A Wii Thanksgiving test on the family

With Nintendo marketing the Wii to cross demographics outside the realm of the hardcore gamer, it seemed only fair to test out the system at a family friends house after Thanksgiving dinner. Bringing the system over and saying I wanted them to test it out, the most apprehensive person wasn't the adults, but 21 year-old Meredith McSorley saying, "I'm not good at that stuff. I can't do the button things." I informed her this would be different.

After dinner ended we proceeded to their modest television room, I handed over a controller to Meredith and asked her to figure it out from there. She got through the menu controls good and fine, took her a second to get used to the buttons until she said, "It's like a TV remote." When we started our first game of Wii Sports tennis, that's when she got excited.

"NO WAY!" She yelled excitedly while swinging her arm to serve, "Can I do a backhand?"

"Try it."

"I could really get into this," she said instantly understanding the game, her learning curve was nil. After that we tried Wii Sports bowling and Rayman, every title she instantly understood what she had to do, and playing well, with only the basic instructions given to her by the games. After an hour she started asking where she could get a Wii, how much it cost, why hadn't she heard about this?

Wii Sports Boxing has another title she really got into, KOing her first opponent and slowly picking up the subtleties of the game by the second opponent, and then asking, "Are mothers buying this for their kids to get them to be more active?"

The adults that ended up coming to the room were a little more difficult to gauge reaction. Their learning curve was pretty steep in comparison. They kept trying to hit buttons, even though we explained they didn't have to, and generally didn't put enough force into their movements for the Wii-mote to register what they were doing. Meredith wanted to get back to playing so the adults didn't have too much time to continue testing.

So, there you go, 21 year-old sporty female who isn't into video games likes the system enough to want one for herself. The adults we'll have to re-test another time, when girl-who-likes-the-system-too-much-to-put-it-down isn't around.