Commentary: Wii and the Formation of My Avatar Identity

This past December, during the annual multi-day cacophonic Christmas gathering of most of my wife's family at her sister's house near Washington, D.C., I experienced my first real-time encounter with Wii. In the interests of full disclosure and to provide a broader perspective for this cultural outing, I feel that I should provide some personal information. Generally, I consider myself to be a curious, but quiet and mildly repressed, person, so I tend to get nervous in crowds. I also feel somewhat uptight and dislocated around lots of loud, outgoing people--even those who are very gracious and welcoming (like my in-laws). I'm not a party person, and I prefer social situations that are usually small-scale and intimate. I wish I were more socially sophisticated, but some things are the way they are and, as a consequence, I've found that this annual, mega-generational extravaganza jammed with season-bending bombilating is mostly way beyond me. But I married into all of this eight years ago, and I'm learning ever so slowly that I should follow my wife's advice to just go with the flow. After all, don't I myself teach that with any new kind of social arrangements come new learning opportunities? When we arrived at Lin's sister's house around six in the evening on Christmas day, Emily, my 25 year-old step-daughter, had already configured her new Wii console on the 72 inch LCD in the family room. As I wandered in to give her a hug and say "hi," she and her older cousin, Kristen, were throwing their arms at the TV screen in a real time activity that was simultaneously projected onto the TV in simulated three-dimensional space via a set of animated figurines in a semi-cartoon bowling alley. Using white remotes that were strapped to their wrists, they alternated turns, manipulating the animated figurines on the screen to mimic the act of "regular" bowling. To my eye, Emily was clearly an expert at this manipulation, lofting a series of rainbow bowling ball deliveries that bounced onto the lane rolling perfectly into the 1-3 pin slot--a technique that resulted in strike after virtual strike. Intrigued by this virtual + actual interface, I watched fascinated as Emily and Kristen bowled multiple frames while I finished another Stella. Finally, after about fifteen minutes of casual ethnographic observation, I returned to the kitchen where most everyone else was already whooping it up in actual champagne-time. Wii is a home video game set designed and developed by Nintendo. Released in December 2006, it's currently Nintendo's flagship home video play console. Since its launch, Wii has won numerous awards and, in its relatively brief existence, has quickly grown to dominate the home video game and entertainment market. It easily outsells MicroSoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, perhaps because of Wii's appeal to a wider player demographic (more on this in a moment). In its September 25, 2007 issue, the London-based Financial Times reported that Wii was the sales leader of its generation, and, in the third quarter of 2008, Wii profits topped 9 million units, setting a sales record for any home video system (Sanchanta, 2007). As of this writing (April, 2009), Wii has sold more than 44 million units worldwide in its life to date (Nintendo, 2009). When I asked a graduate student of mine that same weekend we were down in DC if she'd ever heard of Wii, she looked at me blankly and said: "It's huge!" A shopping trip later that weekend to Target clearly confirmed her statement--I was stunned to encounter in Target's Home Game section an entire aisle dedicated to Wii this and Wii that, carefully displayed as any Tiffany jewelry, in the sleek and sophisticated white Wii style. One of the key features of Wii is its wireless hand-held device or remote (sometimes called a "Wiimote"). The Wiimote is the system's primary controlling device and has a sophisticated motion sensing capacity that allows players to interact with and manipulate objects on the screen through simulated three-dimensional gestural and optical technologies. …