When I think of video games, I think of immersion. The ideal video game grabs the player and keeps them engaged in an entertaining experience, and that requires a certain amount of pulling the player into the game's world. Looking to the future, I think that one day games will have the ability to be completely immersive, bringing the player of a game inside of them. From the moment I picked up a controller and moved something on an external screen, I imagined a virtual world where I myself could be the main character, participating within an interactive and deceptively real world around me, free to live and play inside of it.

And everyday, I see us moving closer to that world. The industry has made incredible strides in scope and graphics that boggle the mind when we think of what was happening only a few decades ago. As graphics and processing become increasingly sophisticated, we could one day find ourselves playing games that rival the complexity of real life in ways we can only imagine. But even with the leaps we've made in the look and scope of games, we're still lacking. A key element has lagged behind the others in bringing the player inside of a game.

The user interface. While controllers have gotten more sophisticated, the player's input in most games has always been limited to a few buttons. And while pressing the right button to successfully execute something in a game is often incredibly satisfying for the player, can it really be said that it brought the player any more within the game? Apart from a limited amount of sporadic or gimmicky games that have made their own controllers, user interactivity hasn't evolved far from where it started. And that is where I see Nintendo attempting to make its next mark.

Nintendo is a without a doubt a game company, but they haven't had the best of luck in past years. In the last generation, they saw themselves drastically lose out (for many reasons) to their competitors because for two generations they tried to beat the competition by more or less doing the same thing. Such a mentality reduced them to a drastic third in the console war. The Wii is their response to being backed into such a corner. To keep doing the same thing a third time would have been suicide. They had to do something different, to try to engage the market from a different perspective. And so I believe they looked at what else could make a game immersive, what else could make playing a game satisfying and give the player a real feeling of being in control of what's on the screen. That's where the remote controller, with all of its functionality came into being.

But Nintendo hasn't stopped there. For a long time they emphasized a revolution was coming but then went and renamed their console into something much of the industry has cringed at, the "Wii." I think to understand this move, one has to know the company's mentality and see what it is looking towards. Nintendo knows it has lost in the traditional market by the traditional methods, so it's trying to be different. The company wants to make its games play differently and attract a slightly different market. They don't want games made for the Wii to be mere ports of what's available elsewhere, they want the whole experience to be different and better. And they certainly don't want to limit themselves to the same crowd in whose eyes they've fallen to third place, especially when they've seen the success of the DS in Japan. The DS in Japan has moved beyond the hands of gamers and become a much stronger phenomenon within the general population. Nintendo sees in that, an obvious market that they can capture. Their video of a child next to an old man both manipulating the controller couldn't be any more blatant. They see an untapped market of people who could be playing video games but are generally turned off with what's out there. And to a certain extent, they're right. Ask yourself; in the general population how many people are even willing to try a shooter like Halo or Doom and how many will at least play Time Crisis if you hand them that light gun? While Nintendo wants to reach the standard audience, they also want to reach a new one, by giving both of them a new, even more interactive way to play their games. The revolution is still there, but it has to reach a wider audience.

So why change to the name Wii? All marketing speeches aside, it's a simple name. I think that's part of their mentality, to be simple. They want to reinvent the potential interactivity of games without making it hard to understand. In the company's mind, why have a game where it takes two analog sticks to move instead of just pointing and going? That would certainly make a lot of games much more playable to a wider audience and breathe a new interactive life into them. In the same mind, why not make the name easily accessible too? All innuendo or size jokes aside, the name Wii as a video game console sounds like a much friendlier and less daunting challenge for a non-gamer to tackle than the mighty PlayStation 3. And while the industry has generally reacted in a negative manner to it, I believe it will be a passing outlook. Innuendo jokes get old and eventually no one cares, one word attribution replaces another. And I think Nintendo knows they have little to fear in their market share with the name change. The market base of Nintendo is made of a lot of dedicated fans, most of which already will know whether or not they want the next "Nintendo" system; and so the name will do little to turn them away from it. I could personally care less, it's a name change and I already know what I'll be getting beyond that. It is Nintendo's gamble to the rest of the population which isn't already in the world of video games to see if the name will be attractive or not and whether their approach to simplicity will hook people.

Regardless, I'm glad they've made the moves they have over the past year. It would've been guaranteed suicide for the company to try to compete against two giants on the same terms a third time and it will be interesting to see what their experiment will yield. And I think it will breathe some life into and force some evolution upon the concept of user interface within games. I don't know if the remote controller is the way of the future, but it was time for something different, for a revolution beyond the status quo. There has to be something more than just pressing buttons if I eventually want to play a game from within.

Note: views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's and are not necessarily those of Wolverine Soft.