I wasn’t one of the many who had to
stand on a 3-hour line to get a Nintendo Wii this holiday season. Instead I drove over
100 miles to the parking lot of a Pennsylvania shopping mall to surreptitiously
rendezvous with someone who saw one of the consoles fall off of the back of a
Toys’R’Us truck. I’m not a gamer, trust me, it was a gift for my partner. And
I’ve never been swayed by past announcements that a PS2, Gameboy, GameCube or
Nintendo DS had been added to our media room. As far as I was concerned video
games were time wasters - just another gadget to be dusted and forgotten in a
few months time when something better was viciously
marketed.
Not so the Wii. It won me over. Rather than continue being the couch-potato I am, I have actually rearranged my living room furniture (including my couch) to make way for uncoordinated boxing jabs, golf strokes and tennis volleys. I’ve actually broken a sweat playing video games. In fact, the most fun I have had with my Wii was making the Wii version on me, an avatar that is too-cutely called a Mii. Making sure my Mii head was the right shape, that my Mii’s nearsightedness was similar to mine and that my Mii goatee was represented accurately took me nearly 30 minutes. That’s 28 minutes more than it should have taken. It was that much fun.
Then I stumbled across Mii Plaza, where the
Wii community meet to share Mii’s, search Mii’s and meet to mingle with other
Miis. The creative outputs of fellow Wii lovers blew Mii away. They’ve conjured
up Mii’s for Harry Potter and Dr. Phil, Jesus Christ and Satan, George Bushes
(multiple versions) and Bin Laden (surprisingly solo). The Dylan and Morrissey
Mii’s are scarily realistic, as is the Mii version of Cap’n Kangaroo and the
Soprano’s Paulie Walnuts. Mii versions of John, Paul, George, Ringo look
cartoonish. But ‘cartoonish’ fits my favorites, the Ramones. Gabba Gabba Mii!
Could Mii’s someday overtake MySpace? What’s your favorite?
Wayne Mitchell
Strategists & Planners