Oh, yes! My next office decorating project! (After I get my pictures hung…)

[via Office Supplies Blog. Tip from Guy Kawasaki’s Twittercast.]

The Nintendo Wii launched in 2006. Today, at the gateway to 2008, it is still in short supply.

Consider that consumers get bored with devices really quickly. Consider that people are always looking for the next thing. Now consider a little statistical anecdote:

DVICE is asking readers to vote for “the best gadget of 2007″, as part of a sweepstakes. What appears on that list? Wii — a 2006 product. Which device (at the time of this writing) had the most votes for coolest? Wii — outscoring even the iPhone.

It’s a stunning testament to the resonance of the product.

Certainly a novel interface. It calls to mind the Nintendogs bubble-blowing function. The “twist” (sorry!) here of getting into the mindset of a blender is funny.

Blendie is an interactive, sensitive, intelligent, voice controlled blender with a mind of its own. Materials are a 1950’s Osterizer blender altered with custom made hardware and software for sound analysis and motor control.

People induce the blender to spin by sounding the sounds of its motor in action. A person may growl low pitch blender-like sounds to get it to spin slow (Blendie pitch and power matches the person) and the person can growl blender-style at higher pitches to speed up Blendie. The experience for the participant is to speak the language of the machine and thus to more deeply understand and connect with the machine. The action may also bring about personal revelations in the participant. The participant empathizes with Blendie and in this new approach to a domestic appliance, a conscious and personally meaningful relationship is facilitated.

…but seriously, folks, what about areas in which it would be important to get into the mindset of an appliance? Have you never had the experience of trying to accomplish some task on a computer, and saying to yourself, “Now, where would they have put that function?”

If you speak the language of the computer (programming code), then you are a software programmer with the mindset of a blender anyway. Sorry. If you aren’t a software engineer, it’s a lot nicer to have the appliance go to the trouble of speaking your language rather than vice versa. Which is why the Macintosh OS is so much easier to use than DOS was.

Certainly when trying to understand other people and especially other cultures, we have to ask: Does speaking their language in fact help you to think their thoughts, feel their feelings? Yes, learning the language shows respect and facilitates communication, but does it run deeper than that?

Who couldn’t find a use for “neko-neko,” an Indonesian word for “one who has a creative idea which only makes things worse,” or “skeinkjari,” a term from the Faroe Islands for “the man who goes among wedding guests offering them alcohol”? Some words […] are surprisingly affecting, like the Inuit word “iktsuarpok,” which means “to go outside often to see if someone is coming.” And then there’s “tingo” itself, from the Pascuense language of Easter Island: “to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by borrowing them.” (from Amazon.com’s description of The Meaning of Tingo, by Adam Jacot de Boinod)

On a PRI Geo Quiz podcast, I heard the above author say there is a Norwegian word for dunking someone’s face in snow!

Having a word for an idea means you have the idea in your mind. Lack of words can result in lack of recognition of subtle distinctions and nuances. When one culture expresses these distinctions in its vocabulary and another doesn’t, important meaning gets lost in translation.

A very basic example that I’ve often noticed is in the Israeli and English words for “blue”. In English, we use blue as a general term for everything from pale sky to dark navy. In modern Hebrew, techelet is used for light blues, and kachol for darker blues. As a non-native Hebrew speaker, I have referred to an object as kachol only to get a blank look from the Israeli who can’t figure out what I’m pointing to; all he sees is something techelet. There is no mental equation of the terms; kachol and techelet are seen as distinct colors, just as blue and purple are to English speakers.

I’ve found that when someone behaves in a way that I’m having trouble interpreting, if I mimic the facial expression and tone of voice (no, not in front of them!), I can try and answer the question: “What feeling would I experience or thought would I think that would cause me to react this way?” Language is not always be expressed as words (hence the term “body language”).

Speaking the language -> understanding the mind.

I finally took the opportunity to play around with a Helio Ocean today. I had met with members of that product’s design team before the product was launched, was impressed with their excitement and enthusiasm about all things usability, and interested to see what they had produced.

Ocean is the SUV of the mobile device world: tough, individualistic (well, SUVs haven’t been that for a decade), and it stays strictly on-target with what it needs to do. It’s a nice device, no question about it.

The spring sliding system is superb. It feels solid in the hand, but it’s awfully thick, and I have to wonder how that works those who carry their phone in their jeans pocket. The display rotates depending on the slider open (eg, when the keyboard is open, the diplay switches to landscape mode), which elegantly resolves the usage issues solved by other devices in a more workaround manner.

