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Editorials   Forest Revelations
- By Mike Schneider [Editor In Chief]

Upon my return from my weeklong trip with some friends to Madeline Island in Wisconsin, many people have asked me “so what exactly did you do on this trip?” Firstly, I must emphasize I had a blast on this trip. With this fact publicized, I find it really difficult to answer the question.

I can try to answer, yet it sounds somewhat forced: “spent some time hangin’ out on the beach, walked around the town of La Pointe, walked around Bayfield one day, had some bon fires, and played poker some nights.” I know, in retrospect, it doesn’t really sound like anything overly exciting or anything to write home about – but yet, the trip left me feeling refreshed in a totally indescribable way.

I live in middleclass suburban sprawl. A town of 60,000, and a short highway drive from two metropolises. Perhaps I found something captivating about being able to walk from one end of a town to the other in 5 minutes, or even more so by the fact that an owner of an Inn can shutdown his operations by 7pm, and leave a sign on his door stating “if you’re here for a room, room #3 is unlocked and there’s a key for the room on the bed. We’ll settle in the morning.” Furthermore, the door to the Inn’s office was left unlocked overnight – the office contains multiple computers, fax machines, and phones. I know at my own house the preferred course of action is keeping all doors leading to the outside world locked at nearly all points in time. Equally exciting was the fact that the night sky was filled with stars – a paradise in comparison to the skimpy, light polluted sky of my hometown.

Yet still, it begs the question: why am I raving about my time on Madeline Island when it appears that I did so little with my time? People go to Orlando or Los Angeles for a vacation and fill every gap in their schedule with varying activities to keep busy and do things, and most people enjoy it – nonetheless, I’d likely choose the former over the latter.

There’s only one conclusion I can make, and I’m confident about its soundness:

It’s the simple things and little things that are important.

Little things like the ones I’ve listed above. Little things such as being able to spend valuable time with friends before going separate ways at different colleges. Little things like being able to kick back, relax, and enjoy nature – instead of being caught in traffic going from one destination to another and rushing through life without being able to truly enjoy anything for its full worth.

It was this aspect of life that I could fully realize while camping – and applying this idea to video games, I think it’s this idea that oftentimes gets neglected by developers. I really don’t care how many millions of polygons per second the engine is pushing if the aimer is too jumpy too offer me precision aim. I don’t care how challenging and engrossing the gameplay is if there are stupid, easily correctable flaws that hinder its entertainment value.

I think that any gamer that claims to be a true hardcore gamer, if given the option of choosing any ten NES or SNES games to be assembled into a GameCube compilation-pak, would easily rank this collection of assembled games as being just as valued, or perhaps more valued, than anything being offered on any present gaming system.

Making things simpler oftentimes maximizes fun. Auto-targeting in Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a simple example of this. Super Monkey Ball is fun yet it keeps things simple by only utilizing one button and the joystick. Goldeneye/Perfect Dark are often hailed as many peoples’ favorite game – if for no other reason than the infinite hours logged playing the game with friends.

It seems the simple things in video gaming – being able to play with friends, and gameplay that can be described as “simple, but rewarding,” are the types of games that garner the most appeal and the largest audience.

When examining the business models of the three present hardware rivals, it is only Nintendo – and Shigeru Miyamoto in particular – who have placed an emphasis on making games simple and enjoyable. Nintendo is going to be the driving force in delivering what I believe more of the gaming populace will eventually realize. For me, what Nintendo has proclaimed seems like a very clear truth and I hold the faith that time will allow more and more gamers to realize the righteousness in Nintendo’s game plan.

So I leave the forest with a new sense of understanding of what Nintendo believes, and I leave you with a quote from Good Charlotte’s song entitled Little Things: “and I know that those little things, they make the biggest part of me.”