POSTED BY

Rob Beschizza

AT 10:02 AM
Sunday December 21, 2008

Consumption

nyt

Wii, iPhone and Flip winning because of recession, says NYT

Damon Darlin of the New York Times thinks that the Wii's success since November 2006 was a "leading economic indicator" of a recession that began a year later and wasn't confirmed until 2008.

THE National Bureau of Economic Research hardly stunned the nation this month when it announced that the United States had been in recession since December 2007. Nintendo, which has sold more than 30 million Wii game consoles, is now offering add-ons like the Wii Fit.

And, as it turns out, the buyers of consumer electronics could very well have been a leading economic indicator. Over the last year, they chose to buy two inexpensive and simple products, the Wii and the Flip, over competing gadgets bristling with more features.

Darlin's piece is a good example of how reporters use emotive adjectives to build stories that couldn't work without them.

Using the Wii is "dimwittedly" simple. Changes in resolution and math-crunching power become "deep" and "rich." The distinction between Dolby pro-logic and Dolby digital, absurdly offered as a consumer concern, is that the latter is "rumbling."

Sometimes the technique works well, explaining why a dry story matters. The NYT's own stories on the Large Hadron Collider spring to mind. But it fails when trying to illustrate formulaic heelglue like "people buy cheap and simple things in hard times."

And so we leap from global economic meltdown to discussion of technical differences between gadgets. The tech-biz beat is full of bathos like this. It's technology as a prop in the Bigger Picture, drained of what makes it interesting to write about.

That said, I'd like to see the next paragraph worked up as the intro text to a Zero Wing-style Japanese video game, setting the scene for a crisis the player must resolve with great justice:

As the United States enters a deflationary period, all kinds of companies will have to grapple with the consequences of falling prices. This is nothing new for electronics makers. Every year, competition and the effects of Moore’s Law forced prices down. ... Feature-itis was a disease, but it was better than the affliction known as consumer boredom.

The Year of the Simpler Gadget [NYT]

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6 Comments

Alan

#1 – 11:26 AM December 21, 2008

We bought a Wii shortly after it came out, not because it was cheaper or because of finances; we simply like it better. Both my sons prefer the games they can play on it. It plays Gamecube games, so we didn't need two consoles to play old games as well. We can download old school games like Super Mario Bros. The wiimote works very well. Two years later, and it gets daily use.

dculberson

#2 – 2:52 PM December 21, 2008

Using sales of the Wii as an economic indicator is indeed ludicrous. Wait, I mean it's dimwittedly silly; the controllers rumble with outrageous funiosity that the average non-gamer just didn't see in other consoles. I mean, blindly didn't see in other consoles.

The target markets are significantly different. A Wii buyer is not considering a Wii versus a PS3; they're considering a Wii or nothing at all.

Alan

#3 – 3:42 PM December 21, 2008

DCluberson if largely right. We weren't comparing consoles when we bought the Wii; we were upgrading from a GameCube and weren't interested in buying another maker's console. In fact, my 18 year old son was recently offered an Xbox360 for free and he flat turned it down.

classic01

#4 – 8:29 PM December 21, 2008

What Sony and Microsoft failed to realize is that games are made to be played not watched! My old Atari 2600 was much more entertaining than today's super intricate 3D games.

Nintendo bet on simplicity and playability instead of multimillion dollar Hollywood game productions, and they are winning.

gnoodles

#5 – 2:01 AM December 22, 2008

It was bad enough that the entire article is based on an obvious fallacy-- that the reason people are buying the Wii & the Flip were related to their simplicity and not to other, equally relevant factors. And it's bad enough that they somehow tried to make the connection that that simplicity is tied to the price, and therefore these sales are an indicator of the recession. No, both those parts are bad. But the really annoyingly bad part of the article is when he throws in the iPhone which, while simple, is decidedly UNcheap and completely ruins the key point of the article.

Simplicity is, and always has been a selling point for many people. But, as the iPhone demonstrates so clearly, Simple is not the same as Cheap. Trying to equate the two and somehow draw a conclusion about the state of the economy from that relationship is just silly.

gber

#6 – 5:56 AM December 22, 2008

The NY Times article is simply a poorly written article. The argument is all over the place:

1. People are choosing simple.
2. Simple could be a preference in recessionary times. (Interesting: author not talking about price)
3. Simple because companies can't lower price and add new features. (Now author talking about price).
4. People choosing flexbile devices like the Ipod.

So 1 & 4 are contradictions. 2 & 3 are contradictions. Pretty much typical of the sloppy writing I'm seeing in the NY Times technology section.


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