Entering the Wii generation

We bought a Wii this morning on Amazon. And it was my wife’s idea.

I’ve never owned a console. I bought a vintage game-in-a-joystick set a few years ago and was a dedicated MAME gamer for a while, but never made the leap to modern systems. My college suitemates who brought an NES to school and kept us up all hours of the night saw to that.

I did a paper in grad school (with George and Bransby) on the video game industry, in which we concluded that the gamer market had enough room for all three players, largely because Nintendo was going after an audience that Sony and Microsoft weren’t. At the time, what we saw was the 10-12 year old audience that they had locked up. What we didn’t see was their “blue ocean”–that Nintendo would find another untapped audience that ranged from retirees to non-gaming women.

The other thing we didn’t see was that the real story in the Nintendo vs. Sony and Microsoft battle wasn’t technology strategy per se. You could look at all the s-curves in the world, but polygon count was ultimately a poor predictor for the market. Fun–now there’s a much better predictor.

So I’m looking forward to playing around with the console when it gets here. A little tennis, a little family time–and maybe, if I play my cards rights, some Lego Star Wars too.

Decompressing

As one might gather from the week of linkblog posts, it’s been a little hard making the transition away from all-election, all the time blogging, though for different reasons than back in 2004. While then I couldn’t believe that half the country enjoyed George W. Bush’s regime enough to bring it back for four more years, now I don’t want to blink for fear it will go away.

And there have been some other things that have happened too–like getting rushed out of our office by a gas main that was broken open by construction staff last week. Or briefly thinking I had to do a four week travel stint to support a client, before cooler heads prevailed.

Plus, I’ve been fighting a cold. So it’s kind of been the perfect storm of blogkill.