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silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
The Nintendo Wii went in a different direction than the Sony and Microsoft rivalry for this generation of game consoles. The other two companies were touting increases of clock speeds, better graphics shaders, more intense sound experiences, all the sorts of things they thought would appeal to the "hardcore" gamer aesthetic, the people who care about framerates and "git gud" mentalities and making sure their game console looks appropriately fierce and masculine-coded. And while the 13-24 year-old boys demographic still gets catered to because they're often the people yelling the loudest on the Internet about how any concession to the idea that they're not the biggest and best demographic means it's not "real" gaming, they're neither the largest demographic of game-playing people (that would be middle-aged persons) nor the people who spend the most on games (again, middle-aged people.) Funny how having disposable income makes you more attractive to people who want to sell you things.
For people who had purchased and loved the previous console, the GameCube, the Wii was fully backwards compatible, with places for the controllers, discs, and memory cards so that a previous investment would still get played and enjoyed. (Sadly, this is the last generation for a cycle or two that maintains backwards compatibility with the previous generation's system, games, and programs. That said, the emulation scene is not that far behind any game system generation, so things purchased in the past find new life through unofficial means of replicating those systems.)
The Wii hearkens back to the days when Nintendo's flagship product was the Family Computer, and instead of controllers with an abundance of buttons on them and a step learning curve, the games are controlled by the motion of the controller itself and a reduced set of buttons to have to keep track of. This was most aptly demonstrated by the pack-in title for the console in the US, Wii Sports. Simple simulations of Golf, Tennis, Bowling, Baseball, and Boxing made it easy for a new person to the system to pick up the controller and understand how the game worked. (And, often times, the reason why there was a strap to hold the controller to your wrist in case you got too excited about playing the game.) Predictably, because it ran at low resolution, had motion controls, and looked a bit frumpy, the "hardcore" crowd dismissed it as a system for kids and grandparents, not understanding that the "casual" market they were so down on was exactly the target market for the console, who showed their appreciation for a console marketed to them by buying it, and many of the games made for it, in droves. (First-party, single-player titles for the system would often include some way that players of a greater age or skill difference could play together if the gameplay required a higher degree of skill from one player than the other.)
The Wii was the first system I bought with my professional money, earned and saved from my work as a full-fledged degree-holding librarian, along with a fairly good swath of titles along with it. It was also responsible for one of my early victories as a librarian. For most of my career, my library system of 18-20 locations had employed two (2) teen librarians to basically run programs and try to keep everyone abreast of new developments in teen culture, brain development science, and new frameworks meant to help teenagers have a positive experience and see library staff as some of the trusted adults in their life that teenagers really need to thrive. Obviously, two people cannot actually manage this workload. (We have three now, and some additional teen-assigned specialists, but it is still woefully inadequate for the number of staff we would actually need to do consistent and sustained teen services at all of our locations.) So, for a significant part of my career, I have been the unofficial teen services person for my location, while the other 0-18 person has usually focused more on the smaller kids.
When I started at my current location, despite having a teen services person and the theoretical idea that teens should be equally as welcome as all other age groups at the library, the reality tended to be that they were seen as tolerated nuisances with a small section in a small library (which was in transition between bigger locations). As a new graduate, I had also seen firsthand the successes of video game type programming in library settings, especially as a draw to teens and tweens. I also didn't have any preconceptions about the organizational culture getting in the way of whether this would be a worthwhile thing to do. I just went with "this is popular and would be a draw to the library," and so I wrote up a proposal for the Friends of the Library group to purchase a Wii and put in a pre-order for a game that would be released in the spring: Super Smash Brothers Brawl. With some demonstration of the device and explaining what I wanted to do, the Friends approved the purchase. (Success!) As soon as I had the thing, and set it up, I was ready to start programming with the thing, even though I knew the real hook would be when Smash arrived. I set up an after school game playing session in the meeting room three days a week, and immediately started attracting lots of teens (and their sightly younger siblings) to play the games that were available. (Mostly Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games.) It was a smashing success, and with the numbers to prove how well it was going, I was immediately yanked back and told that I was spending too much time on the program and not enough on my other duties. Thee program was cut to two days a week. (This decision was, to the best of my understanding, unilaterally decided upon by my boss. The grievously incompetent one who still seemed to think of the teens and and their games and their noise as nuisances rather than as signs that something was working with a normally underserved group. Hell, that gaming group contained a diversity of races that would have made anyone at that time beam with pride about how many black and brown people were attending the program. Almost all boys, though, and probably because they were still semi-competitive people.)
