Apple and Nintendo Innovation

The "state of the art" is an overused cliche. Recently it has become the refrain of choice for lazy marketers and hucksters in nearly every industry: even those with claim to little in the way of "art" to begin with.

Yet every so often the stagnant gives way to a moment of brilliance, and it is for this reason that we can believe that innovation, like hope, springs eternal. Fortunately for us, there have been two such moments recently. They are the Apple iPhone and the Nintendo Wii.

Over two decades ago, Apple changed everything with the introduction of the first Macintosh. With the Mac came the "desktop" metaphor for computer work. The Mac has influenced nearly every electronic device since, from personal data assistants to digital video recorders, right up to Apple's most recent invention: the iPhone.

The first Nintendo advanced the art of the home video game console in almost exactly the same way. Prior to the Mac, the IBM PC was the major computer platform. Prior to the NES there was the vaunted Atari. Both Nintendo and Apple established their legacies for innovation in the face of formidable competition, and both companies have, in similar fashion, maintained their track records and their markets. Now with the Wii, it has become possible for people to interact with home video games through motion, and as a result, the Wii, like the Mac and the iPhone, will influence video games, and their development, for decades.

Based on only what is known now, it is extraordinarily difficult to imagine a more profound development in mobile computing than the iPhone. The marketers would surely say it will be the "state of the art," and they are arguably correct. Others might say it will "change everything" and they are most certainly correct. The power of a mobile phone running OS X and a desktop web browser is extraordinary, and this isn't the first time Apple has tried marketing a mobile computer. Their first attempt was so successful that a substantial secondary market and user community still exists for the Apple Newton: a device that hails from eons ago in Internet time.

Computer and video games have been stuck in a narrowing channel of smaller and smaller incremental graphical improvement for years now. This has been made possible by a near-total lack of improvement anywhere else. Despite the fact that with a video game, anything is possible, and any gameplay concept could theoretically be invented, gameplay has been ruthlessly categorized into smaller and smaller boxes of definition to the point where it is almost literally impossible to invent a "new" video game.

Until now.

From the first demonstration of Nintendo Tennis, or Bowling, or any of the sports games, it became clear to everyone that video games had just changed forever. Almost every review of the Wii has been accompanied by real excitement of the kind that has been unknown to the video game industry for so long few recognized it.

Both of these innovations had their overtures, of course. Prior to the Wii, there was the Dance Dance Revolution (how's that for economy of words?). DDR wasn't a blockbuster hit only because of its innovative gameplay. It was a hit because it expanded the market for arcade games in a way that no game before it did. Oh sure, there were those who believed that by putting Ms. before Pac-Man, they would instantly double the appeal of video games and girls and women would gladly line up to spend their quarters. But it took an arcade game about dancing to make that market a reality.

The same thing is going to happen with the Wii. The new Nintendo system could easily find itself employed at parties and social gatherings where there were once impromptu games of charades instead. There's a Nintendo Wii game about cooking. A party game involving cooking? Why not? There are already dancing games for the Wii, but new ones will be invented, and the possibilities for instructional games haven't even started to be discussed yet.

The Wii makes playing video games a social activity instead of a solitary one, and that alone is enough to change the course of game development. Entirely new forms of gameplay are already possible, and new game categories will result: categories that have never even once occurred to an industry that has limited itself to fewer and fewer tired genres.

As video games go, so will the Internet. Freed from the desktop, the web will become just as social, if not more, than the Wii-as-social-party-game. People will be able to hand each other the newspaper again, except that this time it will be displayed on a screen. Books and blogs will follow. Radio will change, following podcasts. Advertising will change, again. Everything that has been predicted about the "networked community" will become possible when the network becomes a part of the community instead of the other way around.

Like the new video games, new Internet applications will become popular as a result of the new unchained nature of the web page. How might a popular musical group employ a hundred web clients in the audience? Could a political rally make use of such a powerful communications medium among its supporters? What about retailers? Charities? Colleges? Hospitals? Given the recent popularity of web applications like Writely or the Kiko web calendar, it is very intriguing to speculate on the nature of the web-applications that might be invented specifically for a device like the iPhone, or for events where up to now, the web has been almost completely absent, but where it might be quite welcome.

Aside from the web, other popular network applications might find entirely new categories of use. One of the iPhone's most important and emphasized features is its integration with a variety of e-mail systems. The phone number as URL is another. Detailed maps of nearly every populated place on this planet will be available on demand to any iPhone user no matter where they are. So will a dictionary, thesaurus, search engine and daily editions of hundreds of newspapers. Could an application be built around any of those features of a nature unknown to the web of today? Almost certainly. In fact, they are probably already being invented.

Despite their somewhat dissimilar markets, Apple and Nintendo are very similar companies. They both thrive in markets dominated by far larger competitiors. Both succeed through relentless innovation and attention to design and aesthetics. With the iPhone and the Wii, both companies have advanced their respective markets, contributing decades of technological benefits with what might appear at first to be simple, even unremarkable ideas. Web browser on a phone? A game remote that senses movement? Phone numbers as URLs? So what?

The genuinely new and important is rarely found in a thousand-page complex design. The truly beneficial does not require a multiplicity of words. Very often, the true innovations are simple enough to be explained on a single sheet of paper, with their plain appearance disguising the power of their implications such that often even those who were responsible for the invention are surprised by how their simple idea contributes to the future.