Entertainment: a family affair

The newness is not so much a matter of sales increasing of these devices, which have been very popular among teenagers and keen hardcore gamers for a long time, as of a different approach, that is of its target.

The videogames console has now become part of the daily life of many families: no more children playing alone in front of the screen but whole families spending together their spare time challenging each other in a joypad battle.

In the beginning there was the Playstation, that marked its opening to a new audience through a new pink colour: a marketing strategy aimed at approaching the girls to this typical masculine object.

From then on, the videogames producers have carried out the most various strategies in order to expand their customers base, even through unusual marketing choices, like having as testimonials fifty year old man and women from the show business.

Nintendo, for example, not only chose Nicole Kidman to advertise its portable console Nintendo DS, but created a domestic background commercial where mum and dad were satisfied to observe their sons learning English and Maths in their bedrooms till late.

Not to mention the wide success obtained by another Nintendo console: the Wii. In one of its first commercials Giorgio Panariello was defeated in his living-room by his grandma’ playing tennis. The innovation of this console is, in fact, the immediacy correspondence between the movement of the body and what is reproduced on the screen: instead of a joypad you use a sort of remote control which has inside it several detectors that recognize the real action and cast it on the video.

By using this device, a wide range of accessories has been created: you can buy peripherals of different shapes like a guitar by which you can identify yourself in a rock singer or a steering wheel to emulate a car driver. You can also connect a balance board to measure your weight and lose the overweight with the help of the personal trainer offered by the videogame.

The other characteristic which contributed to expand the videogames users is the possibility to connect these consoles online. In these field, the best one has been developed by Microsoft: the Xbox 360. The name itself gives the idea of a multimedia center suitable for every member of the family, created to play, listen to music, watching movies, images and pictures and to which you can connect devices like digital cameras, MP3 players, DVD or PC. Connecting a microphone you can also interact with other players from all over the world in order to exchange advices and game’s strategies communicating in real time.

In this way these devices have been transformed from niche products addressed to a limited target into common objects that you can easily see in everyone’s living room, maybe next to a television or a computer and by which you can do a lot of things: not only a game but real entertainment.

Looking at the current technological panorama, finally, it is possible to identify two different evolutionary lines of the videogame medium: on the one hand the simplification of the interfaces to widen the user-consumer base (Nintendo), on the other hand the boost toward a combined use of different media to offer more entertainment solutions (Microsoft).