Wii is Nintendo’s experiment on grandparents, in-laws, everybody

Zach over at VGBlogger took the Wii to Thanksgiving with his in-laws. His wife’s parents aren’t gamers: her dad played EA NHL titles on the PC in the mid 90’s and her mom tried Tetris on the Game Boy way back when. That’s it. They tried Wii Sports Bowling. So how did the father-in-law do? Not as good as the mother-in-law at first. Then the father-in-law figured out how to put a spin to the ball, and then the strikes came rolling in (remember, this is bowling – a strike is a good thing).

They ended up playing for six hours. Wow. Non-gamer people can play that long?

What’s our reaction to this?

See, Wii fans have a theory: the Wii will sell well because those who can afford one will actually want to buy one. To prove it, Zach ran an experiment.

But this is just one experiment. To prove that a theory is valid, the results must support the predictions. The more experiments that support the theory, the closer the theory gets to being accepted.

Well, hundreds of thousands of experiments are going on right now, because the Wii is being introduced to average non-gamer people in so many homes and offices.

In other words, it wasn’t Zach of VGBlogger doing the experiment. The Wii is Nintendo’s great experiment. Sort of like the DS – you might have heard that 18 million of the DS have been sold worldwide (counting the DS Lite, that’s 27 million as of September).

So we now return to the regularly scheduled Wii experiment already in progress.

Zach over at VGBlogger took the Wii to Thanksgiving with his in-laws. His wife’s parents aren’t gamers: her dad played EA NHL titles on the PC in the mid 90’s and her mom tried Tetris on the Game Boy way back when. That’s it. They tried Wii Sports Bowling. So how did the father-in-law do? Not as good as the mother-in-law at first. Then the father-in-law figured out how to put a spin to the ball, and then the strikes came rolling in (remember, this is bowling – a strike is a good thing).

They ended up playing for six hours. Wow. Non-gamer people can play that long?

What’s our reaction to this?

See, Wii fans have a theory: the Wii will sell well because those who can afford one will actually want to buy one. To prove it, Zach ran an experiment.

But this is just one experiment. To prove that a theory is valid, the results must support the predictions. The more experiments that support the theory, the closer the theory gets to being accepted.

Well, hundreds of thousands of experiments are going on right now, because the Wii is being introduced to average non-gamer people in so many homes and offices.

In other words, it wasn’t Zach of VGBlogger doing the experiment. The Wii is Nintendo’s great experiment. Sort of like the DS – you might have heard that 18 million of the DS have been sold worldwide (counting the DS Lite, that’s 27 million as of September).

So we now return to the regularly scheduled Wii experiment already in progress.

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