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In hopeful pitches delivered to panels of drab-suited, stern-mouthed men, game-makers will refer to their games as being 'platform agnostic'. It's a way to make a game more attractive to publishers; the fewer features unique to a particular console a game utilises, the farther it can travel and the greater the potential audience. This commercial incentive has flattened video game design in a sense. Most game-makers want the technology on which a video game is built to be as invisible as paper is to books. Nintendo has always had a fundamentally different perspective. For Shigeru Miyamoto, innovation in video game design stems from technological foibles and idiosyncrasies as much as anything else. The tactile joy of scratching out the answers to sums in Dr Kawashima's Brain Training is only made possible via the Nintendo DS touch screen. Those joyous games of multiplayer hide-and-seek in Nintendo Land are only made possible by the Wii-U's supporting, clandestine screen. The era-defining wonder of swinging a Wii controller in order to bat back a tennis ball in Wii Sports was only possible due to that remote control. Focusing R&D on merely improving frame rates and polygon counts is, for Nintendo, a gross misdirection of effort. Technology is not the blank, identikit canvas onto which games are painted. It is the topography that defines what kinds of play are possible.
1-2-Switch is, like Wii Sports, Nintendo Land and WarioWare before it, a game that sketches out the boundaries of playful possibility on Nintendo's freshest console (though unlike Wii Sports and Nintendo Land, 1-2 Switch is sold separately). It presents 28 minigames, each one interrogating the hardware's features in different ways, groping around to find what's possible on this slab of plastic and glass, with its weirdo detachable bits. It is the antithesis to platform agnosticism; 1-2-Switch could only exist in this moment, on this machine.
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