Outcast said:
Spoken like a true philosophy student.
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Ouch! Philosophy student? That hurts! 
Seriously though, let's get to it.
Overthinking trivial things which are ultimately irrelevant.
Oh, I dunno about this. A year in legal work has taught me that what some might think is trivial ultimately proves to be quite important. Let me demonstrate.
Thinly veiled attacks and fluff aside, the one point you seem to make is an incorrect one.... Putting words in Nintendo's mouth does not mean taking a quote from a Nintendo spokesman's mouth and writing it down word for word.
That is correct, which may be why I wrote "I'd say "putting words in Nintendo's mouth," but that's not what's happening here."
You even quoted it.
You see, I see things in black and white. There is no obvious different meaning at all because it doesn't exist.
It's a pity that you see things "in black and white." It means you overlook things, sometimes even obvious things that others are trying to tell you. Again, I'll demonstrate in a moment.
Hearing what I want to hear? Well he didn't say anything else on the subject so it seems I've heard everything there is to be heard.
“Making mental connections is our most crucial learning tool, the essence of human intelligence; to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationships, context”
-Marilyn Ferguson
Allow me to show you the things you have overlooked.
"We want to appeal to mothers who don't want consoles in their living rooms, and to the elderly and to young women. It's a challenge, like trying to sell cosmetics to men. If we can do this, the Wii could break all the boundaries in terms of user rates for game consoles. We are not battling Sony or Microsoft. Our enemy is consumer indifference to games.''"
-Iwata, September 2006
What, then, are we to make of this comment? Using simplistic logic, you say
"I think we can take this as meaning the following:
Nintendo is not competing for the attention of hardcore gamers.
Nintendo is competing for the attention of non-gamers.
Sony and Microsoft are competing for the attention of hardcore gamers.
Sony and Microsoft are not (this is changing slowly) competing for the attention of non-gamers.
Therefore they are not directly in competition in so far as target audience."
And yet you arrive at this conclusion by examining simply a single quote (albeit a new one by a smaller Nintendo employee). Like a vacationer in Rome who's seen the Colloseum and visited the Vatican, you think to yourself that you've seen everything there is to see, and quickly move on, cheerfully and deliberately ignoring the rich landscape around you. Meanwhile, those of us who stayed on saw so much more...
"”The way I look at casual games...I think a lot of people view it as a threat…
”I think, what it is, it's a nice gateway drug. It makes people understand the principles of gaming.
”Let's not kid ourselves. When I grew up playing on Atari - those are the casual games of today. Pac-Man is a casual game, Centipede...All those things would be considered casual games now. Tetris is a casual game. There was no concept of a casual game back then...
”I think it is a nice gateway drug. I think it is going to strictly expand the market, which doesn't scare me very much.
“I think what BioShock did was, we said if we're going to have a complex game we have to invite the gamer to explore that complexity rather than just throwing it in their face and saying ‘Deal with it.’
”Nothing on the scale of a Wii Sports, but again, Wii Bowling is like the ultimate gateway drug and God bless them for figuring that out because there is no barrier of entry. ‘Hey, can you go like that?’ [swings arm] That's what you do in bowling, that's what you do in Wii Sports.
“It's not that [casual gaming] scares me. It excites me.
”I think there's a much better chance of people who wouldn't normally be interested in games going in and thinking ‘I'm interested in the history of Rome. I'll buy that strategy game,’ whereas before they would have been overwhelmed by the very concept of it.”
-Ken Levine
Hmm, interesting. According to this, Ken Levine thinks that "Casual" (Note that Nintendo never uses that word...) gamers can go on to be "Hardcore" gamers (Note that Nintendo doesn't either). I wonder what Nintendo has to say about that?
"Meanwhile, Nintendo itself is talking about "bridge games," a term we spotted in a company press release last month that describes games that "let video game novices and veterans play and have fun together." The company used it to describe "Mario Kart Wii" and used it again last week when representatives unveiled "Mario Super Sluggers." A rep even added that the bridge term was coined by Nintendo President Satoru Iwata."
So Nintendo is interested in having new gamers play games that traditional gamers do. Interesting. But that's a bit different than what Levine said, isn't it? For those of us who don't see in black and white, that is. So what conclusion do we draw from this, Outcast? Don't answer out loud just yet: there's more stuff to see!
I've put up a quote from Iwata that shows that "we're not competing with Microsoft and Sony, but indifference" is the old company line. I've put up a thought from Levine that "casual" gamers can become more traditional gamers, if given the opportunity. And finally, I've put up the fact that Nintendo is interested in having "video game novices and veterans play...together," which not only implicitly means they're still interested in the old market, but also that they're trying to morph their new customers into something other than what they are now.
But to see the complete picture, we will have to take another step back, and look at a marketing force called disruption. And this will surprise you, but when you said that "Nintendo is not competing for the attention of the hardcore gamers"...you were partially correct in your statement, but you had the wrong reason and envisioned the wrong result.
To be continued in the next (also long) post.
Edit: Oh snap, it's much longer than I'd thought.
