Why Buying a Nintendo Wii Is Worth It

By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet. Posted December 12, 2007.

For the holidays, I don't want to do something nice for the earth. I don't want to buy special laptops loaded with Western video games and imagery for kids in Africa without computers. I don't want to get handmade iPod covers from the Etsy online store that nurtures local craftspeople. And I don't want to go off-line for a day to commune with people in the real world.

I want toxic Chinese toys covered with paint that will make me hallucinate. I want a sparkly-crap mobile phone that will break within a week and turn into circuit-board garbage that cannot be recycled and will therefore be shipped to developing countries where it will be hacked and resold. I want a media device that's wrapped in so many layers of plastic and nonrecyclable material that the very act of opening it is like smashing my carbon footprint onto the face of Mother Earth. I want a useless gizmo mass-produced by machines that stole jobs from nonunionized workers who stole jobs from the natives.

In short, I want a Nintendo Wii.

It's the biggest-selling video game console ever, and it's made from so much biosphere-destroying garbage that I'll be scrubbing methane out of the air for the rest of my life to make up for even thinking about owning one. Plus, Wii controllers are motion sensitive, which means they strap onto your body. Every time I use my Wii -- which, I would like to underscore, I do not yet own -- I will be turning myself into a literal extension of my machine.

Do you hear that, hippies? I want to strap electronics to my body and trance out to violent imagery while I wave my arms around, killing imaginary things. That's what I want to do for the holidays.

But the Wii isn't just a consumer electronics death monster. It's also something I think everyone should own or at least try out, because it truly represents the future of technology. The fact that people can now interact with a video game simply by waving their arms -- and the video game "sees" the waving and responds to it onscreen -- is revolutionary.

There's a good reason why Wiis are popular with people of all ages, unlike most game systems. They respond to natural human movement rather than force people to learn elaborate combinations of buttons and knobs on bizarrely shaped controllers. The Wii is a machine made for humans.

Already those humans are figuring out ways to repurpose the Wii and make it work with other kinds of devices. There's a Wii DJ (called, of course, WiiJ) who uses his Wii controllers to cue up and mix tracks on a computer. Somebody else is using a Wii controller to operate Bluetooth devices. And so on. The point is, the Wii is cool not because it's a video game system but because it's introduced a new way of interacting with computers. If you want to know what a home computer setup will look like in 10 years, play with a Wii. Your mouse will soon be replaced with a motion-based setup. You'll point with your finger and click by tapping two fingers together. Or by saying click.

I don't mean to romanticize the Wii, because it is, after all, just another thing with built-in obsolescence. It's a toy you'll throw away without thinking, consigning it to an unknowable half-life as indigestible silicon shards. It sucks when great future innovations are doomed to become garbage that may last longer than the benefits of the innovation itself.

But if the holidays are a time of reflecting on the past and the future, you might as well hang out with your friends and play Guitar Hero on the Wii. After all, donating to cool charities and supporting local artists is something you should be doing all year. You should buy a cute present for your sweetie from Etsy when it strikes your fancy, not just when the capitalist juggernaut tells you to. And, of course, you should never be off-line for a day. That's just taking things too far.

See more stories tagged with: technology, consumerism, nintendo, wii

Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who will be online for the next 50 years.

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