Things got even better for attendance when Smash arrived and we did our best and fastest to try and get all the characters unlocked in a hurry. More and different teens arrived to play, such that we had to make sure there was enough room in the small meeting room for everyone to be in. We made extensive use of the Rotation mode, so that turns passed in an orderly manner between people, even if that meant that the most skilled player of the group often kept his spot and the rest of us did our best to dethrone him. (It almost never worked.) I let them set their rules for play, seven as I chided them gently about how much they were missing out on by keeping most of the items off. And, if there wasn't a full rotation of teens to play with, I'd join in. Which could have been a big problem if Berzerker was still having problems about gaming, but for some reason, having to be the responsible adult in the room and knowing full well that I was never going to be the best player in the room helped curb some of the worst aspects of Berzerker. It still sometimes hurt my pride to get my ass handed to me by kids half my age, but I also had to work and they could spend a lot more time playing. (And I still had the problem of not being able to get consistent input into the console from my actions.) Deliberately shifting my goals away from winning (not happening) to something like not being the first one out of lives kept Berzerker at bay for the most part by setting goals for myself that I could achieve. And the point was to have the program same get everyone together to play harmoniously, too make an environment where they had fun and I facilitated their fun, not for me to somehow become the best player over all of these teenagers. About half of them could beat me in a one-on-one competition of "skill", so I embraced my role as Mid-Boss, after the nickname Laharl gives to Vyers in the first Disgaea game. I was the embodiment of the Skill Gate, where people who hadn't mastered the game would find me difficult to defeat, but anyone who had it in the time and developed the skill for high level play would generally be able to beat me, sometimes with more lives than others. This deliberate re-framing of role has served me well ever since I adopted it and it keeps the worst of Berzerker at bay, even if there's occasionally outsize frustration at losing a close battle (with people who are actually really good at this game ← that part is important and needs to be visibly appended to many of the statements I make when assessing my own skill. They have said that I have some skill and I have made things difficult for them, but my brain thinks they're just being polite because actual skill would have been winning rather that just keeping it close.)
For several years, we kept the good times going in that converted Auto parts store. When the new building finally opened up, were kept to the same schedule, but this same boss began to really demand that I not spend so much of my time on my still very successful program. I think it got cut back to once a week, or only during the early release days for school. The program was getting canned, eventually, and the climate that took a significant turn for the worse didn't help me, eventually leadong into the time period where I was one step away from being fired for to the accumulation of many faults against me and accusations of not doing my job. Hostile work environments suck, and even more so when there's no knowing who are true people that are most contributing to making it hostile (and also that there are people out there who genuinely believe it's their business to go straight to the boss and paint a thing in its worst light without asking if that's actually what they saw, or that report on things that don't affect them directly or indirectly but are against arbitrary rules. I have made space in my head for understanding what another person's reasons for such things might be, but I still sometimes have trouble understanding why someone would do such a thing if nobody got hurt and services were not negatively impacted.) After the program was disbanded, because I'd managed to get a screen installed in the ten area as part of the design, the Wii was eventually moved to locked cabinets underneath the screen, the controllers barcoded so they could be checked out, and the gaming allowed to continue for several years after that. (Cute noise complaints about the teenagers and the gaming from people who wanted cathedral silence in a building that seemed deliberately designed to make sound echo all over the place.)
At a certain point, the optical drive on the Wii itself began to fail, necessitating a trip into the homebrew scene for the Wii. I had already done a total conversion on my personal Wii, modifying the console so that instead of booting into the normal menu, it would drop straight into the homebrew loader where I could decide on whether to load the regular system software or pop open some emulators of other systems, activate cheat engines, or load games from an external hard drive that I had ripped disc images to beforehand. Once the optical drive had become too unreliable for game playing, but before it failed entirely, I added the Homebrew Channel to the work Wii and repurposed a left-behind flash drive to store disc images of the games that the library owned. I did some pretty significant work to get the menu options to be clear about the systems available to play, either through the disc images or through emulators that were also available for the Wii. And for some time after the drive failed entirely, we still had people checking out controllers and playing games for a few more years after that, until we eventually retired the original Wii in favor of its successor, the Wii U, which was backwards compatible with the Wii and could also have its Wii environment obtain the Homebrew Channel, if so desired. However, after obtaining the Wii U and setting it up with the screen, and the eventual reality of the remotes breaking and needing the occasional replacement, our teen area screen suffered the consequences of what happens when someone fails to wear their wrist strap while excited. (I still think many of my coworkers were very pleased when that screen broke, so they didn't have to deal with game system related anything any more.) With the broken screen, the most successful program series of my career came to a temporary end, before being revived when the branch leadership team needed a way of giving our higher than normal amounts of teens something to do and somewhere to go when they had an early release day from school. That narrative involves a later item on this list, so we'll wait for that item to appear before you get to hear more about my video game programs, now significantly reduced from their heyday.
