My first console was an Atari 2600. My mother routinely kicked my ass at Pac Man. When my cousin gave me his NES, my grandfather would play Super Mario Bros. with us. When I got a SNES, my mother stayed up until the dark hours before she had to work playing Vegas Stakes. My father's logging buddies playing the NES, and in fact is where I got my copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 from. I remember watching on the news once, where an old lady in her 70s or 80s called a Nintendo hotline to help her get through A Link to the Past. Nobody derided this. Everyone thought it was cool back then.

But then once games started to go 3D, and the console wars began to seriously flare up, something began to happen. My mother showed no interest in playing video games. Everyone I knew and worked around looked down on video game in a derogatory sense. Gaming was no longer cool to the mainstream. It was no longer entertaining.

Of course, as an old-school gamer, as a fan I continued to buy game consoles, but eventually even I began to become disenchanted with the direction the game industry was going, and how it was treating fans such as myself with their lousy attitude towards their customers. If it wasn't for Monster Hunter, I would have been done with gaming altogether.

But then came the Wii. I was still very much disenchanted with the game industry, and I continued to rope in Nintendo with the rest of them. I saw the Wii controls as a merely a "gimmick" that wouldn't catch on. But then something very interesting began to happen.

People that I never thought would have played a game in their lives were talking to me about the Wii with a look of elated glee on their faces. Then they would tell me about the old days when they played an NES or an Atari. People I would have never pegged as gamers were talking to me about games, not derisively, but from the perspective that they were cool.

My friends' parents were talking about playing Cooking Mama on their Dual Screens. They were in their 40s, and I live in Tennessee, mind you. My mother and stepfather showed interest in playing the Wii! Whenever my young nephew comes down, he wants to watch me play Monster Hunter Tri Super Metroid. He'll play Secret of Mana with me. Up until recently, I worked in a nursing home, washing dishes, and every week or so the manager would bring in his Wii to let the residents play. I'd look out the door while clearing off the carts, and I'd see them playing Wii Sports, or some other game. And I would think "My god, they did it. They finally made gaming fun again, and not looked upon as a social stigma."

And viewed from that perspective, I can find nothing wrong with Nintendo's business strategy to expand gaming. Gaming has once more become mainstream, which carries with it a great many benefits to the game industry and to gaming at large. Such as not as easily becoming the target of media and political criticism, since the stigma and mystery of what games are to people that normally don't play them is beginning to ebb away with the Wii and DS's success.

In my youth, I played many games that I could associate with on the Wii. Trauma Center reminds me of M.A.S.H., which I played for the 2600. Most of the Wii's games are in fact arcade games that are being played in a different context. Most people have played pinball at least once in their lives. A lot of people have been to arcades and played Pac Man and Donkey Kong. It's easy to see the correlation between DDR and Guitar Hero. In fact, I remember all sorts of people coming into the arcades to watch other people play DDR.

"Casual" gaming is a derogatory term for old-school gamers who were left out in the cold by the game industry's self-aggrandizing. Everyone on Earth is a potential gamer. It's that simple. The key thing to understand, however, is that all the people I mentioned, they want to play games not play movies. The game industry has gotten to have this line of thinking that games have to be cinematic, and having storytelling, and be like "art".

You know what? As someone who has played games since they were blips on a black and white TV screen, I don't give a shit about that, and nor does most other people. We give a shit about our games being fun. We want arcade-like games that don't require any time sinks to get enjoyment out of. We want games we can play forever, games that we can go back to years from now and still be entertained by. We'll play actual games for years and years, but we'll perhaps play our movie-games once or twice, and never look at them again. For most people, the Wii and DS fulfills those aforementioned criteria, while the rest of the game industry continues to push those old-school gamers away.

Those old-school gamers have always been there, waiting for someone to start making games for them again. That company happened to be Nintendo. The funny thing is, these latent gamers aren't on forums talking derisively about the hardcore and core gamers, yet more often than not whenever Nintendo gets mentioned, they and their mainstream audience of old-school gamers get mocked and derided. Of course, I know that's not everyone, that'd be rather asinine of me to paint with such broad strokes on a community of gamers. But it's not just fans. The rest of the game industry has shown utter contempt and disdain for Nintendo and their audience.

Perhaps this is because they aren't susceptible to the industry's hype machine and marketing? Maybe it's because they aren't going for their overwrought Hollywood Blockbuster games with bloated budgets? Maybe it's because most of these game developers that talk about "art" and business models and demographics are only interested in making games for themselves and not for the enjoyment of many? Maybe it's because with Nintendo's Wii it's impossible for third parties to shove digital distribution down the mainstream audience's throats?

Maybe the truth of the matter is that the game industry has lost touch with gamers. Don't laugh. Trent Reznor remarked that the same people that were running the game companies were the same kind of people running the music industry. The music industry now only markets to "demographics". Nobody makes music for older people anymore. The elderly still have to listen to Johnny Cash and Elvis and Bob Seger and John Fogerty. But what about now? The industry isn't interested in them. They are not only out of touch, they have attacked their customers, their fans, and now they are being marginalized to the point that they will eventually vanish from the cultural landscape. And the game industry seems perfectly fine with following right in their footsteps. Except for Nintendo, who still wants to stay in business and entertain people, hence the Wii and DS.

The mainstream are happy with their "casual" games. Yet, core gamers and the game industry are happy to put them and Nintendo in their sights to make mockery of them. Until it comes time to talk about all this wonderful "growth" the industry is seeing, when in fact it's all coming from Nintendo. Their revenue growth is only them trying to find more ways to fleece their core gamers for more money. Something that is impossible for them to do with the Expanded Market. I guess that means they'll have to start treating them respect and making games that they'll wanna play, like any other sane, rational industry that wants to stay in business. Or they'll go the way of the music industry.

My question is, why do you mock Nintendo and its audience of old-school, arcade gamers? What did they ever do to you? Maybe it's not what they are doing, but what they represent: Gaming going back to its roots, where games were simply games, not movies. I must say, as an old-school gamer myself, I really couldn't be happier.