Japan Gaming Guide

Anything on tonight? If you own a game console you probably don’t care. It’s not as if you’ll be bored with all those games to play is it? What would you be doing with the time you spend gaming if you didn’t have a console? Writing that novel? Finishing your homework? If you’re honest, the chances are you’d be watching TV.

Now imagine you’re a TV executive. Your ratings are your lifeblood. As gaming expands your ratings drop and drop until.. ..you get cancelled.

Not a good scenario. So Japanese TV execs are pretty livid about the success of the Wii. Last week not one Japanese TV company was able to get a decent bite of market share – and they are laying the blame at Nintendo’s feet. The time people spend playing together as a family, is time they aren’t spending staring at a box, being spoon-fed trivia and advertisements for questionable products.

This got us thinking. We’ve been seeing a lot of anti-game coverage in the media recently. Is this simply regular journalism, or are these people feeling a little bit threatened by gaming’s rise as a medium?

TV viewing figures are dropping, magazine sales are falling, and nobody is going to church any more. Maybe they’re all just a bit jealous of the games industry. Time to activate smug mode; at least until 3D-Virtua TV arrives and renders the industry obsolete.

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