Thursday, February 22, 2007

Wii and thee


Residents at the Sedgebrook retirement community in Lincolnshire, USA have been playing the Nintendo Wii regularly from Christmas. The average age of the residents at the old age home is 77 and majority of the people living here have not picked up a video game controller in their entire life.

Flora Dierbach, 72, says, “I’ve never been into video games But this is addictive. They come in after dinner and play. Sometimes, on Saturday afternoons, their grandkids come to play with them. Many grandparents are being taught by their grandkids. But, now, some grandparents are instead teaching their grandkids we’ll even have a fan for people to dry their hands before they bowl.”

Nintendo is also enthusiastic about it. Beth Llewelyn, Nintendo’s Director of corporate communications explains, “And that’s the whole idea. We certainly are grateful to our ‘core’ gamers and will continue to supply them with games. However, the question is, how do you build a bigger audience. Therefore, the idea was to make the controller look like a remote control with just a couple of buttons. People have no fear of picking up a remote control, but they’re hesitant to pick up a video game controller”

The residents of the Sedgebrook retirement community prefer bowling and they have loved it so much, that on Sunday afternoon there will be a video game bowling tournament in the lounge. Twenty residents have already signed up for the tourney and are all geared up to win the competition, just like the younger gamers who play in WCG and GameBox. The Wii is a couple of hundred bucks and is freely available in Best Buy and other dens of iniquity.


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