I'm sure there are other great moments of my career, and possibly more great moments to come, but if I had to choose the thing that most likely defined my career as a librarian, getting the Wii, putting on all the programming, and eventually shifting it to a checkout system for the controllers to be used at any time would be the thing I would think of first. I haven't had a long-running, unqualified success like that up until, possibly, the pandemic virtual program that I've been doing for the last year and a half. (And story time, actually, in terms of attendance numbers.)
- CPU: IBM PowerPC Broadway @ 729 MHz
- Memory: 24 MB 1T-SRAM @ 324 MHz (2.7 GB/s) + 64 MB GDDR3 SDRAM
- Graphics: ATI Hollywood @ 243 MHz, max resolution 640x480
- Sound: Onboard sound system (on motherboard), attached to composite or component stereo sound
- Inputs/Peripherals: Bluetooth-connected motion-sensitive controller (Wiimote) with D-Pad, face buttons (-, +, HOME, A, 1, 2) and trigger (B) underneath, plug-in attachments for Wiimote to resemble light gun (Zapper), to add second motion control point, analog stick and two buttons (Z and C) (Nunchuk), pressure-sensitive Balance Board, Classic Controller attachment with two analog sticks, D-Pad, four trigger buttons (L, R, ZL, ZR), and seven face buttons (A, B, X, Y, -, +, HOME), and several shells for the Wiimote meant to transform it into the thing that would be used in the game, whether a racing wheel, a piece of sport equipment, or a pistol or other weapon. Additionally, four ports for GameCube controllers and two slots for GameCube memory cards. Bluetooth could also be used to connect the Nintendo DS family to the console (useful for playing head-to-head Pokémon matches, for example). IEEE 802.11 b/g wireless Internet connection, 2 USB 2.0 ports.
- Storage: 512 MB NAND flash memory, DVD-ROM Optical Media Drive compatible with GameCube Game Discs, SD/SDHC cards (officially, 1 GB and 2 GB, but capable of reading and recognizing greater sizes.), 32GB USB Flash Memory (for holding game disc images.)
- OS: Wii System Software ("Channels"-based selection), HackMii Homebrew Channel Loader
The Nintendo Wii went in a different direction than the Sony and Microsoft rivalry for this generation of game consoles. The other two companies were touting increases of clock speeds, better graphics shaders, more intense sound experiences, all the sorts of things they thought would appeal to the "hardcore" gamer aesthetic, the people who care about framerates and "git gud" mentalities and making sure their game console looks appropriately fierce and masculine-coded. And while the 13-24 year-old boys demographic still gets catered to because they're often the people yelling the loudest on the Internet about how any concession to the idea that they're not the biggest and best demographic means it's not "real" gaming, they're neither the largest demographic of game-playing people (that would be middle-aged persons) nor the people who spend the most on games (again, middle-aged people.) Funny how having disposable income makes you more attractive to people who want to sell you things.
For people who had purchased and loved the previous console, the GameCube, the Wii was fully backwards compatible, with places for the controllers, discs, and memory cards so that a previous investment would still get played and enjoyed. (Sadly, this is the last generation for a cycle or two that maintains backwards compatibility with the previous generation's system, games, and programs. That said, the emulation scene is not that far behind any game system generation, so things purchased in the past find new life through unofficial means of replicating those systems.)
