Not unlike an exotic space parasite, Nintendo Land wants to keep me alive so that it can feed on me. It needs some piece of me to populate its virtual space, and I need to keep playing it to see what happens next.
It all starts off rather innocently as one checks into the Plaza and meets Monita, the robotic guide that lays down the rules for each of the park’s attractions, shortly thereafter cutting players loose to explore the twelve different games Nintendo offers as a gateway to understanding the relationship between your television and the Wii U gamepad. Playing these games then rewards players with coins, which can be spent on another game in the attempt to win objects that are displayed throughout your park.
And then Nintendoland does something new for Nintendo, offering players the chance to throw open the doors of their park to an online community, sorta. The act causes crowds of foreign Miis to wander around that space. Regardless of where other players are, copies of their avatars are walking through countless parks, their greeting messages displayed overhead to show everything from Zelda sketches to one Mii’s clever message “Has anyone seen my kids?”
Suddenly I’m moving through the park to read each blurb in some strange social console experiment, and despite every legitimate word against Nintendo’s long standing resistance to online gaming, the signature charm of the company’s designs have come from behind to offer something that grasps the online space in ways few of us could have anticipated.