The Gamer's Quarter

[kirkjerk]

(while nitpicky, hopefully this will not give the impression that I dislike the Wii)

One thing missing from the Wii: a damn "Start" button.
I gotta say, I kind of miss it: from the NES through to the GC (with a few oddball exceptions, like Mega Man I think) I knew that "start" would pause the game. For the past few generations, it also got me to any ingame menu.

But now? There's a home button, but it goes outside of the game, and never seems to have game-themed options... and my option for returning to the title screen is "Reset Game", which seems a little rude, like the system is forcing a reset.

Did Nintendo think the traditional menu system should be deprecated? It's too much "outside of the game", too artificial?

There's also a little confusion about buttons. To start a game, I think I've hit A, A+B, "+", and "2". (it's actually annoying that Excite Truck doesn't read + or - as well as 1 and 2.) The + and - are kind of nice generic backwards/forwards though.

Also, all the buttons are white. While very stylish and chic, I don't think it's the best choice for quick recognition. I think a lot of us have tried to help novice gamers.. press "A"... What's A? Err, press the big green button. So the monochromatic scheme hurts communication in that way...

I'm glad some things seem to be improved system-wide though, like unlocking things seems a lot less onorous than before, even with the possibility of a generic SD reader equalling an easy save game transfer tool...

[OtakupunkX]

Just out of curiousity, what do you use for Start and Select on Wii Virtual Console NES?
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[player 2]

The colors were just useful for teaching. Now you say things that make more sense: "pull the trigger" "click your thumb". The only time you have to describe the buttons as 1 or 2 is when you go back to oldschool sideway smode. That worked out well.

@ otakupunk

+=start and -=select

I never liked the words start and select. Start means just the opposite of pause even though that's what it was used for. And select was really just weird. Does it mean "change the selection" or does it mean "choose the current selection"? It usually meant the former even though if I ever used it as a verb I'd really mean the latter.
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Wii #: 8749 9109 9732 3653

"It is a peaceful way of understanding life, to play"
_Marcel Duchamp

[kirkjerk]

[Redeye]

All this talk of "triangle, circle, square," etc. reminds me of one of my favorite pet thought threads: alternate technological development routes/imagining what alien tech may be like.

We have organizations like the IEEE, we have sign languages and verbal conlangs like esperanto, we have standardized road signs, and various other systems of codification.

What pops into my head at this point are the pictograms, colored blocks, and so on that educational and developmental researchers use.

What if the standards and measures groups were networked with the educational and brain research people?

Like if concepts of critical path and various modeling/mapping systems were integrated into an educational system.
(Scaled to represent the ideas in ascending degrees of complexity.)

As a thought experiment, we can imagine that starting as little kids people would be taught mnemonics along with diagrams, flowcharts and hieroglyphs. Maybe even integrate body movements and/or mouse/some kind of controller manipulation.
Sort of like drilling the elements of a martial art in order to create the mental equivalent of a stenographic keypad with different shape and color combinations representing logical, spatial, temporal relationships. Decompressing the webs created by these opens up pockets that can be filled with information.

Yes, this kind of stuff has been tried before and it mostly just teaches regurgitation and probably overstresses and warps the kids.

I just wanted to get to the part of the thought experiment where people may have a sort of Universal Remote/Cellphone/PDA/Semaphore-enabled Wii thingy that they carry around as a security blanket/Memexes and use with the alacrity 1950s engineers on super acid-crack would use their slide rules.

Emote wands?

I completely forgot my point.

Sorry.


Of course a lot of this is already here.

I find the mental image of somebody thinking and mouthing "1-2-3 ::left arrow:: square square ::horizontal oval:: triangle red red six 8 arc liquid grid 7 7-4-8 ::up arrow:: cloud" to be amusing.

As if they are trying to find their keys and also multitasking some other stuff.

Except their keys would be included in the memex wand thingy, so the person would be twitching and fingering the controls of a phantom memex wand as the edge of a panic attack approaches.

I suppose I should tie this in to that other thread.



I probably could have structured this a lot better.

I'll just toss out the bullshit summation: The idea is to install within the minds of the test subjects a symbiotic meme-complex specialized for the navigation of ontological topologies.

lol

Or maybe just leave a copy of Synergetics in the school library and let the internet do the rest.
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I felt sheer anarchic joy when I ran over my first pedestrian.