The Future of Nintendo, Part 2
Multi-Screen Support:
The Wii has made tremendous inroads into fun multiplayer games. Throughout the 90s and early 2000s, games got more and more single player oriented. In the early 2000s the online multiplayer industry started booming, but now, thanks to the Wii, the off-line multiplayer game is back. To help further accommodate this, I think the next generation will feature the ability to display on multiple screens, allowing dozens of players to play cooperative or competitive games at the same time all on one console. This would be really cool.
Most households nowadays have multiple screens anyway, so this would be useful to a large number of families. In addition, I predict that Bluetooth televisions become more popular, and that the new Nintendo console will have the option to communicate to these multiple sets through Bluetooth.
No Sensor Bar:
I don’t know how, but I think Nintendo will be looking to get rid of the Sensor Bar. It is a patched together system that really has to go. It made motion sensitivity cheap this generation, but I think we will need something less likely to produce mistakes in the next generation. One question that has to be asked is how a controller will detect which way is forward without a sensor bar. A good question and one that needs to be answered.
More controller innovation:
Nintendo has had a long history of controller innovation. The N64 controller was crazy and the GameCube controller was its own monster. Both, in my opinion, were flops. Now Nintendo has stumbled upon a design people are saying is Good. Will that stop them from innovating? I don’t think so. In designing the next generation, Nintendo will probably want to keep backwards compatibility, but I bet they’ll do that by having some type of compatibility with the old controllers rather than having a similar controller. Nintendo is showing with the Wii beautiful and complex ideas about input flexibility. I think Nintendo has several surprises up their sleeve this generation, and next generation — when they get to build things from the ground up again — I bet they’ll that all the feedback from gamers and developers and really improve upon the system. I trust Nintendo to do a good job with this, and look forward to seeing what they come up with.
Input processing is a complex field even when you only have analog sticks and buttons. Making the gamer forget about the fact that he or she has a controller in their hand requires a lot of smart programming. Think of the original Super Mario Bros, even though there were really just a total of 8 buttons on the controller (two that were never used in game), the programing really had the think about the input to make it smooth. Remember how Mario would slowly speed up over time? Remember his skid when you changed directions. Remember how he would take a tiny jump is you tapped jump quickly. They took those few buttons and put a lot of intuitive power into they. With the Wii, there is so much more information coming at the programmers, and processing it all can be tricky. In the next generation, I expect that Nintendo will have preprocessing routines for the data based on comprehensive fuzzy logic systems that get a feel for each users style. This won’t be as obvious to the gamer as a huge processor, but the developers need this.
