Designing Wonder: Complexity Made Simple or the Wii-Mote’s Galilean Edge

Abstract

This article considers the Nintendo Wii console’s negotiation of tensions accruing in contemporary developments around “nice work,” “affective labor,” and “hyperindustrialism.” Learning and play have long been considered to “begin in wonder.” Observing that appliances made for us to “enjoy labor,” as one adversary in a recent Nintendo Wii title puts it, have a history, I show that hyperindustrial recreational appliances like the Wii design wonder for learning and play by deploying gestural-technical stylistics first prototyped in human-computer interaction design research. I apply ten stylistics of gestural interaction design to the Wii in order to articulate its differences from other interactive educational, recreational, and health devices. I conclude that the Wii increases bandwidth for player action with two distinct effects. First, it orients “wonder” as gestural-technical conduct, making an ethical claim to differentiate contemporary play and work, while, second, projecting an unprogrammed “signature effect” extended in a range of modifications by researchers and amateurs alike.