Richard Nantel

By the pure luck of being at the right place at the right time, my family now owns a Wii. Although my past is filled with hours at a computer playing Wolfenstein 3D, playing Doom, and crashing Lear jets using various flight simulators, the Wii is my introduction to game consoles.

My right shoulder is still sore from a late-night marathon Wii Baseball practice session Saturday. The good news is that I went from being a loser at the plate, continually striking out, to hitting home runs on a pretty consistent basis.

The experience is very realistic, even if my avatar is a stylized puppet figure with floating hands but no arms. The balls come flying at you at the right speed, and your reaction time is similar to a real batting experience. I found myself recoiling from inside pitches. Best of all, hitting the ball creates a little vibration in the hand controller, just as if you’ve hit a real baseball with a wooden bat.

The tactile feedback (haptics) and convincing yet stylized 3-D graphics of the Wii would make the platform an excellent tool for technical training. Imagine learning to do maintenance on a piece of machinery using this platform. Learners would likely be lining up to have their turns.

Will we see custom-built workplace training content appear for the Wii platform? Although the cost of developing games for the Wii is less than half the cost of developing for other platforms such as Xbox 360 or PS3, a commercial Wii game still costs millions to develop.

But, a short workplace learning simulation would not need to be as large or complex as a full-fledged commercial game. Consequently, the effort would be significantly less.

Rumors are circulating on the Web that Nintendo will be selling a Wii development kit for less than $2,000 to encourage third-party developers to produce titles for the platform. Hopefully, a learning content development studio will pick up a copy and give it a try.