(Random) It has a similar consonance to The Constant Gardner.

Anyways, after watching Mr. Iwata's keynote speech, I'm more convinced than ever that Nintendo is going in the right direction and is going to change the way we, as a society, view gaming.

The key point that Mr. Iwata makes is that the human-machine interface for consoles, the controller, has never been fully accepted.  In fact, non-gamers probably find them daunting and quite alien.  Truth be told, one of the most tedious parts of starting any new game is learning the control scheme.  Memorizing button combos and what not has never been a strength of mine, even after years of gaming.

Mr. Iwata states that while even your grandmother would pick up a remote control to interact with a television, many parents that grew up before the video game generation are turned off to the games before even playing them because they're intimidated and/or confused by the interface. 

Making games more complex and more difficult (the route that Microsoft and Sony are taking), simply alienates more users by making the barrier of entry more difficult to surmount.  A big part of that barrier is the modern controller and the fact that as games become more complex, the only way to add new control schemes is to add new buttons or utilize more combinations of buttons.  Neither of those options is optimal nor are they intuitive/easy to use.

On the other hand, as I was explaining to my wife how utterly badass it would be to play Katamari Damacy with this new controller, even she was getting excited about it (and she's as anti-gamer as they come).

Mr. Iwata emphasizes an important point that I find myself agreeing with more and more: games today fail to stimulate me.  You can only go so far with graphics and immersion before it becomes the same-old, same-old.  We can clearly see how this has failed the movie industry as CG is so common nowadays, that even the definition of what is visually inconceivable is radically different from what it was only a decade ago (or even half a decade ago for that matter); at some bifurcation point, people just don't care about how pretty or how realistic it looks.  Badass CG just doesn't cut it nowadays.  The studios that "get it" smartly allot small budgets to promising stories while the others throw big money to create a grand visual experience (some studios are just dumb and continue to build stupid rehashes).  The latter works increasingly rarely nowadays.

I only own four games for the PlayStation 2: Dance Dance Revolution, Metal Gear Solid 3 (I wrote a nice Amazon.com review for it), Katamari Damacy, and We (Love) Katamari.  Part of the problem is the time commitment.  As I've grown up, I find myself with an ever increasing number of primary responsibilities and gaming is becoming a hobby that I enjoy when I have free time.  As such, I don't want to invest a huge amount of time playing long games (MGS3 being an exception).  As great as Resident Evil 4 is, I still haven't finished it, months after I purchased it.  The other part is that there aren't games that I want to play.  I mean, how different can MGS4 be from MGS3?  What new gaming experiences can I expect?  None.
 
That's the most disappointing part of this: game developers have resigned themselves to rehashing proven formulas rather than innovate and create new expriences.  As we will see with the introduction of Atlas and WPF/E, innovation in the UI can change the way we build and think about software.  Similarly, Nintendo has proven, with the success of the DS, that changing the way we interact with game devices can spur innovation in developing new gaming experiences.  Most importantly, and Mr. Iwata repeatedly emphasizes this, Nintendo is aiming to generalize the definition of a "gamer" by making the human-machine interface intuitive to everyone.

Without question, of all of the next-gen consoles that are coming out, the only one that I'm even remotely excited about is the Nintendo Revolution.  And perhaps more importantly, even my wife is excited to try it out.