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For all the wonder of the new machine (and every new machine carries with it a certain degree of wonder) and all the hum of its potential uses (and what new machine doesn't radiate possibility?), the Wii U faces a variety of difficulties in uniting people around its design. The Nintendo Wii's great success - at least in its formative months - was found in clarity of purpose, one best demonstrated by Wii Sports, a game that any spectating human being could understand within moments.The Nintendo Wii removed the plastic barriers, the sticks and buttons that have for decades presented a small but significant hurdle to many who might otherwise play games. In Nintendo's motion-controlled revolution, one merely had to clutch the baton, swing the arm and watch as physical will was translated to screen: the tennis racquet carving a slice through the air, the bowling ball rattling off down the alley.
Wii U's grand innovation is not so clear and not so easily explained. The technology may be simpler than an iPhone, but the application is unknown, alien and still somewhat inscrutable. Moreover, where the Nintendo Wii removed the barriers between a player and the machine, and a player and their friends, Wii U erects a new barrier, previously unknown in communal video games. One player, by virtue of holding the 'screened' GamePad controller, is naturally separated from his baton-wielding rivals. A type of exclusion is hard-wired into the console hardware: one player is better than the others, or at very least better equipped and, as a result, more enabled. Everyone wants to be the one with the GamePad. Everyone resents the person who's clutching it. The system divides us, where its precursor united us.
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