The Wii’s long-held stance as a bastion of casual gaming hasn’t really ever been in question from launch onward. It was a point that Nintendo themselves had made well before the system’s debut in 2006, with Nintendo President Satoru Iwata saying, “Our goal is to increase the number of game players in every household. We want to create reasons for different members of the family to turn on the Wii every day”—an easy strategy to see given the system’s comparatively underpowered hardware specs versus the PS3 and Xbox 360. Hell, Nintendo’s ad campaigns have gone out of their way to highlight accessibility, showing teens, adults and old folks alike enjoying the then-revolutionary virtues of the world’s first motion-controlled game console (and even adding celebrities into the mix after a little time had passed).
This is of course common knowledge, but what’s fascinating—and in some ways more than a little bizarre—is the degree to which the system has embraced its tonally casual approach. The end of 2011 will mark the Wii’s fifth birthday, and in the years since its launch the hardcore crowd has received a pretty decent share of games devoted to them, but for every such game there’s probably eight casually-minded titles available for non-gaming consumption. (At the same time, the quote-unquote casual market has expanded leaps and bounds over the past few years, with the advent of companies like Zynga and Popgames, as well as the continued proliferation of handheld touch devices.)
Similarly, the Wii has two (very engaging) games that are essentially edutainmental ocean simulators; outside of the framework of a very basic adventure game design, you’d be hard-pressed to find something that’s less like a traditional game (and I would posit that even if not familiar with the basic tenets of adventure games, a non-gamer could still have an experience with the game by exploring and interacting with the first environments in each game). Still, Wii Sports and Carnival Games be damned—I don’t think I really knew what dark depths the casual experience could really until I learned a few days ago about Cozy Fire, a Wiiware title that was released this week for the console.
The game is a fireplace simulator.
As you might expect, I was very surprised to find out about the existence of this piece of software, and I had some questions about it. First, I know that Nintendo has made it a point of pride that the Wii is age-friendly and adept at offering content to all sorts of people, but is there actually a demographic for this kind of software? Who would actually spend five dollars on this? And—perhaps at the root of the issue—what kind of developer in their right mind would actually make this kind of game? It’s not even a game, really; it’s like Nintendo releasing a first-party Home Mortgage Manager 2011. As it stands, Cozy Fire lets you pick from six different fireplace themes, light virtual matches to enact the genesis of your digitized flames, and add new logs as needed. You can even poke at the burning wood in your fake fireplace, or turn on butler mode that auto-adds new wood to keep the hearth ablaze. As if that weren’t bizarre enough, after doing a little research into the game, I found out that another fireplace sim had graced Wiiware only a few months prior—again, the mind boggles.
Perhaps this is just the home fireplace DVD industry’s way of bringing their ridiculous product line into the 21st century (yes, that’s a joke) but having multiple simulations to tend a virtual fire—quite possibly the most useless invention ever—strikes me as odd, even by the Wii’s casual standards. It’s unlikely to set some sort of a precedent for future games (could we even see a third fireplace sim? Maybe Bonfire Times next time?) but I don’t think a game could get much more casual, either. Here I’m reminded of Penn & Teller’s unreleased Sega CD game Smoke and Mirrors, a game in which you drove from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas in a bus going no more than 45 MPH—an exercise that couldn’t be paused and required eight hours of continuous play in order to complete; surely someone could come up with, say, Oil Changer Wii or Just Fax It! In order to further bore us to tears. But as it stands, game developers are unlikely to top the sheer casual essence of non-gaming that is Cozy Fire.
Post contributed by Steve Haske. Questions for the author? Send an email to sdhaske@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @afraidtomerge and online at ajumpsbshoots.com.