THE NINTENDO Wii, VIRTUALISATION AND

This paper will examine the significance of the innovation in home console gaming introduced by the Nintendo Wii. The Wii offers a different interactive experience of the virtual space of the game played. Entertainment systems such as the Nintendo Wii are exemplary of the experience design milieu in which audiovisual media develop and compete for their user’s attention. These contemporary interactive audio-visual systems are central vectors of transformations in what Jonathan Beller has characterized as the ‘attention economy ’ (2006). This economy, built on the capture, channelling and sale of the conscious attention of consumers, has been the mainstay of commercial entertainment and leisure industries since the rise of ‘cinematic media ’ (film, animation, television, video, dvds, gui-enabled computer gaming, not to mention the gramophonic media of radio, vinyl records, optical discs, and mp3s). The interactive game consoles focus a rapid tendency to media convergence in the domestic space around a repurposing of the television screen. In this context the Wii system proposes a further step forward, and ‘outward ’ from the existing videogamer market, by strategically recalling 1980s and 1990s virtual reality discourses of enhanced interactive engagement in a technically delivered virtual space. The specific innovation that the Wii console system offers revolves around how the body of the Wii user is recruited in the attentive practice of play (or other modes of Wii use, such as fitness training with the Wii Fit equipment) in an explicitly different manner to existing consoles. This, I will argue, brings the domestic context of mediation between user and system into play differently. With th