(See, for example, the LG Voyager — now that is a nice looking phone… on the outside. But two — count ‘em — two full-sized displays, BACK TO BACK. It’s the progeny of an iPhone and a Nokia Communicator that was a Nintendo DS in infancy.)

While I don’t think the Ocean lives up to the hype, it’s a better device than most out there. It will be interesting to see where SK Telecom takes Helio and its novel focus on operator (or MVNO) product design. And what they learn from it.

Watching my son play his new Nintendo DS (purchased in the electronic wonderland of Akihabara), I’m struck by two exceedingly important differences between his gaming experience and my own as a kid. I’m from the original video game generation: Pong, Commodore 64, Pac-Man, and Q*bert.

First major difference: Not feeding quarters into the machine. Even now, most young kids would find a couple of dollars a lot to spend just to play a game. 25 years ago, popping $3 in quarters was a substantial amount of money — a whole week’s generous allowance, if you had an allowance. Arcade games showed up not only in arcades, but in lobbies and other public spaces, almost like vending machines. They were a way to gather a crowd around you, or to “kill” some time.

Which kid today has paid for turns to play a computer game? We have games in our phones (parents and kids), we have $2 handheld counterfeit Tetris games, we have home gaming consoles. Surely this has changed the game experience by reducing tension and encouraging risk-taking. When it doesn’t empty your wallet, getting out is no big deal: you just start over again.

The second major difference that strikes me is the Pause button. I can’t remember ever having the ability to pause Frogger or Space Invaders (even the handheld ones) so that I could scratch an itch, listen to my mother, or answer the phone. The impact is similar to the impact of the personally-owned game: reduced tension, and increased risk-taking.

Some other memories associated with those early years (4th-6th grade, about 1980-1983):

• The first time I played Pong. Pong brought out sudden, hidden reserves of aggressiveness, competitiveness, the need to win and win against someone else. Those unexpected visceral responses to the simplest possible game are proof, if any were needed, that graphics are not the essential driver in gaming experience. (If you’re still not convinced, compare Wii sales with those of the XBox or Playstation3.)

• My father brought me a handheld Donkey Kong from Japan (from Akihabara, for all I know) sometime around 1981 — well before any of the other kids in school had anything like it. It wasn’t so different in form factor from the DS of today. I had more fun with that Donkey Kong that with any game I’ve played since. Later on I had a mini arcade-shaped Frogger. The greatest thing about that Frogger was that the opening jingle was the tune of Maigono — the only Japanese children’s song that I retained from my early years.

• Then there was the game on our Kaypro II (one of the first portable computers ever sold, if you call putting a handle on a 30 lb. suitcase portable). The game was sort of a Donkey Kong knock-off, with graphics set in ASCII characters. Eating dollar signs gave you bonus points, the surfaces were made of dashes and “o”s, and so on. As I recall, you controlled your character with the arrow keys, and jumped using the space bar. I spent a surprising amount of time playing with what looked like a corrupt spreadsheet.

• Video Arcades. There was such an electric sense of excitement when you went into an arcade, very much like the feeling of walking into a casino in Vegas. The dark room, the bright flashing lights, the noise, the intensity of the players. The tension was energizing, but also overstimulating. Interestingly, I also remember taking a deep breath of relief when I walked out of the arcade. I don’t know if I was reacting to the intensity, the pressure (to get the most out of each quarter), or the disappointment of losing (you always do, after all).

One of my classmates had a videogame birthday party. His mom took us all to the arcade and gave us each a stack of quarters to play with. It was so cool and so hip that no-one mentioned that it wasn’t a great party. It was 10 kids each doing their own thing, but we said it was great, because it was such a cool thing to do, and in 6th grade, cool counts even more than fun.

• Arcade games. Today’s handhelds give a more controlled gameplay, but you don’t need get to slam the joystick around. Buttons are fun, and home consoles often have joystick controls, but nothing matches the primal satisfaction of really crashing an arcade joystick against the counterweight of a huge gaming machine.

• The summer between 5th and 6th grades was the prime of my gaming experiences (I retired early from the field of combat). When I think of Ms. Pac-Man, I call up also: Eye of the Tiger (theme song from Rocky IV), the Sand and Sea Club, riding around in the big camp van, and playing tennis. I suddenly feel the warm sand between my toes, the heat of sunburned cheeks, the saltiness of the ocean and the potato chips. My memories of pinball are not nearly so powerful.