The Wii hearkens back to the days when Nintendo's flagship product was the Family Computer, and instead of controllers with an abundance of buttons on them and a step learning curve, the games are controlled by the motion of the controller itself and a reduced set of buttons to have to keep track of. This was most aptly demonstrated by the pack-in title for the console in the US, Wii Sports. Simple simulations of Golf, Tennis, Bowling, Baseball, and Boxing made it easy for a new person to the system to pick up the controller and understand how the game worked. (And, often times, the reason why there was a strap to hold the controller to your wrist in case you got too excited about playing the game.) Predictably, because it ran at low resolution, had motion controls, and looked a bit frumpy, the "hardcore" crowd dismissed it as a system for kids and grandparents, not understanding that the "casual" market they were so down on was exactly the target market for the console, who showed their appreciation for a console marketed to them by buying it, and many of the games made for it, in droves. (First-party, single-player titles for the system would often include some way that players of a greater age or skill difference could play together if the gameplay required a higher degree of skill from one player than the other.)
The Wii was the first system I bought with my professional money, earned and saved from my work as a full-fledged degree-holding librarian, along with a fairly good swath of titles along with it. It was also responsible for one of my early victories as a librarian. For most of my career, my library system of 18-20 locations had employed two (2) teen librarians to basically run programs and try to keep everyone abreast of new developments in teen culture, brain development science, and new frameworks meant to help teenagers have a positive experience and see library staff as some of the trusted adults in their life that teenagers really need to thrive. Obviously, two people cannot actually manage this workload. (We have three now, and some additional teen-assigned specialists, but it is still woefully inadequate for the number of staff we would actually need to do consistent and sustained teen services at all of our locations.) So, for a significant part of my career, I have been the unofficial teen services person for my location, while the other 0-18 person has usually focused more on the smaller kids.
When I started at my current location, despite having a teen services person and the theoretical idea that teens should be equally as welcome as all other age groups at the library, the reality tended to be that they were seen as tolerated nuisances with a small section in a small library (which was in transition between bigger locations). As a new graduate, I had also seen firsthand the successes of video game type programming in library settings, especially as a draw to teens and tweens. I also didn't have any preconceptions about the organizational culture getting in the way of whether this would be a worthwhile thing to do. I just went with "this is popular and would be a draw to the library," and so I wrote up a proposal for the Friends of the Library group to purchase a Wii and put in a pre-order for a game that would be released in the spring: Super Smash Brothers Brawl. With some demonstration of the device and explaining what I wanted to do, the Friends approved the purchase. (Success!) As soon as I had the thing, and set it up, I was ready to start programming with the thing, even though I knew the real hook would be when Smash arrived. I set up an after school game playing session in the meeting room three days a week, and immediately started attracting lots of teens (and their sightly younger siblings) to play the games that were available. (Mostly Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games.) It was a smashing success, and with the numbers to prove how well it was going, I was immediately yanked back and told that I was spending too much time on the program and not enough on my other duties. Thee program was cut to two days a week. (This decision was, to the best of my understanding, unilaterally decided upon by my boss. The grievously incompetent one who still seemed to think of the teens and and their games and their noise as nuisances rather than as signs that something was working with a normally underserved group. Hell, that gaming group contained a diversity of races that would have made anyone at that time beam with pride about how many black and brown people were attending the program. Almost all boys, though, and probably because they were still semi-competitive people.)
Things got even better for attendance when Smash arrived and we did our best and fastest to try and get all the characters unlocked in a hurry. More and different teens arrived to play, such that we had to make sure there was enough room in the small meeting room for everyone to be in. We made extensive use of the Rotation mode, so that turns passed in an orderly manner between people, even if that meant that the most skilled player of the group often kept his spot and the rest of us did our best to dethrone him. (It almost never worked.) I let them set their rules for play, seven as I chided them gently about how much they were missing out on by keeping most of the items off. And, if there wasn't a full rotation of teens to play with, I'd join in. Which could have been a big problem if Berzerker was still having problems about gaming, but for some reason, having to be the responsible adult in the room and knowing full well that I was never going to be the best player in the room helped curb some of the worst aspects of Berzerker. It still sometimes hurt my pride to get my ass handed to me by kids half my age, but I also had to work and they could spend a lot more time playing. (And I still had the problem of not being able to get consistent input into the console from my actions.) Deliberately shifting my goals away from winning (not happening) to something like not being the first one out of lives kept Berzerker at bay for the most part by setting goals for myself that I could achieve. And the point was to have the program same get everyone together to play harmoniously, too make an environment where they had fun and I facilitated their fun, not for me to somehow become the best player over all of these teenagers. About half of them could beat me in a one-on-one competition of "skill", so I embraced my role as Mid-Boss, after the nickname Laharl gives to Vyers in the first Disgaea game. I was the embodiment of the Skill Gate, where people who hadn't mastered the game would find me difficult to defeat, but anyone who had it in the time and developed the skill for high level play would generally be able to beat me, sometimes with more lives than others. This deliberate re-framing of role has served me well ever since I adopted it and it keeps the worst of Berzerker at bay, even if there's occasionally outsize frustration at losing a close battle (with people who are actually really good at this game ← that part is important and needs to be visibly appended to many of the statements I make when assessing my own skill. They have said that I have some skill and I have made things difficult for them, but my brain thinks they're just being polite because actual skill would have been winning rather that just keeping it close.)
