You were mistaken: the Nintendo Switch isn’t a games console. Having sold ten million Switches in its first ten months on sale, Nintendo is pivoting to cardboard.
The console’s success was unprecedented – just ask Nintendo, which hasn’t been able to manufacture hardware fast enough to keep up with demand. Now, in typically esoteric style, the company has announced a range of cardboard accessories to turn the Switch into anything from a piano to a fishing rod, or even a pair of remote controlled cars.
Nintendo Labo, which goes on sale in Europe on April 27, is a continuation of the game design philosophy that the firm debuted with 1-2-Switch. While Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo’s platform rivals, focus steadfastly on what happens on-screen, the Kyoto-based firm is doubling down on its fascination with what happens off-screen.
“A lot of the history of gameplay, up until this point, has been people looking at a screen, not necessarily seeing the facial expression and the body language of the person next to them,” Yoshiaki Koizumi, deputy general manager of Nintendo’s planning and development division, told me shortly before the Switch launched in March 2017. “That became a very important, fundamental concept for us moving forwards on Switch: how to preserve that, how to bring people back to that kind of experience.”
The answer? Cardboard. Labo will be available in two versions at launch: a Variety Kit with cardboard parts for making remote-controlled cars, a fishing rod, house, motorbike and piano; and a Robot Kit, which lets the player don their very own wearable, cardboard robot suit. As Shinya Takahashi, general manager on the same team as Koizumi, told me: “We don't necessarily view this as a gaming machine; we view this as a tool for play.” For Nintendo, Labo is sort of full circle: when the company was founded in 1889, it produced handmade hanafuda playing cards. Now, it’s manufacturing boxes of cardboard toys that you plug a games console into. Go figure.
Price: No UK prices are confirmed yet, but the Variety Kit will retail for $69.99 in the US and the Robot Kit will cost $79.99.
Release Date: April 27 in the UK and Europe. The US will get Labo kits a week earlier on April 20.
The innovation behind Labo comes from a very literal way of thinking about play. Think about the books and games you loved as a child. If you grew up in the UK in the 1980s, chances are you read Jill Murphy’s Whatever Next!, which follows the adventures of Baby Bear as he turns a cardboard box into a rocket, shoves a colander on his head, makes friends with an owl and has a picnic on the Moon. At heart, we are all Baby Bear.
The key to Labo’s ingenuity is a willingness from Nintendo to think differently about what a games console should be. Almost 35 years after the NES debuted in Japan, simply staring at a screen for hours on end does a disservice to the range of technologies available to hardware manufacturers. While the Switch’s hybrid design is the innovation that has got tongues wagging, internally you get the impression the company is more excited about the Joy-Cons that sit astride the console’s 6.2 inch LCD screen.
And Labo, much like 1-2-Switch, makes full use of them. The deceptively complex Joy-Cons are packed with accelerometers, gyro sensors, infrared cameras and no fewer than 22 buttons. This means, unlike a conventional games controller, they can become a tool for other types of play. Takahashi told me that 1-2-Switch was an early demonstration of what Nintendo wanted to achieve with its new hardware. The idea, he continued, was never to create a device that combined a home console with a handheld. “Instead, we started with the idea of wanting to create a device that had a versatility of play that could appeal to as broad an audience as possible.”
That’s something that others in the industry are attempting to do through augmented and virtual reality or by building epic-scale online communities and e-sports leagues. Nintendo’s thinking is somewhat off-kilter: why not use technology for old-fashioned, imagination-led play? For decades, gaming peripherals have been clanky piles of plastic that end up discarded in an old shoebox in the attic. By switching to cardboard, Nintendo is actively encouraging people to customise and play around with their creations (and even make their own). Gaming has long been accused of not maturing as a serious creative medium. Nintendo’s playful vision for 2018 and beyond is yet another answer to that ill-informed critique.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
