If you don’t follow gaming news regularly, you might have missed that Nintendo recently officially named its next video game system: “Wii”. (It’s pronounced ‘wee’, and yes the internet has been ablaze with puns!)
Previously code-named the Revolution, the system has the potential to be just that for console gaming. For example: the controller is fully motion-sensitive, meaning you can do things like play tennis games as if you were holding a real racket.
Anyway, to my point. Time magazine recently got some hands-on time with the new system. The article isn’t available on their website yet, but it is in Lexis Nexis (“A Game For All Ages”, by Lev Grossman, in the 5/15/06 issue). This quote was particularly illuminating to me: (the italics are my emphasis)
“But the name Wii not wii-thstanding, Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don’t listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal–they blog a lot–but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. “[Wii] was unimaginable for them,” Iwata says. “And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them.”
I think that advice can be applied to any profession, including libraries.