Games developer rubbishes Nintendo Wii

Company slammed for not considering games as an art form

Ian Williams, vnunet.com 08 Mar 2007

A member of the advisory board for the Game Developers Conference has launched a savage attack on Nintendo and its Wii console.

"The way you manufacture a Wii is you take two GameCubes and some duct tape, " said games developer Chris Hecker. "The Wii is a piece of s**t."

The comments came during a Burning Mad: Game Publishers Rant session during which Hecker took to the podium to answer a question he asked at last year's conference.

In his 2006 rant, he criticised Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 for focusing too heavily on graphics and ignoring gameplay.

"At the end I asked the audience, will Nintendo save us? Will they deliver a balanced machine that's fast enough? The answer to that question is the topic of today's rant," said Hecker.

Hecker continued his attack by claiming that Nintendo did not consider video games as an art form.

He cited the number of Google search results for the phrase 'art form' on PlayStation.com, Xbox.com and Wii.com being 30, 13 and none respectively.

He went on to compare quotes from Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Sony executive vice president Phil Harrison about games as art, comparing them to Zelda creator Eiji Aonuma's comment: "I don't feel that games can necessarily be considered art. There's nothing wrong with that; our goal is just to make games that are fun."

Hecker added that interactivity is the key differentiator of the video game art form and that it requires doing something interesting with that input and threading it back to the user.

"Number one: recognise and push games as a serious art form. Number two: make a console that doesn't suck ass," he said.

The Game Developers Conference describes Hecker as "an outspoken advocate for pushing the current boundaries of design and interactivity, in the hope that games will achieve their full potential as an art and entertainment form".

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