple seems to be doing a better job of realizing Gates' dream. But i digress....
Imagine if Nintendo decided to just re-invent home computing by giving us what we always wanted anyway... networked appliances throughout our homes from stereo and tv to coffee makers and alarm clocks and water proof e-readersmp3 players for the bathroom. They could be the new Sony of the 80's. Instead of software hacking of the 90's and 00's, hardware hacking becomes the new "dot com" phenomenon as everyone is trying to invent new devices that plug into the home network and provide new capabilities and do new things. But i digress some more...
Games today should be considered somewhat dangerous... like smoking and alcohol use. They are by and large a way of spending time that doesn't really improve us or allow us to improve ourselves and some may in fact hurt our personal and psychological development. In that sense there is an opportunity cost and potentially social & psychological costs to playing them. Certainly they are fun but they should be enjoyed in moderation. But some people will simply never be gamers and frankly they wont be missing a damned thing.
IMO, today's games are just way too long to provide enough fun to set the controller down and be on with our lives. It grabs your attention, and will not let it go... for hours and hours and hours. And all those for nothing truly constructive. :(
And this is why I think games are not as socially accepted when compared to other entertainment venues like music, movie, or TV.
Oh, and also, I think the characteristic of games where they're not as socially involved as other experiences is also affecting this trend. (e.g. when going to movies, it's a social experience, of being in one room, sharing the same movie, or watching TV together, or listening to music or even producing and sharing the music together. But when playing games, most of the time, you are sitting alone, not paying attention to anything other than what's going on in the screen. :( Sad.)
As for waste of time, certainly the majority of programming is but there's still some educational programming on channels like PBS, Discovery, Animal Planet, History, TLC, Travel, Food, etc.
I would agree that if Nintendo's debate is about "How can we make that which should not be respectable, respectable..." then they're heading into evil territory.