The Curse Of The Gifted Child: Nintendo At E3

Ever wonder what it's like to be a child prodigy?

Everyone has times where they wish they were born with vast wellsprings of talent, or at the very least, one single skill at which they excelled with freakish grace. The way to success would be already paved, one reasons, a straight and gold-gleaming road to a permanent place in the world's collective consciousness, and wouldn't the parents be proud?

Probably, though, it's a whole lot of stress being the family genius. Likely, everyone watches you closely when you show the slightest stirring of interest in something; you pick up a toy microphone, and the whole family, anticipating your ultimate musical dominion, gathers round to snap photos of the pivotal moment. And when you do find something that you enjoy, and find as if by accident that you effortlessly excel, your fate is sealed.

Your family will encourage you to forever pursue that one whimsical discipline, lest you waste your precious gifts. Probably, you will be told you're special, that you have a calling resembling an obligation to fulfill, from the time you're very small. You'll likely be discouraged from such earthly pursuits as playing in the dirt, from mindless entertainment; from playing with ordinary kids, falling in love with an ordinary girl, because doing ordinary things risks you turning out ordinary, and that would be such a disappointment, with all the promise you've shown.

Probably, this is the pressure imposed on you by your family, and then your friends and teachers, and then by your career and by the time you're a socialized adult, it's too late to believe you are anything other than special, and there is only one thing you must do, again and again, or risk disappointing the entire world.

Probably, it'd be a miserable time. And maybe, eventually, you'd get sick of doing it. Some of the world's most tragic bums are its wildest geniuses who cracked under the pressure.

Is Nintendo our industry's child prodigy?

Earlier this week we talked about how Microsoft's E3 press conference, laden with largely symbolic gestures that nonetheless meant a lot, was considered a success. Nintendo's press conference, laden with Cammie Dunaway's family album and Wii Music, was largely not.

Our industry's longest-reigning dominant has built its kingdom on the promise to innovate, forever, but this year, the best they could do was to at last make it constructive to twist your wrist while holding the Wii remote -- judging by the ill-advised design of many Wii titles, I'd thought you were supposed to be able to do that already. Motion Plus feels like a patch that didn't make it out in time for the launch, not a revolution. Musical instrument games for the console were done to death in every corner of the scaled-down E3, and Nintendo, the trailblazer, was late to that party.

I estimate about a quarter of Nintendo's fanbase bemoaned the absence of any notable overhaul to the status quo. The other quarter? They wanted more of the same, they wanted a step backward. Because to them, without Mario and Zelda ad infinitum, Nintendo is not Nintendo any more.

Note that I said quarters, not halves. That still leaves us with another one half of Nintendo fans to account for. And guess what? They're not reading this blog. They probably don't read game blogs at all. They're the millions and millions who own Wiis and DS and have bought them for their kids and who turn them on to play Sudoku on the subway. Once a week, they play Guitar Hero III for half an hour with some friends after work and it doesn't even occur to them to complain about the graphics.

Nintendo wanted to play with the ordinary kids, and we, the ones who raised it and fed it when it was still small and unsure of itself, we are disappointed.

What is it, though, that we demanded of the genius Nintendo over and over again? At what does it excel -- remaking and reinventing its key franchises over the ages (which it continually does), or breaking the mold with new inventions (which it also continually does)? Are we disappointed this year because Nintendo failed to do something truly different, or because it failed to produce for us, the hardcore audience, something with which we're familiar and in love?

Have we upped the ante now, do we expect them to do both at the same time -- in a way that would actually please us? In other words, the impossible?

Aside from its frequently-stressed commitment to innovation, Nintendo has one promise it often repeats: "We promise to keep people smiling." There's the buzz-driven promise of innovation, at war with the childlike ideal of human happiness -- triangulated against the sad fact that not all people will smile at the same things. Our subway Sudoku warrior is smiling; Nintendo's longtime fans are not.

Our child prodigy has developed a bit of an identity crisis, it seems. Nintendo, who with its meteoric brand campaign, its clean and clever minimalist look, its sea of glowing blue and soothing white, I'd had pegged as the most solidly-defined "console identity" of them all. Maybe not.

Is Nintendo suffering for its gifts, as child prodigies almost always ultimately do, or is it that what we've had on our hands all this time is no genius, but an idiot savant?