The Very Simple Secret to Wii Sports’ success
I promise, it’s very simple
Motion controls haven’t been a selling point in games since 2012. That doesn’t mean they are gone: they are everywhere. Modern VR is based off of motion control. All smart phones have gyroscopes and accelerometers built in. Game consoles also ship with hidden motion controllers. You probably knew that the Switch’s Joy-Con’s have motion control capabilities, but the actual console does too. Being able to sense the orientation of a device is almost mandatory for handheld devices these days. However, this is a very recent development. It’s only been in that last decade that gyroscopes and other sensors where cheap enough to put into everything. There was a time when even products sold as motion controllers had no idea which way they were facing.
And that time: was 2006.
Tracking the history of the modern motion controller will quickly lead to the object ubiquitous with the idea.
The Wii Remote
The Wii was code-named “Revolution” in development and that was honest marketing. I would argue that no hardware since the Atari 2600 has so dramatically shifted the games industry. It redefined what playing a video game looked like in through it’s main gameplay and marketing. That’s due to the Wii Remote’s unique features for the time.
The Wii-Remote has two sensors in it. An accelerator to detect force applied to the controller and an IR sensor to detect the sensor bar. For 2006 that was impressive tech that let Nintendo get what they needed, but in honesty the motion controls were lacking. If you’ve played a Wii shovelware game you will experience the pain of trying to use the controls in any meaningful way. The Wii-Remote had no gyroscope until the Wii-Motion Plus came out. The gyroscope is the backbone of modern motion controls. Without one a large amount of potential motion can’t be tracked.
3rd-party games trying to use the motion controls were across the board unplayable messes. However, first party Nintendo games turned out great. What did Nintendo have that 3rd-parties didn’t. I mean, a lot of things: time, money, experience, knowledge of the system, first mover advantage. That explains most of the difference, Nintendo knew how to work the Wii’s back-end for their own needs. However I think there is a simpler and higher level reason why Nintendo motion controls worked. A secret sauce that made the game.
What do I mean? Well let’s look at the Wii game that did the most with the least.
The Most
Wii Sports 4th highest selling game of all-time: it is a game I’m going to assume you’ve played. If you haven’t go to a public school, an old age home, the living room of particularly nostalgic people, or just Craigslist and give it a try. It still holds up despite being a more then a decade old.
Yes, it was bundled with the Wii. Any game bundled with the Wii would do numbers. However, the Wii was bundled with Wii Sports, and that is equally important. Wii Sports is the perfect demo for the motion controls Nintendo had, and they knew getting it out there was an important step to communicating what they had. Why is that? Well let’s explore both the Wii-Remote some more as well as the gameplay of Wii Sports.
The Least
The original Wii-Remote can detect two things. How much force is being applied in what direction (accelerometer), and what position and orientation it is from the TV (pointer controls). Wii Sports for the most part ignores that second part, you aren’t pointing the Wii-Remote at the screen in most of the games. That means all of Wii Sports magic is on the back of one tiny chip.
What can an accelrometer detect? Acceleration; goes with name. In practice it detects the force being applied to the remote. What that means for control is that every time you move a remote the accelrometer knows. That both gives controllers really interesting potential, but it also comes with a further problem.
If you have a smart phone I want you to go to the store and download an app that can display accelrometer data. Physics Toolbox Sensor Suite is the one I’m using. (I did not know phones have a barometer.) Play around with the linear acceleration and g-force meter a bit and try to answer these questions:
- What actions give the most notable data?
- What does normal use look like? (Moving, pushing buttons)
- What does the g-force meter detect?
Here’s some data I collected. Those small bumps in the beginning are from tapping on the phone. The middle plateau is movement of my wrist. The large spikes are big swings using my whole arm.
It should also be noted that accelrometers can detect gravity. That can be used to give further context to motion. Although, there is a lot of noise in play within that.
Realizing the Wii had a an older chip that was probably less sensitive then a modern smart phone, and that normal use of a Wii remote requires pushing buttons and wrist motion, the only notable thing that can always be detected are large swings. Anything smaller might get lost in the noise.
If you’ve had the displeasure of playing a Wii Sports rip off shovelware title you probably have felt how frustrating it is to have motion controls not work. If the Wii was going to convince anyone of its potential the flagship title had to be perfect.
And it was
The Secret
Okay, after all this setup, what is the big genius secret that Wii Sports has that made it print money for Nintendo?
Swinging
No not that kind, let’s consider the sports in Wii Sports.
What is the main verb that all these sports share. That’s right
Swinging
There might be choices to make before a swing: aligning the shot, checking the topology, mind games, whatever this is:
There might be stuff you do after swinging: running to base, blocking a punch, celebrating a strike.
But the extent of the action done in these games all falls under the magical verb of swinging. That’s what you do in Wii Sports and you do a lot of it:
It’s a very simple story of the context of the system informing the content of the game. You could not do archery, or canoeing, or even 3x3 basketball with an original Wii. It wouldn’t have been responsive. It’s nothing more than that. What you could always do, what the whole console was designed for:
Swinging
This is no technical magic, or marketing stunt. This is the most basic level of game design. All of the the gameplay, the theming, the music, the game Wii-Sports is there because accelormeters are really good at detecting
Swinging
What is the lesson for the game designers? If something works, like really well, make a game for it. Trust your verbs. Wii Sports is a tiny game, and yet it sold the Wii on the back of it’s stellar swinging. Games are hard to make, the most economic decision is to put quality over quantity and just make a game about swinging your arm around.
I could go into more detail about how swinging is done. How tennis uses opposite accelerations to detect forehand and backhand. How bowling and golf add holding the B button before a swing with the context of setting up a shot when in reality all its doing is re-calibrating the g-force detector. Maybe even different aspects, how the singleplayer was a way to present a diverse cast of miis, or how easy the multiplayer was to understand to further the Wii’s marketing strategy. I could even go in depth on how the combination of the TV sound and speaker in the Wii Remote made for one of the most dynamic audio experiences that console games have ever had.
But I don’t need to. You get it. The revolution was just that, revolving the Wii remote around. As a motion it is recognizable and accessible for larger audiences then buttons. Someone playing Wii Sports looked like no other game of the time and that’s what made the marketing for the Wii appeal to a wider audience then the rest of the games industry. Wii Sports had accessibility, new controls, novelty, new audience appeal. It was disruptive. Disruptive means doing something new and doing it well. For Wii Sports that means:
Swinging
Actually, that music makes me want to talk a bit more about the audio. The Wii had a basic audio ship that supported surround sound, but that’s nothing special for 2006 tech. What the Wii did have is a speaker in their controller. It could only play very compressed sound bites, but it is used so well in the Wii’s catalog. From the announcer in Super Smash Bros Brawl to a whole mini-game where you played hide and seek with the remote in Wii Party. Wii Sports did no different. Although in reality the sound is nothing more then a crunch through the speakers, I still can notice the tennis hit from miles away.