For several years, we kept the good times going in that converted Auto parts store. When the new building finally opened up, were kept to the same schedule, but this same boss began to really demand that I not spend so much of my time on my still very successful program. I think it got cut back to once a week, or only during the early release days for school. The program was getting canned, eventually, and the climate that took a significant turn for the worse didn't help me, eventually leadong into the time period where I was one step away from being fired for to the accumulation of many faults against me and accusations of not doing my job. Hostile work environments suck, and even more so when there's no knowing who are true people that are most contributing to making it hostile (and also that there are people out there who genuinely believe it's their business to go straight to the boss and paint a thing in its worst light without asking if that's actually what they saw, or that report on things that don't affect them directly or indirectly but are against arbitrary rules. I have made space in my head for understanding what another person's reasons for such things might be, but I still sometimes have trouble understanding why someone would do such a thing if nobody got hurt and services were not negatively impacted.) After the program was disbanded, because I'd managed to get a screen installed in the ten area as part of the design, the Wii was eventually moved to locked cabinets underneath the screen, the controllers barcoded so they could be checked out, and the gaming allowed to continue for several years after that. (Cute noise complaints about the teenagers and the gaming from people who wanted cathedral silence in a building that seemed deliberately designed to make sound echo all over the place.)
At a certain point, the optical drive on the Wii itself began to fail, necessitating a trip into the homebrew scene for the Wii. I had already done a total conversion on my personal Wii, modifying the console so that instead of booting into the normal menu, it would drop straight into the homebrew loader where I could decide on whether to load the regular system software or pop open some emulators of other systems, activate cheat engines, or load games from an external hard drive that I had ripped disc images to beforehand. Once the optical drive had become too unreliable for game playing, but before it failed entirely, I added the Homebrew Channel to the work Wii and repurposed a left-behind flash drive to store disc images of the games that the library owned. I did some pretty significant work to get the menu options to be clear about the systems available to play, either through the disc images or through emulators that were also available for the Wii. And for some time after the drive failed entirely, we still had people checking out controllers and playing games for a few more years after that, until we eventually retired the original Wii in favor of its successor, the Wii U, which was backwards compatible with the Wii and could also have its Wii environment obtain the Homebrew Channel, if so desired. However, after obtaining the Wii U and setting it up with the screen, and the eventual reality of the remotes breaking and needing the occasional replacement, our teen area screen suffered the consequences of what happens when someone fails to wear their wrist strap while excited. (I still think many of my coworkers were very pleased when that screen broke, so they didn't have to deal with game system related anything any more.) With the broken screen, the most successful program series of my career came to a temporary end, before being revived when the branch leadership team needed a way of giving our higher than normal amounts of teens something to do and somewhere to go when they had an early release day from school. That narrative involves a later item on this list, so we'll wait for that item to appear before you get to hear more about my video game programs, now significantly reduced from their heyday.
I'm sure there are other great moments of my career, and possibly more great moments to come, but if I had to choose the thing that most likely defined my career as a librarian, getting the Wii, putting on all the programming, and eventually shifting it to a checkout system for the controllers to be used at any time would be the thing I would think of first. I haven't had a long-running, unqualified success like that up until, possibly, the pandemic virtual program that I've been doing for the last year and a half. (And story time, actually, in terms of attendance numbers.)
no subject
Date: 2021-12-20 04:34 pm (UTC)I am also curious as to the technicalities of doing a homebrew thing, or at least getting meaningful data transfer; my original Wii suffered optical drive death recently and my level of console ept was (is) limited to "buy another one and be flummoxed by how many of my games explicitly block save transfers" (most notably Mario Kart, but I don't think Smash played nicely either...)
no subject
Date: 2021-12-20 07:13 pm (UTC)It's been a hot second since I've had to do a clean homebrew install, so there may be unexpected bumps along the way, but that's how I would probably go about doing it.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-20 07:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-20 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-20 08:14 pm (UTC)