I’m also new to Wiidom, as I first tried it at a friend’s house on Saturday and then my brother unrelatedly picked one up on Monday. Thinking mostly of Wii Sports, I see two major problems.

First, I agree about the realism question, in general. Specifically, I’m concerned about realism vs. playing stamina. I have tried and have enjoyed pretending to pitch and bat, swing a racquet, throw a bowling ball, and swing a golf club. (Except for putting – what is up with the putting?) But it is so much easier to just flick the wiimote and save my energy.

The other question is closely related: based partially on the golf game I find myself worrying about the accuracy of the sensors in the Wiimote. In many cases I feel as if tricking the wiimote is itself a sub-game of all the games, and it isn’t one I find rewarding.

Improving chips and pitches and sand shots would also be a big deal to me. Anything that elevates “feel” in a golf video game to something approaching what it means to the real sport would appeal to me and many serious (ex-)golfers.

The full swing problem is a real one, especially b/c everyone’s swing is so tied to their actual body. Short of a Snow Crash Black Sun solution, or even better, a Star Trek Holodeck Virtual Golf experience, I think designers in our world can learn from on-line RPG here and allow you to design a character, improve your equipment, take lessons, etc. That is, make the learning curve part of the game. You can experience what it’s like to be a power player, a precision player, a great putter, and so on. But you have to make choices about what to keep normal and what to enhance–you only have so much room for enhancement. (Me, I’d enhance my iron play the most and driving accuracy 2nd most.)

Following up on this idea, I would make access to courses dependent on skill improvements. So you start on a local muni or some kind of relatively easy public course. You earn a handicap, and as it goes down you get to play other, tougher courses. Save the Augustas and the Pebble Beaches for truly advanced players who are ready to appreciate and attempt to handle their challenges.

Then the online part comes in. You can enter your best personae in tournaments and compete against others with similar handicaps. You can form a team and practice together at the same course–and enter into team competitions. And so on.

In short, if the designers mimic the elements of competitive golf that only the better amateurs even get a chance to experience, they can open it up to many more people. They could even imitate the “professional” experience by holding tournaments at tough courses, allowing no enhancements to your persona, and having qualifiers under those conditions that weed out the wannabes.

That is, distill the crack-like elements of the real golf into a video game version and whammo profits without any sock gnomes getting hurt….

We’ve introduced the Wii to a lot of people and the same games are always the hits:

1) Rayman Raving Rabbids is the best of the mini-game style of games, bar none. (Skip WarioWare Smooth Moves. It’s cool for about a day, but everyone I’ve talked to gets bored with it quickly.) Rayman is a lot of fun, has brilliant style and flavor, and is an EXCELLENT multi-player experience.

2) Excite truck. It’s not a precision racing game, but if you want a fun game with quality gameplay, it’s worth getting. It also does a good job of allowing you to be successful at the early levels precisely because you’re quite bad, but it requires a lot of skill to conquer the upper levels of the game.

3) Resident Evil 4. This is just a re-release and a port, but it actually improves on what was already a revered game on the PS2 and Gamecube. A definite exception to the rule that ports are always inferior. A great game made greater. Just not for the squeemish.

The Tiger Woods Golf game is very good, but not perfect. But I disagree that it’s difficult if you’re not good at golf. I’ve never shot under a 100 on a real golf course, and I’m almost a scratch golfer in TW. If you set the difficulty to easy, you can learn the basics of course management, but it’s very forgiving for slices and hooks. As you set the difficulty levels higher the game becomes more sensitive to the flaws in your swing. Casual gamers with an interest in sports games will like this title on the Wii. It’s a better conversion that the first instance of Madden Football (07).

One title that I’m most looking forward might show some of the possibilities of Wii game design is the anticipated release of Boogie from Electronic Arts. It’s a combination dance/karaoke game, but unlike Dance Dance Revolution, you don’t have to memorize and follow a pattern set by the game. Instead, you build up a vocabulary of dance moves, and so long as you stick to the beat and vary what you do, you score well. It might be a nightmare for those with a bulky rhythm in their hearts, but it sounds really cool to me.

The other thing to watch out for in the Fall is how well the new Super Smash Brothers works on the Wii. Nintendo has always been better on gameplay, in my opinion, than the other platforms, and Smash Brothers AI was really incredible at adjusting for skill levels of players. My brother was much better than I, but we could fight head-to-head pretty evenly. If Nintendo can pull off a Wii SSB with excellent responsiveness on the Wii, I think that will show the way for a lot of what follows on the platform for games that include fighting.

If the physical action of the remote is mimetic to the action on the screen, you either have to keep the gameplay simple (as with Wii Sports) or you’ve got to use the Wii-mote to imitate the full complexity of an implement or bodily motion. But if you do that, how do you allow players to become better at playing something in the game than they might be in the real world? Because you want mimesis PLUS amplification. I should be able to get the thrill of fighting a Dark Jedi with my lightsaber/Wii-mote, but if I have to be Jedi-like in the real world in order to produce the speed and fluidity of Jedi moves in the game, it’s a non-starter. But if there’s a huge gap between what I do in the world and what happens in the game, then that breaks the pleasurable of the mimesis, plus contributes to a sense of lagginess. It’s an interesting problem–It’ll be intriguing to see what they do with it.

I’ve heard that a lot of Japanese developers are moving away from the PS3, because the install base isn’t very large. And they’re not going to the 360, they’re going to the Wii. We’ll probably start seeing an influx of original Wii games in another cycle or so.